Monday, December 16, 2013

If Obamacare Fails, More Pressure on Israel



by Richard Baehr


Public opinion polls suggest that Americans have turned against the much ballyhooed nuclear agreement between the P5+1 and Iran, just weeks after the agreement was said to have been signed and the six-month trial period was to begin in which negotiations for a more comprehensive agreement would take place. 

It turns out, of course, that the agreement has still not been finalized, and no restrictions on Iran's nuclear activities have yet been put in place. This weekend, Iranians briefly walked out of the Geneva discussions, supposedly upset that some new firms and individuals were named by the Obama administration as violators of existing sanctions which are still in place today, and that are to be maintained over the six-month period of the agreement, whenever it actually begins.

Democrats in the U.S. Senate, taking their cue from the White House and Secretary of State John Kerry, have caved to the executive branch pressure, and folded on passing new sanctions that would have come into effect at the end of the six-month period of the preliminary agreement. While the House of Representatives may pass a tough new sanctions bill offered by Illinois Congressman Peter Roskam and a few other members from both parties, Harry Reid, the president's loyal servant in the Senate, will ensure that no vote occurs on the legislation there, where a vote against new sanctions by Democratic senators could alienate some Jewish voters and donors, a key Democratic constituency in a year that is shaping up to be a very difficult one for Democrats. 

The mid-term elections involve the job security of a dozen or so senators, and these jobs are the ones the president and his party are most interested in preserving. Pretty much every presidential announcement, initiative, and Senate vote or delay is now focused on protecting vulnerable Democratic senators up for re-election in 2014 or running in open-seat races where Democrats are retiring from seats they now hold. The big problem for Democrats in retaining their Senate majority, and holding onto these seats is the continued political disaster associated with the roll-out of Obamacare, which began Oct. 1. 

The next big date for the inappropriately named Affordable Care Act is Jan. 1, 2014, when those who believe they have signed up in the new healthcare exchanges (so far only about 360,000 people, barely a sixth of the number expected by this date) are supposed to begin to get coverage. However, the healthcare.gov website that was nonfunctional in October and much of November is still transmitting bad information on enrollees to the insurance companies, in as many as 25 percent of the enrollment applications. There are also people who have signed up for coverage but not yet paid for it, and insurance companies do not generally provide free care.

Add to this the 6 million Americans who have been informed by their insurance companies that their current individual health insurance policies will terminate on Dec. 31. These people are scrambling to find new coverage unless their insurer has elected to reinstate their canceled policy for a year (a change now permitted by the White House and authorized in some, but not all, states, despite earlier rules that required the policy cancellations). 

The current chaos, and the anxiety many people are feeling about their health insurance coverage and what happens on Jan. 1, have the makings of another public relations disaster for the president, and his party, which passed the Affordable Care Act on a straight party line vote in 2010. 

A new poll suggests that tens of millions of Americans whose coverage is not (yet) at risk are nervous about the changes caused by Obamacare and anticipate it will impact them in the future: "The poll found a striking level of unease about the law among people who have health insurance and aren't looking for government help. Those are the 85% of Americans who, the White House says, don't have to be worried about the president's historic push to expand coverage for the uninsured. In the survey, nearly half of those with job-based or other private coverage say their policies will be changing next year -- mostly for the worse. Nearly four in five (77%) blame the changes on the Affordable Care Act, even though the trend toward leaner coverage predates the law's passage."

It should therefore be no surprise that the president may be looking for another distraction in January, a blockbuster distraction, that will suggest to some remaining true believers that there is still a functioning presidency working on significant things and not screwing them up. The Iran deal was one such potential blockbuster, but most Americans now seem to expect that Iran will not observe the agreement, and the deal will not set back their nuclear program nor change their intentions to develop a nuclear weapon. 

The January blockbuster that the president is hoping for would be an interim deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority that Secretary of State John Kerry can announce at some point, a big enough story that it could drive Obamacare out of the news for a few days. It is why Kerry continues to return to Israel and works doggedly on a deal.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled a million miles in her four years on the job, being treated like the royalty she believes is only fitting for her at every stop along the way. But she accomplished nothing of substance, and her years as secretary of state had the political misfortune to have the Benghazi attacks occur near the end of her watch. Clinton took the safe approach in her travels, not reaching for policy achievements, but collecting lots of photographs and videos of every handshake with every foreign leader, so that in her next run for the White House, in 2016, she can act as if she were already a recognized leader on the world stage.

Kerry, on the other hand, seems anxious to burnish his reputation as an active secretary of state, with accomplishments. He may believe, like many presidential candidates before him who failed to win the prize the first time they tried (Al Gore, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Bob Dole, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Richard Nixon among them) that he may have a second chance to step up to the biggest stage.

The odds always seem long against an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. It is hard to see how the current environment is more conducive to an agreement than the Camp David talks in 2000, which occurred before the Palestinians were divided into two distinct political entities in the Gaza Strip, run by Hamas, and the West Bank, run by the PA. The Palestinians have never shown any real interest in a final agreement that would end all claims against Israel. 

This was apparent at Camp David. The Palestinian movement for over half a century has focused less on gaining statehood as one of two states, than it has been to first prevent and then to destroy and/or replace the State of Israel. The education of Palestinian children, the messages in PA radio, TV and newspapers, the continued international efforts at delegitimizing Israel, and the sponsorship of boycott, divestment and sanctions activities with nongovernmental organization financing, all suggest that Palestinian leaders are not now, and never have been, ready to prepare their population for a peace agreement with Israel. The intermittent terror activity against Israelis, whether by PA-affiliated groups, Hamas, and now even more radical Salafist operatives, all seem designed to broadcast to Israelis that they can never be complacent about their security, nor feel safe. 

Of course, odds were long against a preliminary deal with Iran being reached, given the history of relations and negotiations between Americans and Europeans on one side and Iran on the other, since 1979. As a party to the recent nuclear deal, the Americans, of course, had some ability to move an agreement along by making concessions. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is different in that the two parties can be pressured by the Americans (with more pressure applied to one side) but both have to agree to a deal for an agreement to be concluded. 

The American desire for a deal, and the pressure on Israel, will rise if the Obamacare problems become uglier in January. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be following the healthcare news from the U.S. with great interest.


Richard Baehr

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=6681

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

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