EDITORIAL: Prez MIA on health bill

July 29--It's easy to blame the feckless Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate for the failure to fix Obamacare. After years of pledging to repeal the law (or repeal and replace it) the best they could come up with Thursday night was a bill that not one person in the Senate chamber -- nor anyone outside it -- wanted to see enacted. Sen. John McCain was the wavering senator who ultimately put "skinny repeal" out of its misery. (Republicans Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski were more predictable "no" votes.)

But let's face it -- while Republicans have promised for years to undo Obamacare it was the election of President Trump last November that offered the real hope for fixing the current, flawed system. The Republican president and famed CEO would come in as the "closer" -- finally locking a deal down. He embraced the role. He would fix Obamacare immediately, he promised, to the cheers of his campaign crowds.

Fulfilling that promise would require work, of course. It would require cajoling of wary senators, and the occasional Beltway-style threat. But when push came to shove, Trump was content mostly to sit on the sidelines shouting criticism at the players on the field.

A president with a vision for a better system and the will to see it enacted -- a president other than Trump -- would have invested the necessary time and attention to negotiate a bill that enough Republicans could agree on. In the end that might have proved impossible, but we'll never know, because he didn't do it.

"As I said from the beginning," the president said in a tweet after the vote early Friday morning, "let ObamaCare implode, then deal. Watch!"

In fact what he said from the beginning was that, as long as Trump was in the Oval Office, repealing and replacing Obama- care would be "so easy."

Another false narrative from a White House that specializes in them.

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