Congressional hopeful disgraces himself
At this very moment, I’m playing into Justin Lecea’s hands.
After all, Lecea, the verbalgrenade-hurling Democratic challenger for Joaquin Castro’s congressional seat, has a campaign predicated on getting attention. Any kind of attention will do. He’d rather have you despise him than ignore him.
Like many other members of the media, I’m giving Lecea attention for a horrific tweet he fired off Sunday morning. In response to a Dec. 14 reminder from former President Barack Obama that the following day marked the annual registration deadline for the Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges, Lecea wrote this to Obama:
“I just want you to think about all the people who have and will die because Obamacare is pointless and your entire presidency was a waste. If god was just, you would get the most malignant cancer imaginable.”
Even in this corrosive, desensitized, dehumanized political age, Lecea’s tweet was shocking in its viciousness, particularly when you consider that he’s a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives.
“I seem to have offended a lot of liberals, which was kind of the goal,” Lecea told me Tuesday. While refusing to offer specific figures, he said his campaign’s total fundraising donations doubled in a span of 48 hours after the tweet.
Lecea, 34, is a Bernie Sanders acolyte, a former Occupy Wall Street activist who grew up in Flint, Mich. Lecea sees capitalism as an evil that can’t be fixed, regulated, supplemented or refined. It must be demolished.
While Lecea’s tone may be uniquely belligerent, it reflects an all-or-nothing philosophy he shares with the socialist wing of the Democratic party.
This faction is the left-wing bookend to the tea party uprising we saw at the beginning of this decade: an anti-establishment amalgam of loose cannons who despise the political party to which they belong, live by the ideological purity test and regard any form of legislative compromise as an unforgivable betrayal.
This movement runs on grievance and Lecea’s got enough grievance to fuel a movement all his own.
He calls Obama a “war criminal.” He says Obama and other Democratic leaders “are entirely beholden to their corporate donors” and “have always sold out the American people to the corporate class.”
Lecea says his passion on the issue of health care — which he defines as a human right for which there should be no place for profit — is driven by the loss of his mother to brain cancer.
As someone who lost his mother to a brain tumor, I can relate to the overwhelming pain that Lecea has experienced. But it’s maddening to see him disregard basic facts and dismiss Obama’s painstaking work to pass the most important piece of health care legislation of the past 54 years.
Obama put his political capital on the line to expand health care coverage in this country. In doing so, he endured relentless attacks from Republicans who suggested that he was bent on destroying the free-enterprise system.
When Lecea and his allies argue that Obama watered down the bill to please Republicans who never had any intention of voting for it, that’s a blatant misreading of the circumstances.
Even after Obama dropped his commitment to a public option for the ACA exchanges, 68 Democrats remained noncommittal, petrified that a “yes” vote would cost them their jobs.
Thanks to considerable finalweek lobbying from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the bill narrowly passed, with a 219-212 vote. Eight months later, Republicans capitalized on the polarizing nature of the ACA and flipped 63 House and six Senate seats.
Obama got as much as he possibly could out of the bill and his party paid a steep price for it. If he had pushed for anything else, the whole thing would have collapsed.
That might be OK to Lecea, who regards the ACA as worthless. Lecea says that if he’d been in Obama’s shoes in 2010, he would have shut down the government until Republicans caved and accepted Medicare for All.
In other words, he would have accomplished nothing.
Obama, in making tough, frustrating compromises, advanced the ball forward.
The Medicaid expansion component of the law alone has brought health insurance to an estimated 13 million Americans. The ACA’s exchanges have enabled an additional 11 million Americans to sign up for insurance, with the majority of those people qualifying for premium subsidies. The law also has provided protections for people with preexisting conditions.
A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that the ACA has saved more than 19,000 lives.
Apparently, that means nothing to Lecea. He can’t distinguish between well-intentioned people working within a flawed system they didn’t create, and the unwieldy forces that created the system.
Lecea knows nothing about governing. But there’s no denying that he’s got a knack for provocation.