The Ricochet Podcast - This Won't Hurt…

Episode Date: November 7, 2013

Direct link to MP3 file This week, election results from all over, Ricochet contributor Heather Higgins on the curious case of MyCancellation.com (and its Twitter account) and the women’s vote in Virginia. Then, the American Wonk himself, Avik Roy talks ACA and why the kids aren’t alright with it. Also, thoughts on Christie and why Cuccinelli could have been a contender. Music from this week’s... Source

All right. I'm ready if you are, Mr. Lilex. This is always a nice break. Hold on, just let me dump the raw code into HTML. So it's HTML5 compliant. And here we go, coming down in three. Hold on, let me find my script. Two, one. Activate program.

I understand what it takes to make a bright and prosperous future for America again. I spent my life in the private sector, not in government. You do your work, and we will do our best. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lileks. Guests today include Heather Higgins from MyCancellation.com and Ovik Roy, Mitt Romney's former health care policy advisor. Hey, if you like your podcast, you can keep it.

It never gets old. So let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. Yes, this is the Ricochet Podcast number 189. It's brought to you by Encounter Books. And our pick this week is a broadside. How Medicaid fails the poor by Ovik Roy. And by some strange odd coincidence, we'll be talking about this later with the author himself when he joins us in the second half of today's program. If you go to encounterbooks.com and use the coupon code Ricochet, not the coupon Coed,

that's a whole different style. Ricochet, you'll get 15% off the list price of this or any other book. And Rob Long, I believe, has something to tell you. And you're going to sit through it, and you're going to like it, because this isn't behind the paywall this is out in front and things like this need

to be said Rob put it through good and hard first of all I hate that phrase paywall it's very unfriendly I would like to say if you're listening to this podcast and you are a member of Ricochet we thank you and we are pleased and proud to have you as a fellow member of Ricochet.com

if you are listening to this podcast and you are not a member of Ricochet, I'm here to tell you you have to join. Look, I know you don't have to. I know there's nobody in your house saying please join Ricochet.com. But I'm telling you, I'm asking you, I maybe even at some point will be begging you to please join. Go to Ricochet.com and join Ricochet. You get access to all of our podcasts. You get access to our fantastic member feed. You get to like join in the conversation.

The best, fast, the best, fastest growing, wittiest, most civil conversation among and between contributors and members on the center, right on the web.

And there's lots going on in the world. There's lots going on in the country and Ricochet has an influence and people read the member feed and it's really worth being part of that larger chorus of voices so that's right it's the best most as clean as growing as thing and you're going to want to be there because it has well it's got people like rob long and it's got people like peter robinson peter hello how are you let's do that few little minutes of domestic little chatter that drives half the audience absolutely crazy. Give us something small, peculiar to your life that has nothing to do with politics.

Small and peculiar to my life. Yes, I will. Son number three is doing well in football this season. He brought home a pair of Sperry top-siders, which is, believe me, uncharacteristic for this family. And they were ratty and tatty and falling apart, but he loved them. Son, where did you get those? I said. And

it turns out they were hand-me-downs from a fellow football player of his. And so I, slightly embarrassed that he'd nicked a pair from a football player. I guess a football player didn't want them anymore. And also, so I bought him a pair of Sperry top-siders on Zappos, which is very 21st century of me, don't you think? Yeah, very much so. I think that one drove the entire audience crazy.

Back to you, James. Just get to the issues. Get to the issues, man. The public is draining down the gutter as we stand here and we're talking about this. I mean look, Chris Christie has declared himself to be a moderate. McAuliffe gets the governorship of Virginia thanks to the locust-like horde of parasites known as the federal workers in the northern part of the state. The Tea Party's over, man.

Barack's got his mojo back. Isn't that how this is probably going to be spinned? Well, is that how it's being spun, really? Because it was awfully – I haven't looked at the paper today. I'm just guessing that – No, I think you're wrong. The New York Times is jubilant this morning, but they sure shouldn't be. because it was awfully – I haven't looked at the paper today. I'm just guessing that – No, I think you're wrong.

No. The New York Times is jubilant this morning but they sure shouldn't be. McAuliffe's ratings – McAuliffe won by a much narrower margin than expected. That has to be because the public was waking up to Obamacare. Furthermore, he only got a plurality of the vote. The anti-government, anti-Obamacare vote which was unfortunately between Kuchinalli, the Republican, and a man whose last name I never actually heard pronounced who was running as a libertarian. It was not a libertarian. It was a faux libertarian reality. Yeah, faux libertarian. But he took off 7 percent of the vote. It's hard to imagine

that more than a percent of that at the most would have gone to McAuliffe if he hadn't been running. And so the anti – that was a – any careful professional politician and every single democrat in the senate who's up for reelection next year is a careful and professional politician will look at those results and say, ooh. Absolutely. This was a clear referendum on Obamacare. I mean in Virginia. In New Jersey, it was a practical coronation of a very popular, very effective governor, somebody I admire a lot who manages to win big in a blue – basically a blue state and leading up to it were spot on for the lieutenant governor's race and spot on for the attorney general's race. But about five points off for the governor's race, which suggests that Cuccinelli was a candidate that people had a hard time I guess admitting they liked for some reason.

I did not follow it as well as I should have. But I think he got off on the wrong foot when he started off and he might have turned some voters off there. How close and how winnable that race was thanks to late-breaking, late-moving polls and late-moving momentum against Obamacare, against Obama towards the Republican as a protest vote. And a little more – a few more resources from Republican Central may have made a difference. I mean you could make a case. It's hard always to know for a fact, but you could make a case that he wasn't – Cuccinelli was kind of written off by the RNC in DC early on and they never quite believed he was worth spending some extra get-out-the-vote money for. And he might have been. He might have been. I mean –

Well, I think that it's true. It's true. A bit more money may have helped to get the message out about Terry McAuliffe. I find it interesting that people would regard this as a referendum on Obamacare, not a referendum on Terry McAuliffe, who is a peculiar character with some odd dealings in the back there. But the people who voted for him don't care about that. They want a caretaker guy who's going to make sure that birth control isn't outlawed. And if you're a liberal, you're looking at what they said about Gooch and saying, oh, he's one of those crazy religious maniacs who's going to shove women back in the kitchen, chain them into a radiator, make them have babies,

which will fall into a saucepan, presumably, when they're giving birth while they slave. And if you're stupid enough to believe that, then you deserve the government that you're going to get. But the fact that it was close and that there was there were those libertarians who peeled off each of whom is individually and specifically responsible for the elevation of tory of terry mccullough by the way uh if you have yeah an option in the election

who himself is not the embodiment of status confiscation and you decide i must be pure i must be pure above all and and throw your vote that way instead of electing the guy that will keep the other guy from doing more harm. Then, yes, you are in a blame. It's nadirism. Exactly. It's exactly what they did with Ralph Nadir. I agree. I think – I mean what's interesting about it is that those are views in Virginia, which is a very interesting state, which is really a purple state, that are – socially conservative views are really interesting in Virginia because the northern – I mean it's all we say. The northern part of Virginia is sort of the great condo reef from DC, and these are all federal workers and federal governments exploded, and they're all very liberal.

