What the columnists said
If Obamacare repeal is dead, blame “Trump’s malpractice,” said Quin Hillyer in the Washington Examiner. The president “never came close to learning even the broad details” of health-care reform, constantly undermined other Republicans, and contradicted himself on what he favored, at one point labeling the House version of the replacement bill “mean.” Now, he is proposing political suicide by insisting the GOP—the party in power—should do nothing as individual insurance markets collapse. “Trump has repeatedly broken his core campaign promise,” said Philip Bump in The Washington Post. The real estate mogul rode to the White House on a simple pledge: “I am a dealmaker,” promised Trump, “and I will make deals.” Yet in six months, he hasn’t secured a single major legislative accomplishment, and spent the last crucial week of Senate negotiations celebrating Bastille Day in France and golfing at his New Jersey club. Turns out Trump “was just another politician, making promises he couldn’t keep.”
This defeat shows that “conservatism is in retreat,” said Josh Kraushaar in NationalJournal.com. Republicans never made a strong free-market case for Obamacare repeal—arguing, for example, that requiring businesses to offer health insurance “stunts growth,” or that soaring “public spending on health care crowds out necessary resources for other priorities.” Instead, Republicans pretended that “more people would be covered as a result of the GOP’s reform,” which was not true and not the goal of their efforts. They got “trapped into playing the opposition’s game”—and lost.
“The larger lesson of this sorry episode,” said John Cassidy in NewYorker .com, is that today’s Republican Party faces some serious “contradictions.” Once the arm “of the Rotary Club and the affluent suburbs,” the GOP now relies on the votes of middle-class and working-class voters—many of whom are beneficiaries of federal programs such as Obamacare and Medicaid. “But the GOP remains beholden to its richest, most conservative donors,” who hate being taxed to help pay for public benefits for the poor and middle class. Republicans are torn between the interests of small-government conservatives and those of their working-class base. “They are now paying the price.”