Other Views.

Edward Klein:

In ancient Rome, whenever a general was given a victory parade, he would be accompanied in his chariot by a slave who whispered into his ear, “Heed not the call of the crowds, for all glory is fleeting.”

Someone ought to be whispering that advice into Barack Obama’s ear right now, for if ever there was a fleeting victory, it was the Supreme Court’s ruling that ObamaCare is constitutional—a decision that will lead to the largest tax increase in American history and leave Obama and the entire Democratic ticket vulnerable at the ballot box in November.
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It is the hallmark of a political amateur to ignore the advice of wise men and women who tell him what he doesn’t want to hear and, instead, embrace those who cater to his inexperience, vanity, and worst instincts.

This has been the pattern of the Obama presidency. And that was exactly what happened in the case of ObamaCare.

Early in his presidency, Barack Obama received ample warning that he was headed for disaster if he went for broke on health care. His then chief of staff Rahm Emanuel urged the president to push for a smaller bill with popular items, such as expanding health coverage for children and young adults. Both his vice president, Joe Biden, and his top political adviser, David Axelrod, sided with Emanuel and raised a red flag.

But Obama wouldn’t listen to his wisest and most experienced advisers. Instead, he chose to listen to his wife Michelle and to Valerie Jarrett, his powerful behind-the-scenes confidante. It was Michelle Obama and Valerie Jarrett who persuaded the president to side with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and her gaggle of far-leftwing Democrats and push for an enormously complex Rube Goldberg health-care bill.

Obama’s arrogance, his sense of superiority, and his air of haughtiness—but above all, his amateurism—led him astray and encouraged him to focus initially on a “public option” in his health care bill. Rick Scott, the health care executive who launched and ran the successful campaign to kill the public option in 2009, parlayed that victory into winning the governorship of Florida in 2010.

When Scott and his group, Conservatives for Patients Rights, defeated the public option, Obama was then stuck with going along with an “individual mandate,” which he had vigorously campaign against during the Democratic primaries. He denied time after time that the mandate was a tax, only to allow his Solicitor General to argue before the Supreme Court that it is, in fact, a tax.

Only a rank amateur could have turned months and months of debate over a widely unpopular health care bill into something even worse—an onerous tax on the middle class.