And then as you move farther south down the state, you move farther south even in sensibility. And so this is a state that has an uneasy relationship with itself, kind of like California in a lot of ways. But it's still winnable. That was a very close race. It was a close race. It's still winnable. I'm sorry, Rob.

Go ahead. I was just going to say it brings me to my brilliant plan, which I still want to do, which is the Ricochet Pack because at a late changing contest where we have a chance to win with a little bit more money, if we had a Ricochet Pack, which I'm exploring. Any lawyers listening, please let me know. If you had a Ricochet Pack, you could probably make – I don't know if you'd make a difference, but you could really add something. You could really add something to that race. I mean a little bit of money to Cuccinelli at the end might have helped. Who knows?

It might have. To me, the most disappointing part of the Virginia race was that McAuliffe did not win because he was liberal. It didn't hurt him in the northern suburbs obviously. But if you look at the map, the detailed county by county map that the New York Times published, I'm sure it will appear other places. What you see is that McAuliffe won in Northern Virginia but he also won in the inner city of Richmond and he also won in Norfolk and the county surrounding Norfolk. Now, what's going on in the inner city of Richmond is that it's essentially a large number of people who are on welfare and what's going on around Norfolk is that it's essentially military and military contractors.

And so the coalition that carried McAuliffe to victory, again, it's only a victory by plurality, not outright majority, but the coalition that carried him to victory was not a liberal coalition. It was people who wanted to use the government to take money from their fellow

citizens. Do we have a name for that? I don't know. Yes, we call it the liberal coalition. I mean like military industrial complex. What is that? Like the government something complex. Yeah, you're right. It was people who wanted

to be left alone to lead their lives versus those who wanted to be left alone to lead their lives versus those who wanted to use the government in a very direct way for their own self-interest, to get paid, to get contracts, to get more welfare. How is that different from liberalism that's been practiced since the late, since the 60s? I don't get it. The people in Norfolk, the point I'm trying to make is that the people in Norfolk were just voting their pocketbooks. They get paid by the government. They were not voting social issues.

The social issue component I believe has been overplayed in a campaign. You're right. But you can also make – That's the point I'm trying to make. You can also make the point however that voting your interests which consists of taking money away from other people by force is a social matter, is a moral issue. I mean it's – It's mean, it's common sense. It's just that it's not what's generally understood as a social issue. No, but that's because we haven't attached enough morality to the whole concept yet.

That's because we long ago lost the idea that there is something immoral about the leveling egalitarian effect of taxation because they do it because they're compassionate. When we oppose it, it's because we're selfish. That's one of those moral rhetorical battles I wish we'd fought better. What I think was interesting was that the social issues, the old style term social issues were used early on to soften Cuccinelli up. He used them early on and they were very, very effective. I mean they were very, very effective. I mean they were very, very effective in Northern Virginia. In making sure that Cuccinelli's negatives

never were robust, right? Everybody does that as a candidate. And then they did what was interesting was they did kind of fade away. The idea of Cuccinelli as kind of a right-wing nut kind of faded away as he started

to lay some blows there. And I think, really, at the end of it, it was I mean, McAuliffe was up way too late looking at these returns than he expected to be. But than anybody expected to be. And I think a lot of that has to do with Obamacare. If you're

in the White House right now, you've got to be looking at numbers that are terrifying. Right, right. McAuliffe – quick summary of the campaign. McAuliffe outspent Cuccinelli by at least 60 percent. Right. He dominated the press in the last 10 days of the campaign by having Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton and then the president himself come in and he got coverage that millions of dollars worth of coverage. Cuccinelli got beat up early for his standing on social issues that drove up his

negatives, especially in Northern Virginia. And his negative stayed high among the press to the end, among the press to the end of the campaign. Furthermore, the Tea Party government shut down in Washington, Cuccinelli's numbers tanked. And even at that, even at outspending Cuccinelli, even at having a sitting and former and possibly future president come into campaign for you, even when running against Cuccinelli, who can be easily caricatured on the social issues because of certain things he said, even at that, McAuliffe did not get over 50 percent of the vote. And that has to be because of Obamacare. That has to be.

We actually have – well, go ahead. I'm sorry, James. No, I was just going to say one of these days we've got to march – mount some sort of smear campaign on our own early on. I mean Terry McAuliffe has been described as a great singer. Peter Singer is an ethicist who believes that babies should be aborted up to six months after they've been given birth. Is Terry McAuliffe like Peter Singer? Well, here's a picture of Jerry McAuliffe sawing a baby in half. Could it happen? It could. Virginia, you make the choice. I mean, be as stupid and as obscene as they are. On the other hand, if you're right, Peter, and they are in the White House looking

at numbers, Obama's got to be thinking those chances for a third term are rapidly diminishing. He's looking at 2014, and he may not be generally acclaimed as the greatest ever, and he may actually have attached to his name one of those mocking statements that was made with his chin out that comes back to haunt him and sting him again and again. If you like your plan, you can keep it. Well, you can't. And as people have noticed on the Internet, there's a lot of cancellations going on. One of the places that you can find those cancellations is the site that assembles them all for all to see.

It's not just 5% of the people, maybe millions. And the more the stories get out, the more the outrage builds, which brings us to Heather Higgins. Heather's president and CEO of Independent Women's Voice and serves on the boards of the Independence Women's Forum, the Hoover Institute, the Philanthropy Roundtable, and others. Her writings appeared on many places, the Independence Women's Forum, the Hoover Institute, the Philanthropy Roundtable, and others. Her writings appeared on many places, including the Wall Street Journal, Politico, HuffPo, Town Hall, NRO. Heather's everywhere. Heather's everywhere. We welcome Heather to the podcast.

Hello, Lou. Thank you. Heather, how are you? Good morning. It's Rob in L.A. How are you doing? Hello, darling. How are you?

I'm doing very well. Okay, so, okay, we got to talk about last night, but just before you do, can I just get to that? What's the latest on MyCancellation.com and the latest on the Twitter account? To bring people up to speed, you posted on Ricochet. You had a Twitter account. It's been canceled, a million minutes canceled, and then reinstated. Yeah, we created a website called MyCancellation.com, and it has a Twitter account that goes with that called At My Cancellation. And we did a soft launch on, I think it was Friday, and within just a few hours of our existence, our account was suspended.

