Julian Zelizer: Obama was too timid on health care
Editor's note: Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter" (Times Books) and of the new book "Governing America" (Princeton University Press).
(CNN) -- The individual mandate might prove to be the death knell for President Barack Obama's health care reform.
Politically, the polls have been clear. While most parts of the Affordable Care Act are immensely popular with the public, as recent data from the Kaiser Foundation has shown, the individual mandate is unpopular. (A CNN poll found that a bare majority of Americans oppose the mandate to buy health insurance.)
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As Princeton sociologist Paul Starr has written in the New Republic, during the 1990s the mandate was perceived as the "conservative alternative to the Democrats' proposed mandate on employers to pay for a share of health insurance. The Republican proposal was thought to represent a more individualistic, market-friendly approach."
Whereas liberals were once willing to defend the role of the federal government in American life and, even more importantly, defend the costs that federal programs imposed on the citizenry, liberals since the Age of Clinton have relied on developing jerry-built solutions to domestic programs that are often unpalatable politically -- and don't accomplish their goals.
full: http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/02/opinion/zelizer-health-care-liberals/index.html
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