Henninger: OCare and the Liberal Brand

"As American voters watch ObamaCare continue its Godzilla-like rampage across the national health-care landscape," writes Daniel Henninger @ WSJ, "it's worth considering the collateral damage this political monster may be doing to the Democratic brand itself."

Not everyone deserves a gold badge from J.D. Power, but by and large it has become very difficult to sustain a shoddy product in the marketplace anymore.

Except the government. And the Democratic Party is nothing if not the party whose identity is bound up with government services and the public unions that deliver those services.

Good enough for government work was once just a joke. ...For decades, voters have passed off this mediocrity as the sometimes maddening bureaucratic price for living in a large, complex country. No longer.
With every new reboot of ObamaCare—glitches to the horizon, the constant revision of the law's rules, policies canceled and resurrected at higher cost—more of America's workaday Dilberts are seeing that the Democrats' performance benchmarks would get anyone else fired. Nowhere else could you get away with arguing a product like this is at least better than nothing.

And they won't even apologize! When the first ObamaCare problems erupted, its supporters said: It's the law, get over it. Even now, the smart alecks in the Obama administration responsible for ObamaCare, backed by a chorus of left-wing wonks in the media, make it sound as if you are too dense to comprehend the law's inevitable benefits.

The Democratic Party and especially the left have for years been demoting standards of performance for pretty much everything. Whether it's the work product of the public unions, the quality of Medicaid's medicine, admission criteria for colleges or even standards of personal behavior, measuring up has been devalued. It's no accident that one of the most used words of our time is, "Whatever."

Once public employees became unionized, the process was never accountable to anything. The inevitable weaknesses simply metastasized. Work rules and pension obligations proliferated under politicized collective-bargaining agreements until the system bogged down into an expensive morass that won't change and won't reform. But it changed the Democrats into a pure public-sector party.

Now even liberal Democrats have begun to distance themselves from this legacy....