And now for a few words about how it is already obvious that Trump is a much less effective political leader than Obama was. 1/
In light of this tweet, let's discuss the abject failures of leadership that led to the failure of the AHCA
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/845974102619906048 … 2/
I don't think the AHCA was worth passing, but if Trump did, he did a terrible job of seeing that it happened. 3/
Let's recall the work that went into the passage of Obamacare. It was a process that took nine months of intra-party wrangling. 4/
Obama was in regular contact with his own party's congressional leadership and engaged in a full-court PR press to sell the bill. 5/
A process which began long before the bill was even conceived. 6/
An important element of this was that Obama did not act like a jackass every single day on Twitter and immediately tank his approval 7/
Thus, his campaigning, particularly with members of his own party, actually worked. His own party cared about crossing him. 8/
Now let's contrast this with Trump's, uh, "efforts," if you wish to call them that, to ensure passage of the AHCA. 9/
First, he doomed the whole effort by setting up wildly unrealistic expectations - we will repeal "immediately," it will be "very easy" 10/
Then, he refused to participate even a little bit in the drafting of the bill, even to provide input on thematic elements. 11/
Once the bill was drafted, he failed to educate himself at all on what was even contained in the bill. 12/
The entire time, he undercut House leadership's messaging on the bill and sent dramatically inconsistent messages in the press. 13/
During the fight over the bill he did almost no work to convince the public of the need for its passage. No major speeches, no townhalls 14/
He did, however, play a lot of golf, so he had that in common with Obama. 15/
During the debate over Obamacare, Obama personally cajoled, threatened, and bribed (Nelson-NE) his own caucus to keep them on board. 16/
Obama stuck with the bill even after a necessary vote in the Senate (Kennedy) DIED, making a conference committee impossible. 17/
Trump walked away after the bill had been debated for about two weeks and he personally had been involved for about 3 days. 18/
In short, the amount of effort he put forth was pathetic and his tactics were ill-suited to work with elected officials 19/
Most importantly, he has no political capital to make people afraid of him because his OTHER unforced errors made him unpopular 20/
Unforced errors, by the way, that have had nothing to do with advancing his agenda but rather with protecting his infantile ego 21/
Again, the AHCA's failure is a good thing. But if you disagree with that, nearly 100% of the failure lies with Trump. 22/
The idiotic rants of Jeanine Pirro and Sean Hannity aside, Congressmen are not serfs. Trump isn't Kim Jong Un. Leaders understand this. 23/
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Arch-conservative Leon W.
