The Counsel for Obamacare’s Ringing Defense

As I’m following along (admittedly only with minimal interest) on the Obama Administration fiasco arguments before SCOTUS, one of the question that keeps coming up is “How could they have been this poorly prepared?”

It’s only a guess, but I tend to think that this is one of those moments where epistemic closure and the conviction that you are so right you don’t need to actually pay attention to your opponents has not served the Administration well.

One of the dangers of an increasingly polarized culture is that people stop taking their opponents in debate seriously as smart people with actual principled ideas. Instead, they get lazy. Everybody who disagrees with my tribe is evil, stupid or both. You see it in the dumb “[Insert dislike person here]=Hitler” posters (just yesterday I was informed on FB that Hitler had a health care plan, so QED: Obama is Hitler!” much as Bush was Hitler a couple of years ago).

The Obama Administration seems prone to this sort of snobbery too. His dealing with the HHS mandate is a classic example. He had zero interest in what the Church’s objections might be. When you are anointed, you act that way. Only with Obamacare, that sense of Anointing appears to have led the Administration to seriously believe that no decent person would question it, and therefore not to prepare for the questions that anybody outside the ideological bubble of the Self-Anointed could see would be asked by the court. Result: the stumbling babble you hear above.

It would be nice if Obama learned a little humility from this. But one gets the sense that is not his strong suit, nor the strong suit of the self-congratulating band of Besserwissers who constitute his inner circle. They know better and reality must conform to that fact. The trouble is, as they are discovering, sometimes reality has other plans.