And we're like, whoa, we didn't violate any policies. So they reinstated it, and bam, on Saturday we got suspended again. And then we launched on Monday, and they suspended it a third time. And as best I can tell, there's sort of a concerted effort that periodically happens. If somebody wants to shut down a site, what they do is they lodge these faux claims that it's spam, and it trips the system within Twitter, where if they get a certain number of complaints, the automatic response is shut down the account and investigate later. So this is not Twitter.

This is somebody hacking, not hacking, but somebody sort of using the Twitter game. Playing the Twitter system. Who's doing that? As best we can know. I mean The game playing the Twitter system. Who's doing that? As best we can know. I mean, I can't prove that. Maybe it is somebody internal to Twitter who hates us. But but that is what's been explained to me as the way people who want to play games with Twitter and control social media will do that sort of game. Well, who would those people be, Heather? Who do you think it would be? People who don't want people to be too upset about how many people have had their insurance policies canceled.

Maybe the sorts of people who think that it's just a sliver of the population. So at any rate, we're now up to, since our launch on Monday, 8,000 Twitter followers and 900 Facebook likes and over 300 letters and photos of people's cancellation letters posted on the website. It is amazing to see this. I mean, you just scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll, and it's just people showing their letters of cancellation. Yeah, and a lot of them have very helpfully, because the print gets sort of small, they write on it what the percentage increase is, or the fact that they're now going to be getting less care for more money, which is always a joy.

Well, you do things like that. Just to put it in context, Ricochet members know – again, if you're not a Ricochet member, you should join Ricochet and you can actually – one of the people you can have a good conversation with is Heather Higgins. But you've done a little of this stuff. I mean is it – but this is your first big social media. I mean just the background for it. Heather – one of Heather's political operations is something I'm trying to steal for Ricochet, which is to come in at a late-breaking – a late-moving race when you can really make a difference. And you've done that. You've done that in Hawaii. You've done it in a bunch of other places. You've really looked at the women's vote. But is this the first time you've kind of pulled the levers of social media this hard?

Not entirely. I mean we run and we still run the repeal pledge, which has over 200,000 signers. It's the only repeal pledge that actually has a real pledge attached to it. There are an awful lot of them that were floated around as a way of capturing people's email addresses, but they didn't actually do anything. We actually, people can see the real pledge. They can see which senators and congressmen and candidates have signed it. We then will go into elections to let people know. We've also done races where the Republican Party or others think that it's a lost cause, and we don't.

So we went in, our first one was the Scott Brown race in 2010, redefining that as being about health care. We did the race in Massachusetts for Barack Obama's, theoretically, NATO seat, Hawaii 01, in the special election there, and went from the Republican coming in third to coming in first. We most recently did the Sanford race, the special election in South Carolina, where everybody had given up on him two weeks before and walked away. And we thought it was insane to just give up the seat.

You didn't need to give up and thought it was worth doing. So we do participate in elections, but we also do a lot on this other, our primary focus for C4 is issue activity. And so we do an awful lot on the whole – we were the ones saying, no, no, don't say defund. Defund is not your optimal strategy here. We all share the same goals, and this is – if you game it out, this is not a pretty picture. There are better, smarter ways to do this. Heather, Peter here in Palo Alto. Congratulations on those victories you just enunciated and on Twitter.

Now, listen, how do you answer this? OK, Heather, have fun making fun of Obamacare now. But within a month, it'll be fixed. You're just having fun. You conservatives are just making fun of some ordinary to be expected glitches in the system. It'll get fixed in a month and you'll be sorry because by next spring it'll be working beautifully and it'll help the Democrats in 2014 not harm them. How do you answer that? I have actually told people on our team that while the website glitches are obviously embarrassing to the administration, they are not where we should be focusing because they will be patched one way or another. But problems will continue and certainly the problem of canceled insurance.

Remember, this is an insurance that got extraordinarily upset and decided that we needed to redo the entire healthcare system in the United States because of people, for example, with pre-existing conditions. And I believe their number at the time that they were floating was 700,000 people who needed coverage that couldn't get it. We're looking at 16 million Americans who are going to have their insurance policies canceled. And these were policies that people actually liked and felt were providing them the coverage that they wanted. And when they're going on the websites, many of them are discovering that they don't qualify for subsidies. They're going to have to pay a lot more money. There was a devastating editorial in the Wall Street Journal on Monday

by a woman who's got stage four cancer and Obamacare is forcing her to choose either one half of her doctor team or the other half, both of whom are essential to keeping her alive. And there will be more and more horror stories like this where we are ruining people's lives, and eventually it will be Obama-wide and people died, which is going to be the byproduct of where all this comes out. People will not be able to keep the insurance that was paying for the extraordinary level of care that they've been getting, and they will wind up with something substandard.

It's part of why people are not happy about going on the exchanges. Your choices on the exchanges are incredibly limited. The quality of hospitals that will agree to be covered by the policies that are on the exchanges are extremely limited. If you were worried about a two-tier health healthcare system in the United States, it's going to get worse. Concierge medicine is going to go up, and the number of doctors who are going to agree to participate in the exchanges is going to go down.

So your wait times for care will also go way up. Could you explain that term, concierge medicine? To me, at least, it's relatively new. If it's new to me, it's new to others as well. It is. It's where you pay a doctor a fixed sum annually, say several thousand dollars, and that covers all of your visits and all of your care no matter what happens. And so that way the doctor has a steady stream of revenue.

He doesn't need to deal with your insurance company, and you just do it that way. So that's where we are with that. But I think, yes, there will be people who benefit from there being subsidies and who, there will certainly be stories that the Obama administration talks about, But there will be many more horror stories as well that people will start to realize that this is not the panacea. And in fact, it has a lot of doubt that there's a website we created in 2012. And when people go through it, it's a real eye opener. It's called health reform questions.com. It basically lets people test their own knowledge of the law and what it does and particularly goes to a lot of the presumptions about how caring and

compassionate this law is going to be and in fact it walks people through what happens to people who have children who need insurance or who have pre-ag who are young adults who need insurance and what's going to happen to their costs and how many people are in fact still not going to be covered people in this was going to cover everyone and don't understand that at least 30 million people will still not be covered despite the tremendous upheaval and distortions this is

going to create and the damage it's going to do to the private insurance market. As much as we all like to berate insurance companies, they're a whole lot better than government being your only alternative. So this is part of the problem. And then you're also going to have challenges with data security. And I am waiting. We already have those, right? It's horrible, but you haven't had the abuses of it yet. But this is a huge, big target for anyone who wants to steal data and information and

manipulate and misuse it. But the government holds itself to different standards than it would any private company. The mere fact that in many places where if you go on the exchanges, it shows you only two ballpark prices. And then when you go in, you discover that your prices are much higher. If you were a private company, the FTC would be all over you. That's illegal. Yeah. Right. With major fines. But, you know, it's the government. So we can do all sorts of crappy things to our customers because we're immune from that sort of thing. And they've decreed themselves immune from fraud and from all sorts of other allegations that would apply to any private business.

