Parker: Midterm elections’ real message: Restore voters’ trust

These obfuscations include telling the American people that they could keep the insurance they had if they liked it and also writing the law in such a way that the ACA’s mandate to purchase government-approved insurance was not a “tax,” despite the Internal Revenue Service’s role in policing its compliance. The keep-your-insurance ruse is history now, but the memory still lingers in the minds of voters.

Voters: ‘Just stop it’

Punditry aside, there’s no mystery to the midterm shellacking. It was a loud, clear shout-out to Congress to Just Stop It. Not only stop Obamacare, which more likely will end up being tweaked, but to stop executive overreach and disinformation to sway votes while betraying voters.

Those who feel defrauded by their own government got third-party confirmation recently when remarks by one of the ACA’s chief architects, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber — invoking the stupidity of voters and lauding the political advantage of a lack of transparency in government — went viral. It is a beautiful thing when Truth trots out the door before Oops can catch him.

“And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing (Obamacare) to pass.” The irony is that the very thing the White House was trying to conceal (because the truth was just too complicated for regular folks), the Supreme Court confirmed. Enforcement of the mandate constituted a tax, not a penalty. Thus spake Chief Justice John Roberts.

This ruling, indeed, was the reason the ACA was able to go forward, which is why so many Republicans were apoplectic with Roberts’ siding with the liberals in a 5-4 ruling. In other words, Obama’s obfuscation was simultaneously revealed and rewarded by the court. And the American people were smacked with a health-system overhaul many more would have rejected had they known the truth.

Or would they? It’s hard to know what might have happened if truth had won the day. But we do know that truth squandered is trust lost.

We also know that once trust is gone, it’s very hard to restore. Over time, and not just during this administration, we have lost trust in one institution after another. But when we have lost faith in our government, we have lost faith in ourselves.

At their core, the midterms were really about restoring that trust. This, it seems, is the mandate that precedes all others and will require the good faith efforts of both Democrats and Republicans.