Whimsy, n. playfully quaint or fanciful behavior or humor (Apple MacBook Oxford American Dictionary)
One doesn’t usually think of the Washington Post‘s stable of serious, establishment OpEd columnists as whimsical, but today (actually, posted online last night) two of them offer observations that many will regard as whimsical (although Attorney General Eric Holder will probably regard at least one and maybe both as racist; see UPDATE to post below).
First, Fred Hiatt notes that “[o]verseas and at home, the administration seems besieged and befuddled. Obama is in danger of cementing an image of haplessness that would be hard to undo.” The way to do it, Hiatt suggests, is to shake up “the team” in the White House. It should be clear to everyone, however, even editors and big shot writers at the Washington Post, that the problem is not Obama’s advisors but their advisee. And shaking him up is unlikely to do any good.
And then Robert J. Samuelson is astute enough to recognize that “The real Medicaid problem” is not what the White House says it is. “To the White House,” he notes, referring to its recent report on opposition to the expansion of Medicaid, “the right-wing anti-Obamacare crusade is mean-spirited partisanship at its worst,” but Samuelson points out that ” two aspects of the White House report suggest opposition to the Medicaid expansion isn’t just rabid partisanship.”
Not just rabid partisanship? Well, gives more credit to those with reservations about Obamacare than most opinion, or even news, pieces in the Washington Post. Here’s one of the points he mentions as evidence that all critics need not be “rabid”:
… the assumption that the 90 percent reimbursement rate remains permanently. Why should it? To curb budget deficits, Congress might cut it. “The ACA says what it says. Future Congresses can repeal or modify it,” says Matt Salo of the National Association of Medicaid Directors. Could the favorable reimbursement be bait-and-switch? States’ actual costs could be higher than assumed. Why make a bad problem worse?
Congress might renege on its promise to pay 90%? “The ACA says what it says“? So what? That is, what difference does it make what the ACA “says” if President Obama feels free, as he has demonstrated countless times (23? 38? who’s counting?), to ignore “what it says” whenever he deems it expedient to do so?
Perhaps Samuelson feared that he might sound like one of those “rabid partisans” if he mentioned that Obama’s frequently demonstrated willingness to ignore “what [the ACA] says” could easily make a non-rabid state legislator reluctant to rely on the what he law says. Indeed, since Democrats have slavishly demonstrated their own willingness to justify the president setting aside the law whenever it suits his interest, Democratic state legislators themselves might reasonably fear that a future Republican president’s eagerness to continue covering 90% of states’ expanding Medicaid costs into the indefinite future might be somewhat attenuated.
