Live from Strada at Bancroft and College: Last year's journamalism. Is there a trend, is there a number that is correct? And is there an argument other than the sadistic undercurrent that the bottom third of America's white population (and a much greater fraction of the minority population) deserve to be fleeced by credit-card and payday-loan companies, and deserve to die prematurely from lack of routine and preventative care?
Michael Barone: How ObamaCare Misreads America "The Washington elites who designed the law must be bewildered...
...Why doesn't everyone behave as they do?...
Start with the assumption that just about everyone wants health insurance.... ObamaCare architects assumed that if you offered health insurance with subsidies for those with relatively modest incomes, those currently uninsured would flock to apply. So far that seems not to have happened.... Only 11% of those who bought new coverage between November 2013 and January 2014 were previously uninsured.... To [the] extent [that] ObamaCare policies are not insurance but prepayment of routine expenses... the uninsured aren't interested in prepaying for health insurance any more than they are interested in prepaying their credit cards. A second assumption of ObamaCare's architects is that health insurance will make people healthier.... A third assumption is that those with health insurance are more likely to seek care from physicians and less likely to go to emergency rooms....
The apparent discrepancies between what policy makers expected and how many of the intended beneficiaries of ObamaCare seem to be behaving reminds me of the divide described in Charles Murray's 2012 book "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010"... the sharp differences in behavior between the upper (in education and income) 20% and the bottom 30% of white Americans.... Liberal policy makers have long regarded Scandinavian policies as a model. If a welfare state can work there, they have long argued, it can work here. But the Scandinavian countries have homogeneous populations with high levels of trust, conscientiousness and social connectedness.... [In] North Dakota and Minnesota, most people are of Scandinavian or German descent. But policies that work well in Scandinavia or Minnesota and North Dakota won't necessarily work well in a wider United States, where a much larger proportion of people are socially disconnected. And such policies may not work as well as they might have in the United States of the 1950s and early 1960s....
The trouble that has resulted—from the architects' apparent failures to anticipate the behavior of fellow citizens who don't share their approach to the world, and the architects' determination to impose their mores, such as contraception coverage, on a multicultural nation—is a lesson to national policy makers, conservative as well as liberal. Govern lightly if you want to govern this culturally diverse nation well.
Remember Barone in 2012? Pre-election:
(November 2, 2012): Barone: Going out on a limb: Romney beats Obama, Handily: "Fundamentals usually prevail in American elections...
...That's bad news for Barack Obama. True, Americans want to think well of their presidents and many think it would be bad if Americans were perceived as rejecting the first black president. But... voters oppose Obama's major policies and consider unsatisfactory the very sluggish economic recovery.... Both national and target state polls show that independents, voters who don't identify themselves as Democrats or Republicans, break for Romney.... Just about every indicator suggests that Republicans are more enthusiastic about voting--and about their candidate--than they were in 2008, and Democrats are less so. That's been apparent in early or absentee voting, in which Democrats trail their 2008 numbers in target states Virginia, Ohio, Iowa and Nevada....
Which candidate will get the electoral votes of the target states? I'll go out on a limb and predict them, in ascending order of 2008 Obama percentages--fully aware that I'm likely to get some wrong...
And the absolutely remarkable post-election:
: Barone: I was wrong–where it counted | WashingtonExaminer.com: "I will still defend my prediction as reasonable...
..The entire count... could end up Obama 51% and Romney 48%. An electoral vote lead of 332-206, the likely outcome, is pretty wide given the narrowness of the popular vote margin...
The popular vote split ended up: Obama 51.1%, Romney 47.2%.
I was just plain wrong.... The outcome... was not determined... by fundamentals... [but] by mechanics and... demographics. The Obama campaign... that they would win by organizing and turning out the vote.... They had no illusions that they could expand the president’s appeal beyond the 53% of the popular vote... in 2008.... They conceded Indiana’s 11 electoral votes and the single electoral vote of the Nebraska 2nd congressional district... didn’t contest the 15 electoral votes of North Carolina very much.... The fundamentals... simply did not operate at all powerfully in the... target states.... Fundamentals if they had been evenly applied in all states would have drive Obama’s percentages down by 3% or 4%, enough possibly to deprive him of a majority, and enough to deprive him of pluralities quite possibly in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado and perhaps enough of the other target states to give Romney an electoral vote majority. The trend apparent in the national polls toward Romney... was real, but it was either suppressed or offset in target states by stickiness to Obama.... And demographics? The Hispanic turnout... wasn’t good news for Romney...
To the contrary, if the swing in Ohio, Virginia, and Colorado had been the same as the national swing, Obama would still have won those states. Florida is the only state that "stickiness to Obama" appears to have moved out of the Obama column in 2012.
