Charles C.W. Cooke: “No One Sabotaged Obamacare”

I know I’ve mentioned before that Charles C.W. Cooke is rapidly moving up my list of favorite conservative analysts.  I like the way he thinks, and I like the way he writes about his thoughts.  His latest outing is a firm rebuke to those Democrats who are desperately trying to establish that the dismal failure that is Obamacare (so far, at least) is all the Republican’s fault.

He begins by acknowledging that it’s natural for people to look for scapegoats, especially when they’re very deeply invested in their own failure.  One cannot ignore reality, however.  While it’s really true that Republicans, for whatever reasons, have predicted and desired Obamacare’s failure, that does not make them responsible for the fact that their wishes came true:

That notwithstanding, my opinion on this matter has absolutely no bearing on the outcome — and to pretend that it does is extremely naïve. I am not possessed of any magical power with which I might prevent the law from working, any more than I am able to stare at an airplane and will it to crash into the ground. I did not award a no-bid contract to a failed Canadian IT firm, nor ensure that the system wasn’t tested until four days before it launched, nor allow it to be “built using ten-year-old technology.” Nor, for that matter, did Republicans. Unless you believe that the role of Congress is merely to “support” the president in all that he does, the fact that more than half of the voting public and one of the country’s two political parties have been critical should not be held against them.

[snip]

To believe that the states have in some way “nullified” or “sabotaged” the law by choosing not to do the lifting themselves is to believe that the states are merely regional departments of the federal government and that their electing whether or not to expand Medicaid or set up health-care exchanges is illegitimate. In this case, “political reasons” means doing what the people in their states wanted them to do. What next? That “if Americans had just chosen to sign up, then the system would have worked”?

I urge you to read the whole thing, if for no other reason than the pleasure of reading intelligent political analysis that is also beautifully written.