Source:The Daily Beast– From left to right: Governor Steve Beshear, (Democrat, Kentucky) U.S. Senator Rand Paul (Republican, Kentucky) and U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Republican, Kentucky,
“We stuck with the Union in favor of our favorite son, Lincoln, but then joined in common cause with the Confederacy after the Civil War had ended. A century later, we boasted some of the nation’s most progressive civil rights laws; yet, to this date, we still feature many of America’s most segregated societies. And while Kentucky’s been one of the largest beneficiaries of the New Deal/Great Society welfare state, the dominant strain in our politics remains a fierce anti-government, anti-tax worldview.
Kentucky’s perplexing and hypocritical aversion to big government has been exploited brilliantly by our senior senator Mitch McConnell, who’s capitalized on our cultural resentment of elite interference to transform the Bluegrass State into a deep-red citadel in federal elections. More recently, our junior senator Rand Paul catapulted McConnell’s vision much further than Mitch intended, placing Kentucky in the crosshairs of the Tea Party revolution. But while these two political icons and their surrogates clash over the depth of government slashing, they’ve been steadfastly united behind one common vision: the defeat, and, more recently, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
It’s no coincidence then that Obamacare is beginning to expose the political fault line that divides the two Kentuckys. The GOP’s effective—and quite misleading—messaging plays into the anti-establishment populace’s greatest fears about out-of-control outside interference: the myth of a government-run-health-care system, engineered by a President with socialist tendencies (and whose skin pigmentation and exotic name frankly heighten popular anxiety in some of the nation’s least educated counties). And yet, when you wade through the propaganda and understand the law’s true impact, Kentucky needs the Affordable Care Act…desperately. It’s a state consistently ranked near the bottom of nearly every national health survey, where one out of every six citizens remains uninsured.
With our long-standing tradition of timid politicians fearful of incurring the wrath of the anti-government mobs, it wouldn’t have been surprising to see Kentucky join much of Red America and reject both Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion to the working poor, as well as its option of establishing a state-run health benefit exchange to provide affordable health care to the remaining uninsured.
But in a delicious irony, Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul’s home state may ultimately serve as the proving ground of Obamacare’s success. That’s due to the political chutzpah of one man: Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear.
Over the past several months, Beshear used his broad executive powers to bypass resistance from the GOP-controlled state Senate to ensure that the Commonwealth is the only Southern state that both expanded its Medicaid rolls and opened up a health benefit exchange, providing access to affordable health care to our more than 640,000 uninsured citizens. And while the federal launch of the program has been plagued with technical difficulties, Kentucky’s experience has been exemplary: In its first day, 10,766 applications for health coverage were initiated, 6,909 completed and 2,989 families were enrolled. Obama himself bragged that Kentucky led the nation with its glitch-minimized performance.
It would be hyperbolic to crown Steve Beshear as a profile in courage. The Governor’s second and final term expires in two years, and he’s made clear that this is his last political hurrah. However, Beshear is keenly interested in the political prospects of his son Andy—the betting favorite in the 2015 race for Attorney General—and he understands that even a tangential connection to the unpopular Obama carries a heavy political burden. Furthermore, the Governor isn’t quietly going about the business of administering the new law: Beshear has been gleefully poking the eye of the Tea Party beast — and its subservient U.S. Senators—and channeling Harry Truman in the national media circuit: In a recent New York Times op-ed, Beshear crowed: “[T]o those more worried about political power than Kentucky’s families, I say, ‘Get over it’…and get out of the way so I can help my people. Here in Kentucky, we cannot afford to waste another day or another life.”
From The Daily Beast
I’m not a mindreader (obviously) but if I had to guess I would say that the hyper-partisan, right-wing base of the Republican Party hates the Affordable Care Act (also known as ObamaCare) but I don’t think that’s who they really hate or what they really hate.
What the right-wing in America really hates is President Barack Hussein Obama, who the Far-Right of the party, which might be the dominant faction in the Republican Party, sees as an Un-American, Muslim-Socialist, from Kenya, who represents everything that they hate about modern America. And now that President Obama has ObamaCare on his legacy, that adds 20 million Americans to the health insurance roles in this country, they hate him even more.
Again, I’m no mindreader, but had a President John McCain got the Affordable Care Act or McCainCare (as it would’ve been called) and gotten the exact same law that President Obama gotten through a Democratic Congress in 2009-10, you wouldn’t see the Republican Party, even with a Republican House trying to repeal the ACA today. The Republican right-wing’s opposition to ObamaCare, is really about Barack Obama, not as much as the law itself.
38.951614
-77.119752
Read Full Post »