They're Desperate Now -- By James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal

Sometimes it's obvious when somebody states the obvious, and we've seen a lot of examples of late as America's left-liberals have struggled to come to grips with the disaster of ObamaCare. Example: "The mismanagement of the website HealthCare.gov and the cancellation of millions of policies pushes an underlying question out into the open: Is the federal government capable of managing the provision of a fundamental service through an extraordinarily complex system?" Arguably the answer is no less obvious than the question.

It is nonetheless remarkable for its source: Thomas Edsall, a "contributing op-ed writer" for the New York Times (we surmise that means he's not on the New York Times Co. health-insurance plan). Edsall goes on to admit that "recent developments . . . strengthen the most damaging conservative portrayals of . . . big government"--to wit, that "too much a part of our lives, too invasive, too big, too scary, too regulatory, too in your face" as well as "incompetent, bureaucratic and expropriatory."

Which, of course, means it is necessary to change the subject to something more comfortable: race. "The Affordable Care Act can be construed as a transfer of benefits from Medicare, which serves an overwhelmingly white population of the elderly--77 percent of recipients are white--to Obamacare, which will serve a population that is 54.7 percent minority," Edsall writes.

Hmmm, if the ObamaCare population is 54.7% minority, that would make it 45.3% majority. Math is hard.

Predictably, Edsall goes on to blame opposition to ObamaCare on "a critical mass of white voters" who have not "moved past [their] resistance to programs shifting tax dollars and other resources from the middle class to poorer minorities." If you don't want the government to redistribute your wealth to somebody else, you must be racist.

It's telling that in the course of disparaging whites, Edsall also disparages Medicare, which--along with Social Security--is normally sacrosanct to American liberals (as well as to many conservatives). As a political matter, the old-age entitlements are by far the most successful elements of the American welfare state. That's because beneficiaries imagine themselves as collecting on their past "investment," in the form of payroll taxes paid during their working years.

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