James Kerian: Heidi Heitkamp Is One Of Jonathan Gruber's "Stupid Voters"

Jonathan Gruber, MIT health economist and “architect” of Obamacare, has been causing his fellow Democrats a lot of heartburn over the last week.  The problem, for Democrats, is that videos have emerged of Gruber in various public forums discussing what everyone involved in creating Obamacare knew when they were developing it and ramming it through congress.

He has talked about how passage of the bill required “a lack of transparency” that was only possible due to “the stupidity of the American voter.”  In a separate video he bragged about the “very clever” way that the law practiced “basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.”  In a third video he gloated about how the bill was able to pass because Americans are “too stupid to understand.”  In a fourth video Gruber states that Obama knew that Americans “don’t actually care that much about the uninsured” and that many of the uninsured don’t even want insurance (because they’re young and believe they’re invincible) so in order to get the bill to expand insurance coverage to pass they would have to present it as being about reducing costs.

The videos keep coming out but at the time of this writing there are six videos of Jonathan Gruber boasting of the deception of the American people that was necessary to pass Obamacare and ridiculing the stupidity of those voters who fell for it and supported the bill.  The most recent mentions that if Americans now want to repeal the taxes on their insurance plans that are set to take effect in 2018 they will suddenly be facing “a trillion dollar hole in the deficit.”

Because there are a handful of real journalists in this country some of them have taken the obvious next step of asking the other individuals involved in the creation of Obamacare to comment on what Gruber has revealed.  The results have been pretty comical in Pelosi’s case.

Kathleen Sebelius took the wiser, if still awkward, no comment approach.

One of the “stupid voters” taken in by the tricks Gruber talks about was North Dakota’s junior senator, Mary Kathryn “Heidi” Heitkamp.  Either that or she was one of those participating in the original deception but those are about the only options given her praise for Obamacare as “a budget saver.”  She peppered her 2012 campaign with vague criticisms of the law but in two years in the senate she has helped her party block any attempt to change Obamacare and voted to keep in place even its most extreme elements.

To this point, however, no one in the state media has asked Heitkamp for her thoughts on what Gruber has revealed.  This seems to be par for the course in our current media environment where Heitkamp is treated with kid gloves at all times and everything possible is done to help her maintain her fake folksy image.

Hopefully, at some point, we will hear from Heitkamp whether she was in on the attempt to exploit “the lack of economic understanding of the American voter” or if she, herself, was one of the “stupid voters” who was fooled.  But I wouldn’t recommend holding your breath waiting for anyone in the North Dakota media to ask her.