Preview of the State of the Union

It looks like the dream of ObamaCare isn’t dead after all. President Obama will bring it up during tonight’s SOTU speech.

Politico: In his State of the Union speech tonight, President Obama will remind the country why he took on health care reform, explain the virtues of the House and Senate passed bills and renew his commitment to push reform over the finish line.

That was the message White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer gave House and Senate staffers during a morning call previewing the address, according to participants on the call.

“He’s going to make clear just how important health care it is and what a critical priority it is,” said a Democratic congressional staffer on the call. “The president comes up big in moments like this so let’s let him. He’s very good at this. … When people need to hear his voice, he sings loud and clearly and I suspect that he will tonight.”

That’s not all he’ll talk about. Funny, his health care plan is wildly unpopular, yet he just won’t let it go. He believes the power of his TOTUS inspired voice will be enough to sway the masses. He must think the power of his TOTUS inspired voice will be enough to make the masses believe he’s serious about the economy, too. Perhaps he is, I just don’t think he has a clue how the economy really works. Richard Baehr isn’t convinced, either, and it looks like he was pretty spot on with his predictions about tonight’s speech.

This modest effort should not cheer the hearts of deficit hawks concerned with the overall level of federal spending (now well over a quarter of GDP) that is creating annual deficits and total debt that will make the country a permanent debtor nation, at the mercy of purchasers of our bonds. But Obama will have the platform. He will spin himself as a serious and committed deficit hawk who needed to spend a lot last year to save the country from a second great depression caused by the policies of his predecessor.

To cement this notion, Obama will point to how bad things were when he took office — the monthly job losses, declining GDP, falling stock market levels, etc. — and tell the American people that, while much more needs to be done on the jobs front, the great crisis has been averted.

It will be important to add up the cost of new spending initiatives announced in the speech, many of which will be labeled as programs for the hard-pressed middle class. Without a doubt, the cost of the new programs will dwarf any purported savings from the freeze on discretionary spending accounts.

In 2009 and 2010, federal tax revenues will be barely half of federal spending. The left’s answer to the spending versus taxation gap is to significantly increase taxes and to make the federal tax rates much more progressive (with far higher tax rates on higher-income Americans). The president and liberals in Congress share this goal, but the State of the Union address is not a suitable venue to propose raising income tax rates. (In fact, if Congress does nothing, income tax rates will rise for all Americans who pay them after 2010 and many will be added to the tax roles, with the expiration of the 2001 Bush tax cuts). …

Baehr went on to predict that Obama will mention some targeted tax cuts and the creation of a debt commission in an effort to quell the concerns of voters. He wonders, though, how Obama will sell the Democrats’ health care plan to a skeptical public.

If there is any mystery in the president’s remarks, it is what he will say about the health care reform effort. It appears that the president and Democratic leaders in Congress are unwilling to throw in the towel and seek a smaller and more bipartisan bill. In short, they have come too far to allow their failure to pass a bill even with complete control of both houses of Congress to be acknowledged. Instead, they will attempt one more time to jam this unpopular bill through by having the Senate version of the bill passed by the House and sent directly to the president, with a second bill containing fixes to the Senate bill passed via the reconciliation process in both houses. This would require only 51 votes in the Senate (no GOP filibuster possible).

Americans by a large majority hate the process that accompanied the health care reform effort: the bribes, the closed sessions, the payoffs to major lobbying groups (the latest a $60 billion deal for the unions), and the complexity (the unread 2,000-page bills). They want the effort killed. The health care reform effort in substance was a major redistribution effort — getting seniors and wealthy Americans to subsidize  health care for lower income Americans without insurance. Since the 85% of Americans with insurance would not benefit from this, and some would now be asked to pay for the expansion of coverage of others, the bill could not be successfully sold for what it was — namely, a giant redistribution program.

Instead, the bill was sold as a way to protect Americans against sinister greedy insurance companies. The other selling point was that only with this reform effort would health care costs begin to come down. Most Americans had little trust that spending hundreds of billions more each year would bring their health care costs down ($2.5 trillion would be spent in the first ten years after the program was fully in place). It is hard to see a way for the president to successfully resell to the public the mishmash in the Senate bill with some new special interest fixes. But if the president believes in anything other than himself, it is in redistribution.

And he may still trust that he can play a shell game on this bill, arguing to the public that he is so noble he will risk his second term for this great achievement. Seeing how the president tries to thread this needle may be the only interesting part of the address.

Interesting indeed.

As for me, I’ll be playing BINGO!