Discriminations

The Los Angeles Times reports today that Democrats are conspiring behind closed doors on methods to revive and pass health reform. You may be forgive for thinking the LAT didn’t put it quite that way, but I don’t believe I’ve mischaracterized their report. You decide:

President Obama’s campaign to overhaul the nation’s healthcare system is officially on the back burner as Democrats turn to the task of stimulating job growth, but behind the scenes party leaders have nearly settled on a strategy to salvage the massive legislation.

They are meeting almost daily to plot legislative moves while gently persuading skittish rank-and-file lawmakers to back a sweeping bill.

This effort is deliberately being undertaken quietly as Democrats work to focus attention on more-popular initiatives to bring down unemployment, which the president said was a priority in his State of the Union address on Wednesday. [Emphasis added]

And what of the often-promised but now forgotten “transparency that was supposed to accompany health reform? Again, Obama is not the only one who’s forgotten it.

In a 24-hour news cycle, with the Internet and bloggers and cable news, sometimes a lot more can be accomplished, especially with healthcare, when it happens behind closed doors,” said Drew Altman, a healthcare policy expert who heads the nonprofit Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Among those plotters behind closed doors is Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor, described by the LAT as “a conservative Democrat who was among a group of centrist Democrats from the House and Senate” who’ve been meeting. “Formerly conservative” or “a Senator who would like to be thought of by his constituents as conservative” might be more accurate, but whatever his political coloration at the moment Pryor believes he has plumbed the depths of human nature, and he’s discovered that people, or at least voters, are not as smart as he is.

“A little bit of time and quiet could help,” he said.

“Human nature being what it is, it's always easier to be against something than to be for it. And if you create any uncertainty with change, opponents can jump on that and just try to scare people. . . . That has been hard to overcome politically,” Pryor said. “Maybe over time, people will have a chance to understand what is in the legislation.”

In other words, we were too dumb to understand what Obama explained to us in 29 (or was it 39?) speeches and endless snippets from them on TV. But maybe if they just keep quiet about it for a while and bring it up later, we will have forgotten that we don’t like it.

Democratic leaders do not reserve their condescending scorn for voters who disagree with them; they have similar contempt for many of their own skittish followers (or not) in Congress who were, for some reason, “rattled by Brown’s winning campaign in Massachusetts.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) particularly want to give members time to recover from the shock of Republican Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate race two weeks ago. The election cost Democrats their filibuster-proof Senate majority.

But in the coming weeks, Pelosi and Reid hope to rally House Democrats behind the healthcare bill passed by the Senate while simultaneously trying persuade Senate Democrats to approve a series of changes to the legislation using budget procedures that bar filibusters.

But why should they recover from the shock? Will the threat to Democrats intent on passing unpopular legislation implicit in the message of Brown’s election lessen over time?

The Dem leaders thus assume not only that voters are too dumb to appreciate the wisdom of the Dems’ health reform but also that they are so dim they will forget their opposition, thus allowing the “rattled” Democrats in Congress to recover from their Brown-induced “shock” and stick by their former willingness to impose massively unpopular legislation on a forgetful public.

Given the regard in which Obama-Reid-Pelosi-Pryor Democrats hold their constituents, this may work.