If a comedian has to explain why a punch line is funny, the joke isn’t any good. And if a president has to explain why his signature domestic policy achievement really isn’t a disaster, that president has a problem.
Case in point: Bush and Medicare.
Bush will travel to Liberty, Mo., in a key battleground state he won by 3 percentage points in the 2000 election. He will talk about the Medicare prescription-drug program that took effect last month to provide federal subsidies and discount cards designed to help low-income seniors pay for prescription drugs.
Passage of the law was expected to be a political plus for the president as he seeks re-election. But it has been dogged by controversy and confusion, despite a $50 million government ad campaign to inform users of its benefits.
That’s a bit of an understatement. The entire White House Medicare initiative has been a debacle from the beginning. The administration had to lie about the plan’s cost to get it passed (a scandal that is already under investigation); congressional leaders had to try and bribe lawmakers to vote for it (another scandal under investigation); and the administration ran expensive and deceptive ads that turned out to be criminally wrong.
And best of all, seniors don’t want anything to do with the program and feel like they’ve been conned.
“You are not in a good political position if you have to go out and explain your program because people don’t understand it,” says Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta.
The administration, for unknown reasons, continues to be optimistic.
Medicare chief Mark McClellan, a Bush appointee, told a Senate hearing last week that more than 3 million seniors are signed up for Medicare drug-discount cards…. The administration expects about 7.3 million seniors to apply for the cards.
What McClellan didn’t mention is that of the 3 million who signed up, 2.4 million did so involuntarily — their HMOs enrolled them automatically, which makes the numbers look better than they really are.
But if Bush wants to travel to key swing states to talk about an unpopular policy, wrought with scandal, that the intended beneficiaries hate, I think that’s terrific. I can only hope he keeps it up throughout the campaign.