Heather, I know Rob has another question or two, but I just want to, one word of admiration from me. You know, one of the things that I just so love about what you're doing is that you are showing that the new communications technology, the web, all of that can work for conservatives too. It's not as if that's all somehow or other inherently favoring the other side. Ricochet is proving that it isn't, and so is Heather Higgins. Hats off to you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, in almost all the stuff that we do electorally, we do it through social media as well as things like phones and mail.

So we're very much focused on targeting particular voters as opposed to doing the big media buys on the air. We think that that's largely a waste of resources and have proven time and time again that, in fact, social media is a much smarter, targeted voter approach is much more sense. Well, that's what the other side does. Hey, so Heather, I got a question for you. That may do turnout better because that's what a lot of Virginia was about last night. But Obamacare also, yes. Sorry. That's my next, that's my next question. Can we talk a little bit about Virginia last night? Because we, before you got on, we were saying that it was, it was, it was a late

movie to Cuccinelli. We think that has a lot to do with Obamacare and maybe a little extra money at the end and it'll get out the vote obviously would have made the difference in a very, very tight race. What do you think? Yes, hugely so. When we did polling over the summer, Obamacare was an issue that worked really well with Republicans and somewhat with independents. But there was still a lot of ambivalence. People weren't sure what was going to happen. Cuccinelli lost momentum during the shutdown and lost the capacity to have the conversation focus on what he wanted to focus on because it was all focused on the shutdown. Then when it came back, you finally had,

with the website glitches initially, if we want to call them glitches, and then more importantly, with the cancellations following on, suddenly the conversation became about Obamacare. And Cuccinelli in that period moved from being behind by double digits to being seriously neck and neck. I mean he lost by what, under 60,000 votes? The third party libertarian candidate won nearly 150,000 votes and it turned out that his largest supporter was an Obama bundler. Right, right. You know, all these poor libertarians need to understand, you may have thought that you were voting on principle,

but ultimately you were voting for McAuliffe and Obamacare. The RGA pulled out. The RNC did spend $3 million, but they'd spent $9 million for McConnell in 2009. So to me, it felt a little bit like resources, but when they're down. They do these straight line extrapolations and they assume that they're losers and they walk away right at the time when they need to be doubling down and coming in and pulling it out. And I don't know how to change that temperament, but it is a consistent problem. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead, James.

James, I'm here in Minneapolis. I know you have to go. And everybody's been hitting all the points that I want to hear about. But I have to ask you this. Is there any way that the GOP, the right, the conservatives can find an advocate for our side as unpleasant as Debbie Wasserman Schultz is for theirs? Because apparently they think that's the key. Can we find someone that grating and appallingly elitist to talk down to everybody as she does. I mean, just. Well, I'm not trying to cast aspersions here, but she works for their team. And I would say the greatest parallel perhaps that we've got, and I'm not casting aspersions, but it would be a Ted Cruz analogy in that Ted Cruz works really well for our base. And he grates on a lot of other people.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz works really well for her base, and she grates on a lot of other people. I'm not sure that – her goal is motivating her base. So they understand why they have her in that position, but I'm not sure that that's what we need to advocate for. Yeah, there's so many issues I'm on the fence about, I just have to ask, how would she screech at me if I went the wrong way? Cruz is an interesting example, and Christie came out the other day, and we see a little friction between the two of them there as people jostle around for 2016.

Is this good for the party? I mean, do we want to see this aired out in public, or would we prefer, actually, that everybody shake hands until the real backstabbing begins in 2015? I am always one for washing laundry quietly behind the scenes and keeping it as out of public limelight as possible. Part of our challenge is that there are different constituencies

and genuinely differently held beliefs about what it takes to win. You also have different interests. So sometimes if you've got an outside group, their focus is on doing whatever works just for their membership base rather than what it takes to necessarily win an election. They may not even view winning the same way as, for example, the establishment Republican Party would. So these things have to be thrashed out, and one or the other is going to eventually come to the top or somebody is going to leave the table, which would be unfortunate because

there's not enough of us to have anybody leave the table. Hey, Heather, one last question. It's Rob again. When you started the repeal pledge, it seemed – That was the summer of 2010. 2010. It seems quixotic. It seemed quixotic at the time.

I supported it, but I thought – and people like me, little squishy cowards like me were saying, yeah, we're not going to repeal it. We're just going to fix it. We'll just have to fix it. We'll just have to get in there and fix it and slowly move it back or add things to it. And people like you were saying, shut up, coward. No, that's not what's going to happen. We have to repeal it. The question is how dumb am I and how big do you think this is going to be? How big is this going to be in the next two years? How big is it going to be in the midterms? How big is it going to be in the general? If you're a Democrat right now and you're looking at these numbers, you've got – there are only two Democrats for which Obamacare really can be wrapped around their necks, and that's Barack Obama who's not running again and Joe Biden who's disappeared.

So my double question is, one, how big is it going to be? And two, if you had a pick, who are the first Democratic senators to start to bail on this who are up for re-election? My recollection, and I'm not doing it off the top of my head, so I don't want to name names, but I was given a count the other day that there are now 32 different Democrats

who have talked about the need to delay implementation in one form or another. The way you wrap it around their necks is that you say that they're not willing to delay it, they're not willing to repeal it, they're not willing to undo the special congressional exemption. Another website of ours, no Washington exemption for that petition to make sure that they don't get the special subsidy for going onto the exchanges that none of these poor people who have their insurance canceled are going to qualify for either.

