Momma, Why's It Called Obamacare ?

    That's a great question and the answer is pretty funny.
    Politicians really love catch phrases.  The republicans seem to love wearing their hearts on their sleeves. May Day became Law Day as an answer to communism. Obviously,  an international workers holiday couldn't be tolerated.  Damned Commies.  Then we had the Patriot Missile.  Pfft, what??  Operation Iraqi Freedom. That's a bad joke.  Enduring Freedom, actually a dumber joke and so on. I guess one name is as good as another.   But Overlord seems better than "Let's Go Kill All the Nazis". The Manhattan Project, though it had nothing to do with Times Square, is certainly better than "Let's Make 'em Glow In The Dark".  I digress.
    So, the President who is very popular, does the heavy lifting and comes up with a plan for one of people's primary concerns and expenses. The republicans oppose it at every step of the process but they can't stop it though they sure did try.
    Now let's hold on here a minute. The duty of the opposition is to oppose and nothing I say should be construed to mean I object to that fact.  I do kind of object to just how completely incompetent they were about it but what are ya gonna do?  They were what they were.  No one ever referred to a collection of republicans as the Best and the Brightest.  They might want to look into that.
    Actually, that phrase, "The Best and the Brightest" typified the problem they faced.  Take that phrase together with the "New Deal",  "Social Security",  "Camelot",  "Medicare" ( which they fought tooth and nail with a lot of the same arguments we're hearing today),  "The War on Poverty",   "The Great Society".  What did they really have?  " A Chicken in Every Pot",  "That Man in Washington",  "Mr Roosevelt's War",  "The Little Man On Top of the Wedding Cake",  "The Silent Majority",  "Peace With Honor",  "Voodoo Economics",  "Trickle Down",  "Weapons of Mass Destruction."
    They were stuck.  They could see the advent of a government program that would be a popular fixture of our society and a true legacy maker yet again, so they decided to denigrate it.   To their constituents Obama was a really unpopular guy and they really hated him.  Don't get me wrong. They didn't hate Obama for his race.  They hated him for the same reason they hated Clinton.  He'd pushed their snouts from the public trough.  That didn't mean they were above exploiting the inherent racism of the constituency they had so carefully cultivated.  They were just more interested in the spoils of office. They just forgot about the minority their constituency actually was.
    They decided on a catch phrase that would appeal to their constituency in a negative way: Obama Care.  Yeah, that didn't work.  The people, the media, the society decided:  OK, wanna call it that?  Fine, we like it.  Now it hangs around their neck almost exactly like the albatross in "The Rhyme  of the Ancient Mariner". and pretty much for the same reasons.
    Nothing special about it.  It just ranks with other miscalculations of minorities but it is pretty funny. Wait until they get a load of what "MAGA" does for them.