Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

by Matt Taibbi

In the age of insta-polling and focus groups it is hard to imagine that the Obama campaign did not know exactly what it was doing when it promised on the one hand to support drug reimportation, televise all negotiations on C-SPAN, and push for bulk pharmaceutical purchases for Medicare, and on the other swore it would never tax health care benefits, push for an individual mandate, or support any health care bill that did not have a public option in it. He would completely reverse himself on all those positions and more. Obama made a lot of these policy promises sound like they weren’t particularly tough decisions for him, either. My personal favorite was his take on the individual mandate, offered in February 2008 in an interview on CNN. Obama is laughing when he’s asked about mandates. “If a mandate was the solution,” he chuckles, “we could try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody buy a house.” Roughly a year later, Obama would be ramming a sweeping mandate to buy insurance down the throats of the entire U.S. population. Candidate Obama similarly laughed at the notion that reimporting cheap drugs from Canada was unsafe, but when he became president his administration ultimately rejected reimportation over safety issues. His campaign take on taxing “Cadillac” health plans (a major McCain campaign idea) was just as eloquent; candidate Obama was one of the few politicians to grasp that a lot of these so-called Cadillac plans were union benefits that had been neg...