Or not many of them. I never would have said shut up to you robin you know that uh ever ever ever and your art your eyebrow would have been raised in an arched fashion tantamount to saying shut up well the reason that i i never felt that fixing worked is the entire underlying architecture of this law is so seriously flawed. The premises which drive it are wrong. It is so counterproductive to genuine reform of the health care system that every serious policy analyst who's looked at it says there just isn't a way to fix it. There's so much that's wrong with it. You can do patches that give you the illusion that maybe you can make it less painful for a little longer, but ultimately

it does terrible things to medical innovation. It does terrible things to the number of doctors providing care, et cetera. But the issue still absolutely wraps around the necks of anybody who won't... Remember, the House has voted now to have a full-year delay on the employer mandate and the individual mandate. Remember Obama in his selective understanding of how laws apply gets to think that he gets to selectively decide

what parts we're going to implement and what parts we're going to not. And who needs Congress and who needs laws? It's his entire approach to governance. It's very imperial. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually work that way, and you now have a whole bunch of Democrats who have voted against that extension, and you've got a Senate that keeps refusing to take things up,

or when they do have it presented to them, there have that's taken which work against that so although that you're going to play very strongly in two thousand fourteen uh... and probably get in two thousand sixteen uh... the things your listeners can do that would be the single most helpful thing to advancing the ball on delay because we're not going to get repeal of long as obama's in the house but any kind of serious delay

is to demand that there be a vote on the Vitter legislation, that there be no special exemption for Congress. Just as Congress will vote for all sorts of things when they know that their plane is waiting to get them out of town to go home for Christmas vacation, this is that on steroids, because what it does is it says you personally are not only going on to the exchanges as the law says, but you are not getting a subsidy for doing so. Just like the rest of the American people, you can pay for it. And if you want to keep your old insurance, then you can make that a possibility for the rest of the American people by delaying the mandates, et cetera.

Peter here, may I ask one last question? Rob, as Rob is, in my humble opinion, over fond of pointing out, for 70 years now, our side has been pretty steadily losing ground. Pause during the Reagan years and then one counter victory when Gingrich was speaker, that is the welfare reform. But overall, if you look at the last 70 years of domestic policy in this country, it is the expansion of the welfare state. Obamacare has now been enacted. It is being rolled out. Some people will benefit from the subsidies. The interest groups are being built up to support it. And although it looked as though Republicans may have had a wonderful opportunity to unite against Obamacare, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, brilliant men, though they may be patriots, suddenly the Republican Party looks as though it's a mess. Is Heather Higgins optimistic looking toward 2014? I feel that my role in life is to be on this earth to counterbalance Rob's perpetual pessimism. Beautiful. Good work. All right. So even though I have moments of darkness, I am going to maintain

my optimism that we can restore this. If we were to have more time and have a longer conversation, I would say the welfare example is extraordinarily instructive, as is Reagan. Most of the time, on the right, people are so upset about the freedoms that they are losing that the tone they take is negative and the tone they take is hurt, and they focus very often on the costs involved of these things. When Reagan was running, he didn't self-reference as a conservative. He talked about all of America. He talked about the promise of America.

And when we were looking at welfare reform in the 90s, we had been pushing for welfare reform for 15 years with no success until we finally got smarter, made a coalition with Democrats, and started talking about what was good for poor people and how welfare was hurting them and taking on a positive approach. And that's what we need to do as a party, which is be for what is good for the whole country, not always talking first and foremost about what things cost, and maintaining that vision of what the promise of America is, which we have sadly done a very poor job of. I'm sold. Okay, thank you The thing about you is you won't stay sold, Rob Which means we have to have Heather back again and again I'm delighted any time Heather, thank you for everything you're doing

I hope to see you soon I will do that Lucky members of Ricochet We are part and some we saw had a front row seat and all this stuff including at it's at my cancellation follow it on twitter

that's the twitter at my cancellation is twitter and my cancellation dot com is the tumblr type website perfect perfect thanks Heather alright take care see you soon Tumblr type website. Perfect. Perfect. Hey, thanks. Thanks, Heather. All right. Take care.

See you soon. Does anybody know where Joe Biden has been? We were pretty sure he's running for president. Of the two people we know, we're pretty sure running for president on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton. This does not touch her necessarily. Joe Biden does touch her. I think we're going to

look at Joe Biden running away and we're going to see some some key Democratic senators running away when that happens. The bottom falls out of this, doesn't it? I mean, how does it not? Well, Peter, no, it was not a rhetorical question. I want an answer. No, what threw me, what threw me, what's still throwing me, what's giving me a temporary brain freeze is that was actually kind of an optimistic framing of the question, Rob. Heather really did turn you around. Well, just for a second. It's the Heather glow. But it does seem to me like just politically, looking at the political landscape, that's what we've got to be looking for, right? We've got to be looking for signs of weakness on the other side, and these are going to be senators up for reelection.

That's where you'll see it first. And that's where you're going to see it. There's the people who are going to pay the price. Barack Obama is not going to pay the price. I will go out on record and say that the Barack Obama administration, the era of Barack Obama ended on the day that Obamacare launched because Because he's got no more leverage, right? He's only a liability. If you're Terry McAuliffe, aren't you thinking to yourself, man, I wish I hadn't done those appearances with Barack Obama, the president.

I should have done them with Bill Clinton. I would have been fine. There was a post to Ricochet. I forget. It may have been Troy. I would have fine. That cannot be edited, erased, explained as much as they try. And you're right, Rob. We have to look for the disarray and find a way to exploit it. Joe Biden is probably out there right now washing the feet of the poor so he can show them exactly that he cares. And that shows that he's a compassionate man.

But what the GOP needs to do is not always be the party that says, no, this doesn't work, this doesn't work, but we have to come up with our own ways of getting the point across that, yes, we do indeed care, right? That's the compassion gap. We have to point out that this is not about an anarchic society where there is no government and libertarians and Anne Randian freaks run wild destroying civil structure, but that actually what we're about is taking those things that government can do well and manage them. I mean, I know people hate to say this because it's accepting the parameters of the welfare state, but this is the thing in which we live.

This is the world that we have to accept and then change. There are people out there who say, you know, your alternatives are just to let everybody die. That's the way they phrase the argument every time. The Republicans stand in the way of health care, not affordable insurance, but health care, as though we're standing in front of the emergency rooms looking at people with batons in our hand and whipping them out if they come in with a broken arm and we say, you look poor. We have to explain how government fails the very people it's supposed to protect.

How Medicaid, for example, fails the poor. And Ovik Roy has written a broadside about this that you need to go get. It's at EncounterBooks.com. He explains how people on Medicaid have far worse outcomes than those with private insurance. Yes, I'm reading the copy. And how no better outcomes than those with no insurance at all. He explains why this is and how Obamacare doubles down on the broken Medicare system. And, of course, he's one of the best voices on health care right now.

And lucky us, we welcome him to the Ricochet podcast. Hello. Hey, guys. How are you? We're just great. You know, I forgot to say all the other things. You're a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. And in 2012, you were the health care policy advisor to Mitt Romney,

which makes people scratch their head and say, wait a minute. What was Mitt's – what was his health care policy? And didn't he sort of lose the argument when everybody said that Romney care was just like O care? Well, he did at the time, but I don't think he's losing that argument today, I think. I wrote a piece for National Review a couple months back called Romney's Revenge. And it was all about this point that state-based reform is very different from federal-based reform. And both conservatives and liberals didn't give him much, didn't tolerate that much, didn't take it seriously.

