The New York Times's Matt Bai has a thoughtful blog post on what the fight over health care mandates is about, beyond mandates themselves. I don't always agree with Bai, but I think he's mostly right here. In particular, Bai notes that differences between the three leading Democratic presidential candidates' proposals are not too different, contrary to "all the posturing." Yes, Obama does not have a mandate for all adults, but the outlines of each candidate's propoosal are otherwise very similar. On mandates, Bai writes, Obama is different because he "favors trying to reduce the cost of insurance first, and then, if the uninsured still refuse to buy in, he would consider further mandates. Surely there is truth to Bai's view that criticism over Obama's lack of mandates suggests that "something else is going on, and it has more to do with pure partisan rage." As Bai argues,
"There is currently a way of thinking in some quarters of the Democratic world that says “framing” is everything in politics. That is, conservatives have controlled our national debate by hammering home a number of insidious themes (big government is bad, liberals are elitists, entitlements are too expensive, etc.), and they have triumphed because of timid Democrats who refused to challenge these assertions, preferring instead to accept these premises and adapt to them. By this thinking, when Mr. Obama suggests that maybe it’s not the best idea for government to hand down new edicts — or when he asserts, as he also has, that Social Security may not be viable without significant fixes —he is reading from “Republican talking points” and giving rhetorical comfort to the enemy. In other words, Mr. Obama’s crime wasn’t really coming up with the wrong health-care solution. His crime was in saying what he actually believed."
I don't think Bai is correct with his implication that Obama's critics in this context disagree with Obama on framing alone. Most of his critics do disagree on priorities (e.g. "fixing" Social Security now versus addressing any possible shortfall decades from now) and they disagree on actual policy solutions (e.g. including an initial adult coverage mandate to prevent free-riding in a universal health care system) as well.
[In the interest of full disclosure: I have contributed to Senator Barack Obama's campaign.]
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