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I think you'll enjoy them. Welcome to the Weekly Standard Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Graham. John McCormick has been a lot of talk from John Gruber.
Jonathan Gruber and his allies about how dopey and dumb and clueless we voters are. But you point out that Gruber himself has missed some pretty key items in the Obamacare debate. I think he has a video that says Obamacare passed because of the stupidity of the American voter, and that it was written in a convoluted way, so that the tax is going to be scored as a tax. That's gotten a lot of attention to one of the more explosive claims he made in the office of the service.
I think there's some truth to that. I mean, obviously, if the law had been implemented in 2012 and 2013, all the people have seen the premiums skyrocket. I don't think Obama would have been reelected. On the other hand, I don't think the American voters have dumbed as some of these politicians who are looking to get away with people like, you know, people like, I think the tax link, for example, I mean, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, he said he wasn't violating his tax budget if he voted for this law.
You know, our own specter, he found out saying Americans were tax reform taxpayers. They both lost their jobs, and so it doesn't really Democrat in 2010, you know, people like Bart Scupack, not a pro-life Democrat, who said the law wouldn't pay for abortion. Of course, it does. That wasn't true.
They all lost their jobs in 2010. You know, Democrats definitely did pretty well in 2012, counting down a pass while, you know, the law was strategically delayed from implementation in 2013. But then in 2014, I think we had another Obama-car election, where that was a pop issue, you know, it was the number one topic in all the Republican ads in October, you know, voters still dislike it, but I'd say it hurts them by a two-to-one margin and those who are hurt versus those who are helped. So, yeah, I mean, I think we're, you know, you spoke a lot of truth, you know, about what the Democrats really thought, what the president thought behind the scenes.
But I think people in accurate sort of talking about how this was written in a convoluted way, you know, because of the stupidity of the American voter, it was more written to, you know, to give these Democratic politicians something to hang their hat on some way that they could plausibly deny that they were raising taxes and they were fighting abortion or raising premiums or anything. Yeah, for the goal of writing the law was to write it in a way that Democrats didn't pay a political price. It's clearly a failure based on the fact that the number of Democrats in state and federal offices is at the lowest points since the 1920s. So, that clearly didn't work.
But I want to ask you about the other stuff that the Johnson-Gruber and the team around Obamacare got wrong, either through attempted deception or just plain, they just missed it. You know, I wrote a book of, right when the Tea Party movement was hot, called That's No Angry Mob, That's My Mom, and had an entire chapter on Obamacare and statements that the elites like Johnson-Gruber were making, that my mom, that my guy who works at the gas station knew were not true, like, this isn't going to add to the deficit. John, did Johnson-Gruber really believe the bogus math that this wasn't going to add to the deficit? Or was he just lying to himself or to the rest of us or both?
Well, clearly not. I mean, that's not the one. I mean, there's been somebody who quoted it come up. But recently there was a study that came out, I believe earlier this year that said, you know, Obamacare will increase or emergency room because it's not decreased.
And that was one of the many, many claims that the president and self-made that, you know, this would decrease ER use by people who are uninsured and are using the emergency room as their primary health care and, you know, group of care on each side, you know, that was under misleading claim to say that this is going to save money. You know, getting people of health care costs money, this is him, and I was missing claims, so that's one of the many things he's put out there. It's because really in convenience for Democrats, you know, now they're trying to pass them off as some random guy who wasn't even on our staff at the president's side or as close as he said, you know, he didn't help right our bill and you go back and look at your country, 2012, and they said he quote unquote, draft the specifics of the law. And, you know, I don't think anyone believes that, you know, Nancy Pelosi, your president Obama, has a better idea of what's actually in this law than Johnson-Gruber, I mean, Johnson-Gruber probably read at least, I know some of it, which is a lot more than the president or Nancy Pelosi.
But there is this question when the issue of the stupidity comes up, if this was a play to give Democrats cover, as you pointed out, it just fell apart, if it was a play to gain popularity, that's not working the new poll out today, shows that it's popularity, the Obamacare popularity, is at an all-time low. But I'm just interested in who's calling who stupid, I mean, when you say, when you stand up in a room and you say, hi, I want you to give a trillion dollars to the federal government over the next 10 years, and I promise you that that will actually save us money and make whatever we're doing better. Is there anybody in the country dumb enough to believe that Obamacare, as presented, was ever really going to work? All right, you know, I don't think a lot of people outside the media ever believe this.
I mean, even, you know, Ezra Cloy was one of the most influential partisan bloggers in the whole debate, so I can hear speaking of videos where someone spoke an inconvenient truth, and I can't remember later, he said at the time that Democrats were pursuing a quote-unquote sneaky strategy, just to get something passed now, and that's what leads toward single-payer. You know, that was a thinking back then, but I just don't see how that's going to happen after the debacle in 2010, again, 2014, the laws that had lowest approval ever. People say it more are hurt than held by to the one margin, so I just really see that happening right now. I don't think Democrats have really had that hope that they just don't want their responses to now, and that will be with the consequences later.
Which is kind of like the Jonathan Gruber approach, which was to just say whatever you could say to get the thing passed, and then hope nobody noticed that the math that you presented and the plans you presented didn't work, and now the Democrats are really paying a price for that short-term opportunity, short-term opportunism. I think they may have genuinely believed that, you know, handing out money from what you saw to be is what had been popular, but I just don't, I think they underestimate the fact that it would hurt more people than it ended up helping. I think they just didn't feel like coming at all. A lot of Democrats who voted for it just must have figured out, you know, things like Social Security, Medicare, and the government ever went to big check, it's not a good thing, but the problem is if you're just writing a check to insurance company who's, you know, giving you a product that isn't as good as they want to use to kind of put the case for a whole lot of people, the process could be more than, have been helped, it's just, it's not possible to show that consistency.
I think the Democrats have really ever worked out for the 2016, with a plan to replace or fix this. It didn't have that in 2014, it got here pretty bad. And that's what I like about your analysis on Jonathan Gruber, which is the net result is that the brand of both Obamacare and the premise of government-run health care have been damaged. And so it's going to be harder for that if the theory was a nose under the tent, it's going to be harder to pull that deal off now because people have lost their trust in both the concept and the Democratic Party's ability to bring it.
Thanks for your time. Today, we really appreciate it, John. Thank you, Michael. John McCormick with Weekly Standard on this podcast, please be sure to check Weekly Standard dot com regularly for podcast updates.
I'm your host, Michael Graham.