But I think we're seeing that. We're seeing these effects of Obamacare on premiums across the country. And we're seeing that in the states like Massachusetts, the law isn't really having as much of an impact. But in less regulated states, it's having a huge impact. Ovik, Peter Robinson here. How are you? I'm fine. How are you, Peter? So, Paul Krugman has been arguing again and again in the New York Times that all these glitches

in the healthcare website rollout are just that, glitches. And he adduces as proof that it can be done and be done smoothly, various state exchanges. So that comparison is just false? Well, you know, Paul Krugman is many things, but his columns on health care are always head scratchers. And this is a great example. That is the most diplomatic way to put that. Well, this is a very high-toned podcast, so I felt like I should be elegant and diplomatic. Wow. What podcast do you think you're on?

You know, so this talking point has been around for a long time, this idea that, well, if everyone just implemented the law like good foot soldiers of Obamacare and we had all these state exchanges, then everything would have been fine. And that's not true. So if you talk to the directors of these state exchanges, so I've spent some time with Kevin Cunahan, for example, who's a director of the Connecticut Exchange, a blue state that set up its own exchange, tried to do everything that Obamacare told them to do. And he said openly to the press on the record, I wish I had one more year because they had to wait so long to get the regulations from HHS as to how to redesign everything. At a certain point, they just threw up their hands and said, we're just going to do whatever we want. Screw you. You know, I'm bringing down the tone. There goes the high tone podcast.

Yeah. So that's that. You know, there's been there's been a lot of these problems. And and I think there's been this kind of delusional explanation that, well, if only Republicans implemented the law, then everything would go fine. I think most serious people dismiss that argument, but it has a fair amount of power. All right. So the next question then would be – it's a mess, but you just suggested that the fellow who's running the exchange in where? In New Jersey, did you say? Connecticut. Connecticut. He said if he'd had another year, the implication is if he'd had one more year, he could sort it out. So the administration is now saying they'll get the website substantially fixed by the holidays, by the end of this year, by next spring, everything will be humming along. And it sounds as though the fellow you spoke to in Connecticut says, in principle, that's possible.

In principle, it can be fixed. Is that so? Yeah, I think it is so that in principle, in theory, it is possible to set up a website where people shop for health insurance plans. The private sector seems to manage to do this just fine. Just go to ehealthinsurance.com and you'll see a private website that does just this. But the thing about this federal website, it's one of these situations where a lot of the Obamacare headlines, there's been more noise than – more heat than light. So the headline sensationalizes something that's a fairly technical problem where maybe the disruptions are important but sort of minor.

This is an example where I think the opposite is true. So I think there's this conventional wisdom out there that, well, these website issues are just glitches. They should be able to fix them by the end of the month. That's what the government is now promising. But the more you dig into this, and the reporters at places like the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and some of the tech and software blogs out there that you read on this stuff at places like Reddit, the problems are so deep and so profound at every level of how this website needs to operate. I'm not confident that they're going to be able to fix this in a month.

I think they might be able to fix the interface, the front end, but I'm not so sure they'll be able to fix the back end so quickly. That's probably true for all of us. So we should say before we go farther that you do a great podcast for Ricochet.com, American Wonk. And so – and you've – like you've done a deep dive into this. I mean if we could just take a little put on your your pundit hat for a minute how much of a lie i mean i keep asking this to heather higgins i'm asking you how much of a slow um disaster is this gonna be for advocates i mean i mean peter sort of touched on that is

the website gets better all that stuff gets better assuming it does get better i mean is this a year from, are we going to be looking back on this and thinking, oh, we made such a big deal about this one thing, and the truth is that the people who have Obamacare are now happy with it? I mean how rough is is going to be a smashing success, but I don't think it's going to collapse under its own, effectively say, Madam Secretary, tear down this website and rebuild it over time once you've got it fixed. They're not going to do that. So that may actually delay the amount of time that it takes to rebuild it. But once they do rebuild it, people will sign up. But what's going to happen? With all the hassles and all the problems, the people who are going to sign up are the people who are the most desperate for coverage. So sicker people, older people, and people who, of course, are of low income. So they benefit from the subsidies in the law instead of facing the

huge rate hikes that a lot of people will face. So what you're going to see most likely, and this is what every insurance executive believes on the record or off, is that you're going to see that the population on the exchange is not going to reflect the actual population of uninsured people. It's going to be poor, sicker, and older. In other words, the most expensive. Yes. Right. And so the average price per person is going to be high. The cost of these insurance plans will be higher, but less people will enroll. So from a fiscal standpoint, calculating how that all plays out is complicated because per person, it might be more expensive. So you might worry as a taxpayer, okay, this means the plans are going to be more expensive.

But if less people enroll and therefore less people get subsidized coverage, then maybe it's not as bad, right? So you don't know. It's hard to know exactly how all that math will play out. But I think we do know this, which is that if you don't qualify for subsidies, or if you're of sort of middle class average income, so maybe you qualify for a small subsidy but not a very large subsidy, you're likely to pay much more for health insurance tomorrow than you did yesterday. And therefore, health insurance is going to be less affordable than it was yesterday. I was under the impression that by adding all sorts of mandates and waving the magic

federal wand that prices would go down. But listening to Debbie Wasserman Schultz the other day, we were talking about before her charming oratorical skills. She said that the president – we were not misled by the president at all, which is a new way to pronounce misled, of course, I guess, that actually everyone's going to benefit and that there's three to five percent that are having problems, which is irrelevant if it's an insurance matter. But if we are talking about things like gay marriage, changing everything to accommodate

the three to five percent is, you know, the fierce moral moral issue of our time. But aren't they saying that once this hits the insurance that everybody gets from their employer, that we're going to see a repeat of this, and that's what's really going to galvanize people to action when the folks with the nice cushy jobs and the good plans all of a sudden find that their premiums are going up and their deductibles are going up? Yeah, so one of the useful aspects of the fact that this law was passed in such a partisan way is that whatever happens to the health care system, you broke it, you own it. They're going to have to own that.

