Obama, the Anna Kournikova of politics

Anna Kournikova, as most of you are probably aware, was the tennis sensation who was more famous for her looks than her tennis. Despite her failure to ever win a major event, there were almost daily pictures of her in the paper. In fact, the Chicago Tribune had a sports columnist who would find excuses to run a gratuitous Anna picture. She is largely forgotten now, too old for the short skirts and too poor a tennis player to serve as a role model.

Sort of like the anointed one. As his vice president Joe Biden would say, Obama is a well spoken, clean-cut black guy. The fact that he is largely politically, at least, impotent puts him right into the Kournikova camp.

Let’s look at the stimulus plan. One year in, and unemployment is at 10 percent, 17 percent among blacks. The anointed one claimed that the stimulus would create 3.3 million jobs. That doesn’t mean saved; Obama claimed those would be newly created jobs. Since the stimulus was passed, there has been a job loss of 3 million jobs. Obama’s much touted stimulus recovery has cost a net 6.3 million jobs. Who would be foolish enough to vote for more stimulus? I suppose only people who wanted 100 percent unemployment for anyone except government employees, who are the only people unaffected by the economic crash.

Obama now says that things would have been worse without the stimulus. As hard as that is to imagine, it is also unprovable. Specifically, the White House’s “proof” that the stimulus created jobs is an economic model that they programmed to assume that stimulus spending automatically creates jobs. The administration is ideologically committed to the belief that regardless of empiric evidence to the contrary, deficit spending must create jobs.

Additional Kournikovian failures would have to include health care. The democrats have decided that they will force Obama’s blueprint of health care through congress, regardless of the level of public opposition. They have signaled their willingness to do this without any republican support whatsoever.

Further, the president’s proposal is notable for taking every bad idea, and putting them into one convenient package. More taxes, more subsidies, less cost control, and an expanded bureaucracy are all hallmarks of the proposal. The democrats, seemingly ignoring election defeats in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, are determined to press ahead with a plan that the voters don’t want. Americans largely oppose these plans, and yet the Kournikovites are planning to give you what you don’t want.

Obama wants to create a new federal board that will have the ability to control prices in the health care market. Ignoring the fact the each state already has this mechanism, this federal board will have the power to reject any rate increase that is “unreasonable or unjustified.” If an insurer raises rates without prior approval, they would be forced to “lower premiums, provide rebates, or take other actions to make premiums affordable.”

The anointed one has failed to learn the lesson we all learned from Nixon and Ford; price controls are a bad idea. They cause supply shortages, demand reduction, and unemployment. And yet, price controls are always the first resort of national health care advocates. For example, Medicare’s administered prices for doctors and hospitals. This new White House proposal is a preview of Obama’s  planned medical economy, which will inevitably reduce choice and quality.

It is clear that the anointed one and democrats have no intention of listening to republican, or any other, ideas on health care. They know the public opposes the various plans that have been offered, and they don’t care. They have publicized their intention to use reconciliation to get their way, notwithstanding the magnitude of this issue. The Kournikovites have even driven some of their own away, e.g Evan Bayh, with their insistence on playing Chicago style machine politics.

So far, it seems all we have gotten is a pretty package, with not much there. Just like Anna.