Stay Calm & Enroll On: Obama’s Reassuring Health Care Talk Post-Election 2016

• In Event: Presidential Rhetoric and Public Opinion

Abstract

Given the substantial emphasis Donald Trump gave to “repeal and replace Obamacare” messaging during the 2016 presidential campaign, and following his unexpected victory in that election, we might have expected Barack Obama’s administration in its last months to pull out all the stops in a major confrontational public battle to defend and preserve the Affordable Care Act, its signature legislative achievement. Instead, a close look at President Obama’s communications during this period demonstrates that though he had previously depicted Trump as dangerous and a threat to all his administration had accomplished in the previous eight years, post-Election Day Obama adopted a reassuring tone and speculated the President-elect, once in office, might not dismantle the law. Further, the president and his team sought to divorce the ACA from Obama’s personal political legacy, no small task given the policy’s widely used “Obamacare” moniker. Using archival research, interviews, media coverage analysis, and a detailed evaluation of the Obama team’s public statements and actions in its closing days, this paper identifies a comprehensive strategy in presidential communications in this period, to champion the ACA but not assail Trump’s judgment on health policy, and to deescalate the intensely partisan conflict around the law. I argue this effort began to change the national conversation around the ACA, making the news media and public less likely to focus on the law as the site of personalized wrangling between the current and future president, and more likely to focus on the impact the policy had made on Americans’ lives, including the potential negative ramifications of its demise. That shift was a major contributing factor to the more favorable political environment for the ACA in the time that followed, with Republican majorities unable to eliminate the program in 2017 and a Republican Party that has now largely abandoned repeal promises as a central campaign theme. Though Obama might have lamented he was not effective enough at communicating the value of the ACA to the American people in its early years, the departing administration’s strategies helped foster conditions leading to the law gaining a majority of support in polls for the first time shortly thereafter, obtaining record high enrollment numbers, and creating an atmosphere for successful state ballot initiatives to expand Medicaid, as well as the passage of federal reforms to increase subsidies and strengthen the insurance exchanges. This case helps shed light on the unusual and unexpected approaches that can constitute effective presidential leadership on domestic policy in a hyper-partisan era, and how even presidential programs that are initially unpopular and inspire vehement opposition can potentially enjoy a more favorable landscape over time.

Author

• Jennifer Hopper, Southern Connecticut State University