And this is – they had the lie about if you like your plan, you can keep it. And what they've done now in the last week or two is they've compounded that lie with a second lie, which is this lie that only 5% of people are affected by Obamacare's disruptions. That's not true. So I wrote a piece for my Forbes blog where I actually cite the administration's own estimates that 93 million people will have their insurance policies disqualified by Obamacare, and they'll have to rotate them out for new Obamacare-compliant plans, which will be more expensive and often have higher deductibles and narrower physician choice. So that's like the next shoe to drop, effectively, that you're going to see not so much

disruption in the sense of people going without coverage in the employer-sponsored market. You're going to see that in the individual market. I think just so your listeners understand, it's very important to understand the distinction between the two different private sector insurance markets. The one that 156 million Americans are involved in today is they get coverage through their employer. That's called the employer-sponsored market. That market is relatively heavily regulated today and generally more costly than the other market I'm going to talk about, which is the individual market or the non-group market costly than the other market I'm going to talk about, which is the individual market or the non-group market. So the individual market or the non-group market

covers about 26 million people today, 25 million people today, and that is the market for people who shop for coverage on their own, who don't get it through their employer. So that's relatively smaller, but Obamacare expands that through these exchanges. So on the exchanges, it's technically an individual market because you're shopping for coverage yourself instead of getting it through your employer. Now, what's going to happen with Obamacare, what the administration is arguing, is that all these disruptions, yeah, they're disruptions and that's bad, but it's only affecting these people who shop for coverage on their own. It's not affecting people on Medicare. It's not affecting people who get coverage for their jobs. And that's not true. So the law actually is going to dramatically affect people who

get coverage for their jobs, not so much by taking away their coverage. They're going to have coverage, but it's going to take away their old plans and replace them with plans that are costlier. You know, yes, but aren't we going to be told when this happens that the plans that we had weren't really that good in the first place and it was the fault of a predatory, unregulated insurance agency that somehow tricked all these people into getting these lousy plans? I mean that's what we heard for the last iteration of this. That's surely what we're going to hear in the next one, that all of these unregulated, vulture insurance agencies gave these people crap coverage and they were too stupid to know it. I guarantee that's going to be replaced when it starts to hit the employees. Yeah, the president has already rolled out this idea that, well, the plans that are being – that we're now rendering illegal are junk plans, to which I cite Charles Krauthammer and say, don't touch my junk.

Here. to which I cite Charles Krauthammer and say, don't touch my junk. Peter. Bringing down the tone of the podcast a little. Well, no, I think it's elevating in fact that you were here at the beginning. So, Peter here, as best I can tell, I'm not sure how to formulate the question, so bear with me a little bit as I fumble around. But as best I can tell, this is one of those situations, as this plan is being rolled out, there's nothing even like a settled status quo or what the economists would call an equilibrium

in sight. Therefore, and the principal problem we see right now is that young people on whom the insurance need more healthy people to pay for health insurance that they don't strictly need in order to make this work. They need a lot of young people to sign up and young people are not signing up. So for those who support Obamacare, the next step, it's the dynamic, the built-in dynamic of the thing. The next step almost has to be in favor of more government coercion. Raise the fine. Tighten the mandate.

Force people into these exchanges in a way that hasn't yet been done. Isn't that right? That's right. Actually, I just interviewed a couple of weeks ago at the Forbes Healthcare Summit, the retired CEO of Aetna, one of the large health insurance companies, his name is Ron Williams. And Ron Williams said just that, not only do we need to steepen the fines, but we should add other conditions. For example, you're not eligible for student loans unless you buy health insurance. You shouldn't be able to get a driver's license unless you have health insurance. He wants to stiffen it even further. And I think the insurance

industry is going to lobby for that. They're going to lobby for a tightening of the mandate if they see that young people don't enroll. What they should do, what I encourage them to do, is to actually say, well, if young people aren't enrolling, why don't we make the plans more affordable for young people instead of treating young people like that famous scene in The Matrix where premiums because we want you to subsidize everybody else's healthcare. And young people need to be more aware of that that's what's happening, that they're being taken for fools, played for fools. So my question is like do you think that's – you are a self-described healthcare policy wonk. How do you take all of this information and boil it down so that the – I mean this is a cliche but I think it's true – so that the generation that watches – gets their news from Daily Show understands what you're saying. I mean the matrix image is pretty vivid. I mean is it

stuff like that or is it – do they need to understand how the entire insurance industry works? I mean I find myself when I talk to young people saying, well, I mean you watch TV and every third commercial is for some form of insurance. Insurance is actually kind of a good business, not health insurance though, and why not? And that seems to get to their – part of their sensibility. But how would you do that? How would you describe that to people who are not self-described policy wonks? Yeah, I mean certainly I think vivid imagery is always useful in trying to explain things to people. But I think that we don't have to worry too much in this sense, that the people who have to shop for coverage on these exchanges, these young people, they're going to see what the prices are.

There was a survey that the Commonwealth Fund put out, I believe, yesterday or the day before. The Commonwealth Fund is a liberal think tank that supports Obamacare. They put out a survey of people who'd signed up for accounts on the website but didn't actually purchase insurance. And they asked those people why it is that you didn't buy insurance. And I believe it was something like 50% or more that the reason they didn't buy insurance is because it was too expensive. And if you ask average Americans of all ages, what's the biggest problem with our healthcare system? 11% say that there are too many uninsured

people. 74% say it's that health insurance is too expensive. So most people already know that health insurance is too expensive. That's why they don't buy it. People have iPhones, right? The average cost of a lightly regulated health insurance plan is less than the cost of an iPhone contract. But not anymore, not after Obamacare where these plans are going to cost $200, $250 a month. And a lot of younger people are going to say, I go to the doctor once a year. Why should I spend $250 a month on health insurance? It doesn't make a lot of sense. Well, the good thing is that the president, to restore his credibility,

and Luster is going to roll out a plan to affect those people who don't have smartphones. And if you like your number, you'll be able to keep it. As it stands now, we're going to do something to get those iPhones into people. They'll actually be Samsungs. Well, they'll be Rockers from Motorola from 1997. But the point is that those people who don't have phones will actually have phones, and that the phone that you like will actually be better

even though it'll be more expensive. You remind me of one important point, which is that this whole website crash situation has diminished Obamacare's credibility in the eyes of young people because the whole idea of not being able to put a website together where you can shop for something seems so basic and elemental to the 21st century world that I think a lot of young people look at this and particularly tech-savvy young people saying, what? The government can't build a website?

I think this has been a sea change moment in terms of before people thought of Obama as as the, as Ezra Klein put it recently, the iPod president, the guy who was really hip to all these technologies. And that has completely changed now, and that's why you're seeing a lot of the coverage on Comedy Central has been quite tough on the problems. Oh, that's the absolute

beauty of it. All of a sudden, he's Grandpa with the Blink-12 and the VCR. I love this more than anything else, because when he came to office, he was cool and techno-savvy. Wow, he had a Blackberry, and he was addicted to it like all the rest of us. And now it turns out that he and Joe Biden goes on television and says, well, you know, you got an unexpressed value there in line 2604. People would just marvel. His abilities were just absolutely legendary, like Kim Il-sung hitting a hole in one and then inventing a new polio vaccine. But no, turns out he doesn't. iPod presidency, for heaven's sakes. Show me that this guy has any concept of how to back the thing up, let alone turn it on. Mr. Roy, thank you very much. We'll talk to you down the road. And we encourage everybody to go to EncounterBooks.com and get your new book on how Medicaid ill serves the poor. It's a broadside, but heck, it's a book to us.

