Is Obama Clueless -- or Dishonest?

I’m always amused when I hear my liberal friends say that they’re pro choice.  What they mean, of course, is they’re pro choice when it comes to abortions. But many of these same liberals support nanny state laws that tell us how much soda we can drink from one cup, or what kind of fats are acceptable for us to eat in restaurants. Those laws restrict our choices.  And they’re certainly not pro-choice when it comes to ObamaCare.

Millions of Americans are right now getting cancellation letters from their insurance companies thanks to the unfortunately named Affordable Care Act.  The plans, according to the president and other liberals who know what’s best for us, were junk that left us, in the president’s term, “underinsured.”

Maybe they did.  Maybe, as Mr. Obama says, we’ll get a “better deal” with the new plans we’ll get from the exchanges, if we can ever get on the exchanges.  In any case, whatever happened to “If you like your healthcare plan you can keep it – period.”

But as an editorial in the Wall Street Journal put it, “If the federal exchanges really were better, Mr. Obama wouldn’t have needed to outlaw the old product and compel everyone to buy the new, government-approved version.”

And this is from the people who tell us they’re pro choice!

President Obama and his slobbering supporters talk to us the way parents speak to children.  “You think you know what’s best, but you don’t,” a mother tells her 10-year old child.  This is how people who are smart talk to people who aren’t, how superiors talk to inferiors.

But despite the media attention it's been getting, the massive failure of the rollout may be the least of the problems with ObamaCare.  Liberalism – and its I-know-what’t-best-for-you-because-you’re-not-smart-enough-to-take-care-of yourself—is a much bigger issue.  Liberals like to tell us that, unlike conservatives, they’re open-minded.  What they really are is authoritarian. And what they practice is liberal paternalism.

Which leads me to a new Gallup poll, which has President Obama’s approval rating at a dismal 40 percent – and his disapproval number at a troubling (for him) 53 percent.

It doesn’t take a political genius to know ObamaCare is behind these numbers. The same people who didn’t care about Benghazi or the IRS scandal care about what’s going on with their healthcare.  Benghazi and the IRS mess didn’t directly hit them, so they let it slide. ObamaCare is hitting them, directly and hard.  They’re the ones getting cancellation letters from their insurance carriers; they’re the ones who are getting sticker shock rate hikes.

But there’s one more element, I think.  And that is the belief held by many Americans that the president lied to them, that he knew all along what was coming, but he decided not to tell the truth because the truth might mean an early end to ObamaCare.  The truth might also have cost him re-election.

Even the clueless, the low information voters, the ones who barely know how many states there are, don’t like a person who looks them in the eye and lies. And I think the Gallup numbers reflect that. But in fairness to the president, there is another possibility.  Maybe he was selling the American people something that even he didn’t understand. After all, his pal Nancy Pelosi did tell us that we’d have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.

So Mr. Obama is either clueless or dishonest.  Take your pick.