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The biggest political error committed by Democrats over the last four years has been to run away from their signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act. As a result, they've allowed Republicans and conservatives to depict a measure that improves the lives and health of millions of Americans as harmful, even un-American.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) disagrees about the Democrats' mistake. He thinks their mistake was passing the healthcare law in the first place, or at least putting it at the top of the Obama administration's first-term agenda.

It's a startling admission of political spinelessness. Schumer gets the positive impact of the legislation wrong, he gets the politics of it wrong, and he displays a shocking ignorance of the problems facing the American middle class. The only good thing about his remarks is that they confirm how bad today's Democrats are at messaging. Let's put it this way: Franklin Roosevelt would never have tried to discredit his own policies the way Schumer just did.

Schumer made his observations in a speech Tuesday at the National Press Club in Washington. Here he is, at length:

"Unfortunately, Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them. We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem -- healthcare reform. Now the plight of uninsured Americans and the hardships caused by unfair insurance company practices certainly needed to be addressed, but it was not the change we were hired to make. Americans were crying out for the end to the recession, for better wages and more jobs, not changes in healthcare.

"This makes sense, considering 85% of all Americans got their healthcare from either the government, Medicare, Medicaid or their employer. And if healthcare costs were going up, it really did not affect them. The Affordable Care Act was aimed at the 36 million Americans who were not covered. It has been reported that only a third of the uninsured are even registered to vote.

...

"So when Democrats focused on healthcare, the average middle-class person thought the Democrats are not paying enough attention to me. Again, our healthcare system was riddled with unfairness and inefficiency. It was a problem desperately in need of fixing. The changes that were made are and will continue to be positive changes, but we would have been better able to address it if Democrats had first proposed and passed bold programs aimed at a broader swath of the middle class."

What shall we make of this? Let's start with fundamentals. Healthcare reform directly impacts the middle class, for the better. People who get their health coverage from an employer or the government aren't immune from financial problems caused by medical issues. As this crucial study found, medical issues were major contributors to more than 62% of all bankruptcies in 2007. That was a sharp rise from a 2001 survey that placed the figure at 46.2%. (Among the researchers contributing to the studies was future Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), then a professor at Harvard Law School.)

The majority of these debtors were "well educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations," the authors stated. About three-quarters had medical insurance at the time they filed for bankruptcy, but often had experienced a lapse in coverage within two years of filing; presumably the lapses occurred because they had lost a job or couldn't afford offered employer coverage.

The rest is here:
On Obamacare, could all Democrats really be as clueless as Sen. Schumer?