Thanks, sir. Thanks, Ovik. Thanks, Ovik. Thanks, guys. Well, that's – yeah, the iPod presidency. I love that. I love that. I love it. I can always tell when something has been brewing in you, James, because it comes out and it's like – suddenly it's like, oh, yeah, they did call the iPod presidency. And then before I could even get mad about it, you're already there.

I love it. But it's true. It is infuriating. But there's got to be something delicious about this. I mean just before we go, and I know we're running out of time, but, I mean, please, aren't you enjoying this fall, this Obamacare collapse? It's just such a disaster. It's such an embarrassment.

It's such a humiliation to wipe that smug off their faces. It's just been, oh, it like been like a week at a spa. People say that there's nothing sweeter than the tears of your enemy. And while that's true, you know, we've had to use those tears as sort of a flavoring and other things because they've been fairly spare and

low supply. Now here we are with nice plastic wobbly gallon jugs of the tears of our enemy. You can water your house plants with them. You can pour them in the toilet if you want. We've got soap. We've got a reservoir. And the cavilling and the noodling on the words and the lawyering of all of it.

It's just fantastic. It's fantastic. The best part has been to hear them explain away that the president didn't say what he actually said. No, he didn't say that. Here are people who are tasked with explaining why when somebody said if you like your policy, you will be able to keep it, period. Now, the use of the word – For a period. Is that what –

No, no. I'm just saying that's probably what he was going to say next. He said you're going to keep it for a period and then that period is from the time you sign on to the website to the time you click off. That's the period you get to keep it. That's what I would suspect the next lawyering – the definition of is, is will be. Well, they either try to do that or they evade the question entirely and say that what they had before wasn't worth keeping anyway, period. It doesn't work. It's and Chris Christie, the, when I was listening to Chris Christie talk on the bus or wherever he was the other day, you realized why this guy is a potent political force and why you've got to pay a lot of attention to him because he's the only guy out

there right now in the national stage with the GOP brand who you're actually not fearful of, of that. Something horrible is going to come out when he opens his mouth. There's something talking to be stupid or an elegant or clueless. He sounds like a guy plugged in and he sounds like a guy who, who has the confidence that, that doesn't outstrip his actual rhetorical abilities. Now you may hate what he said about Ted Cruz. Fine. We're going to have the debate when he was talking about how the president

sounds like he's, he's being a lawyer, you know, and he says, I'm a lawyer, but people, people hate lawyers. Yeah.

That's a, that's exactly right. Because that's what it sounds like. It sounds like – but it's lawyerliness coupled with a sort of 11-year-old inability to explain away why there's a broken dish at their feet and they didn't do it. I didn't do it. Yeah, it's just precious. Peter, are you enjoying this as well before we conclude? I am loving every moment of it. Although I am feeling uncharacteristically, Rob is now so optimistic that I'm starting to feel as though somebody has to be a little bit pessimistic.

I'm just – You've got to get – It can't go on. It's too good to last is sort of my feeling now. Well, I feel like it sets us up for a midterm, a one-issue midterm or very clear midterm fight, which I think is really good. We do well when that happens. We do very, very well when that happens. By the way –

It terrifies Democratic senators and that's a good thing. Yeah, the Democratic senators, I think maybe the test – it might be useful to think of it as the test of the two marks. Mark Begich, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, is senator in Alaska who defeated the then indicted Ted Stevens by only one point. And you recall that, in fact, the prosecution, the case against Stevens was so incompetent and also corrupt that it was thrown out. Begich would certainly have lost. He's standing for reelection. Keep in Alaska, Sarah Palin State, if that guy doesn't backpedal on Obamacare, he's doomed and he must know that.

And then Mark Pryor, Democrat senator in Arkansas, which hasn't been too kind to Democrats since Bill Clinton was governor, who's running against one of our guys, Cotton, and who's a very impressive member of the House. Those are the two Democratic senators I'd expect to break first, which means they may already have while we're recording this podcast. That's exactly right.

I mean getting the Senate back is a huge – would be a huge, huge, huge win. It would be a – it would be really a direction-changing win. It would change everything. It would be historic. Really? More so than the White House. More so than the White House. I think.

Well, you're right. And if that happens, you know that the president is going to scowl and think about his historical legacy. And what will really, really rankle him is looking forward to the days after he's out of power and thinking, you know, I'm not going to get one point five million per speech. I might get one point.3.67. This is just a disaster. What a disaster that will be. Hey, listen, folks, we did not spend $400, $600 million on the Ricochet 2.0, but the beta test is going to be starting up soon, and you're going to see exactly what a website, lean, efficient, clean,

and wonderful can do for you. And there's no truth whatsoever to the rumors that the government is attempting to put Google ads on healthcare.gov in order to fund healthcare for the poor. But if you do see those little double underlined blue keywords anywhere on healthcare.gov, don't click because they will take you to some other site that wants to sell you a mortgage. We wouldn't do that to you at Ricochet. We also want to tell you there's going to be a holiday meetup in December. So stay tuned for that and you'll find the details, of course, at Ricochet. We also want to tell you there's going to be a holiday meetup in December, so stay tuned for that, and you'll find

the details, of course, at Ricochet. We'll see you in the member feed, where we can discuss exactly how we're going to blow this and then promote the posts to the front, where people can then say, no, we're going to win this, and this is the beginning of the delegitimization of the welfare state. Well, we can only hope.

We do know that you'll never be able to delegitimize EncounterBooks.com because they are the sponsor of this podcast, and if only hope, uh, we do know that, uh, you'll never be able to delegitimize encounter books.com because they are the sponsor of this podcast. And if you go there and enter the coupon code, Ricochet, you get 15% off Peter, Rob. Great to talk to you guys again.

We'll see you down the road. We'll see everybody else in the comments at Ricochet.com. That was so much week. Next week. He thought he was the king of America When they bought Coca-Cola And slapped him to twine Now I try not to become hysterical

But I'm not sure if I'm laughing or crying I wish that I could push a button And talk in the past and not the present tense And watch this hurting fever Disappear like it was common sense It was a fine idea at the time Now it's a great mistake Ricochet!

Join the conversation. He lingered in the air like your eyes of fish and laughter and the mentors of the birds. Oh, I said, I see you know him. Isn't that very fortunate for you? She showed me his calling card. He came for the bond and there was more than one or two He was a bad dear at his time Now he's a great mistake He thought he was the king of America But it was just a boulevard of broken dreams

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