Sarah Lenti
For President Obama, the importance of passing Obamacare clearly trumped the pressing need of restoring our economy. The Supreme Court’s decision today merely reminds us of the scope of the president’s substantial squander and the importance of the election this November.
The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Obamacare on Thursday marks the continuation of a distraction which has plagued the Obama administration from its very beginning. President Obama assumed office in the midst of an economic crisis. He was, after all, elected to rescue our nation from the kind of economic trauma we had just experienced.
But instead of doing that, he ventured down a very different, and dangerous, path. He focused on pushing a top-down, federally-controlled health-care takeover through Congress. I would venture to write that he refused to work with Republicans on bipartisan, effective reform. Sadly, the President adopted the attitude that he held toward the stimulus, about which he famously told Republicans, “I won. So I think on that one, I trump you.”
And for President Obama, the importance of passing Obamacare clearly trumped the pressing need of restoring our economy. We can see the effects of his neglect today. We’ve seen staggering unemployment levels of 8 percent or more for over 40 months. There are currently over 23 million Americans unable to find a full-time job. People in quarters across the country are losing their homes to foreclosure.
When President Obama arrived in the White House, he possessed immense amounts of political capital. He chose to waste it on unpopular legislation that did nothing to assist our economic recovery. The Supreme Court’s decision merely reminds us of the scope of the president’s substantial squander and the importance of the election this November.
Sarah Lenti is the blogger behind NMPolitics.net’s The Savvy. E-mail her at sarah@nmpolitics.net. For disclosure, Lenti previously worked on Mitt Romney’s policy book, as a researcher, in 2008 and 2009.