THE OBAMA RECORD, AND HOW IT CAN BE REVERSED – AT 12:09 P.M. ET:  Michael Barone is one of our leading political analysts.  He examines the Obama style of "governing," – government by faculty lounge – and how it led to a record that can be cast aside by the new administration.  From RealClearPolitics: 

Obamacare was based on the shaky premise that mandating often expensive and limited health insurance would be seen as guaranteeing good health care. As a result, as historian Walter Russell Mead recently wrote for The American Interest, "it did not generate enough public support to protect itself from its opponents."

Regulations imposed on coal and other fossil fuel production -- instituted after Democrats, even with strong congressional majorities, were unsuccessful in passing cap-and-trade legislation -- failed to impress a population that did not share liberal elites' faith that climate change is certain to produce catastrophe.

And regulations legalizing the presence of millions of undocumented immigrants have failed to pass muster in federal courts, thanks to legal maneuverings as sloppy as the legislative legerdemain that shoved through Obamacare.

Public policies prove to be enduring when they address what people regard as genuine needs and thus create constituencies that politicians dare not defy. Social Security retirement benefits are a prime example. You can jigger the taxes and benefits, as a bipartisan majority did in 1983, but voters who believe they paid for their benefits will insist they not be taken away.

Policies that induce long-term reliance also tend to endure, a prime example being the home mortgage interest deduction. There's a good argument that this policy, like the Social Security benefit formula, unduly benefits the affluent. But that argument doesn't move most voters.

In my view, Obama owed his election and re-election to the feeling -- widely shared by Americans, including many who didn't vote for him -- that it would be a good thing for Americans to elect a black president.

What they didn't expect, but got, was a president who governed according to the playbook of campus liberals, imposing -- or attempting to impose -- policies that he believed would be good for people, whether they knew it or not.

This was governance that was both inattentive to detail and law and out of touch with how policies affect people's lives. That is why so many of these policies seem headed for the ash heap of history.

COMMENT:  Government by theory.  This is another proof of how the Democrats lost touch with their constituency. 

But Republicans must demonstrate skill in overturning Obama's programs, recalling the admonition within the medical profession, "First, do no harm."  Obamacare can't just be chopped down like a tree.  It must be replaced by something better.  Ditto Obama's trendy energy policy, based heavily on the "science" of climate change, which sometimes seems more like political science.

January 6, 2017