Will Obama's Biggest 'Achievement' Be His Undoing?

More and more it seems that the healthcare initiative was an ill-fated move by the Obama adminsitration.
When the history of this administration is finally written perhaps someone will then be able to identify who's idea it was to place healthcare at the top of the agenda when Obama took office.
For certainly, making this the highest priority was ill-advised.
The country faced (and still faces) a huge economic crisis.
That was clear then and it is clear now,
But President Obama decided to begin his term by launching the healthcare initiative.
This became his largest single effort.
No doubt he was motivated by a desire to cement his place in history. After more than 60 years, he would finally be the president who brought about national health insurance or something similar. He wanted government-fundied healthcare and he was determined to get it at any cost.
I believe he felt that accomplishing something like this would be transformative and that it would assure his legacy.
No matter that what was needed above all was a "fix" to our economic woes.
President Obama wanted something more than that. His sense of himself, his ego or whatever you want to call it demanded something bigger, something epic in size, scope and impact. And so it became healthcare.
And you know what happened.
He and his party invested the first two yoers of his presidencey in the healthcare debate.
It was a huge battle.
And in the process Obamaville got more than it bargained for.
Obamacare triggered not just an historic backlash but a whole new movement.
Indeed, it's safe to say that the Tea Party would have never been born without the Obamacare effort. And that's just part of it.
The healthcare juggernaut re-energized the Republican Party and brought it from one of its biggest deafeats (2008) to one of its most stunning victories (2010).
But there was more than that.
This one issue seemed to crystallize everything. It became a touchstone -- the ultimate dividing line between those who supported Obama and his effort to "remake" America and those who did not.
It became a chasm between those who seemed to believe that America needed to be "reinvented" and those who felt that no such far-reaching overhault was needed.
And it remains a pivotal fault line -- a line between those who want to see America continue down the path that Obama has charted and those who do not.
Meanhile, the economy never really picked up the way it should have. It merely sputtered along in, at best, a sort of healf-hearted series of fits, semi-starts and stops.
And here's what happened along the way: With so much focus on healthcare the Democrat Party (supposedly the union-centered party that was built on jobs) ultimately forget about jobs. The result is that the unemplyment level remains over eight percent, not enough new jobs are being created (last month was a disappointment, again) and a record number of people have simply given up and left the workforce altogether.
But here's the biggest thing of all: Though the healthcare law may have been "passed" by the Democrat Congress and signed by the president, it has never really been accepted let alone embraced. It is still controversial; it remains a stubborn polarizer and its eventual enactment is still by no means assured.
This was vividly evident during the recent Supreme Court hearings on the law.
And while President Obama can boast all he wants about the power of the chief executive and the legislative branch, it is the Supreme Court that will have the final say.
Remember: It wasn't the Republicans who brought healthcare to the fore and made it America's top priority.
It was Obama and the Democrats.
They're the ones who made it the single biggest (and perhaps most controversial) issue of our times.
And now it won't go away. For all their efforts, they haven't been able to tack this one down. And they haven't been able to gain clear public approval for it either. Polls still show that solid majorities of Americans still disapprove of the healthcare law.
Message to Obama and the Democrats: Be careful what you wish for.