Parker: Overreaching on health care bill leaves Obama with few friends

By Kathleen Parker

Perhaps it is the spirit of the season, but my empathy receptors are in overdrive for poor Barack Obama. All he wanted for Christmas was a health-care reform bill - and all he got was a lousy insurance industry bailout that few can love.

Lefties hate it because there's no public option and no Medicare buy-in for those 55 and over. Righties hate it because requiring that Americans buy private insurance or face penalties means taxpayers will have to hand over more of their hard-earned dollars (assuming they have a job) to the government.

And so things seem to have turned for Obama. Left-leaning Democrats suddenly are wondering: Who is this guy? What happened to the liberal dream-maker who was going to provide health care to every person in the country while hand-feeding polar bears basking on vast expanses of restored sea ice?

Obama didn't so much move center as he just stood there and let others craft his seminal legislation. Now, it would appear, he can't quite close the deal.

The rabble from Democrats must be deeply rousing for Republicans exhausted by their own circular firing squad, as they watch the left collapse on itself like an imploding black hole. Republicans now need only get out of the way as leaders on the left are forming their own death panels to urge euthanizing the Senate health bill.

“Kill it,” says Howard Dean. “Kill it,” says Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post. “Kill this monstrosity,” says Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos Web site, which vigorously fertilized Obama's grass roots. Meanwhile, Obama's poll numbers continue to tumble. A Rasmussen poll released Monday shows that just 40 percent of voters favor the health-care plan and 56 percent oppose it. Sixty-three percent of senior citizens oppose the plan.

In its daily presidential tracking poll, Rasmussen showed Friday that only 28 percent of the nation's voters strongly approve of Obama's performance, while 42 percent strongly disapprove. Overall, 44 percent “somewhat approve” of the president's performance.

Suddenly, the entire organism known as “Obama” seems endangered, not to mention all those Democrats up for re-election in just 10 months.

Obama's fever is grandiosity - an inflated self-confidence and a sense of power exceeding one's means. Most politicians suffer some degree of grandiosity, or else they'd never run for office. But Obama's is of a higher order, in part owing to a worshipful world (see Berlin) and a confluence of urgent events. Cutting the man some slack, no one could pull off what he has attempted to manage - two wars, a crashing global economy, climate change, health care, energy and unemployment.

The growing sense now is that Obama is desperate - for any kind of bill. What matters is checking the box next to “health care reform” and declaring some kind of victory.

Thus, the man who was going to remain above the political fray has revealed himself as pluperfectly political. Rather than inspiring confidence, he has inspired a groundswell of disapproval and a populist uprising that may allow Republicans to clean House come November.

In the meantime, left and right finally have discovered a common foe. Too bad for the country that his name is Obama.

n Comments: kathleen

parker@washpost.com