Author: Juan Williams

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Trumped

Donald Trump is blunt about his primary qualification to be president: “I’m really rich!”

Yes, he is — and so are most of the other people running for the White House. All but four of the 22 prominent candidates across both parties are millionaires. The only non-millionaires are Senator Bernie Sanders, former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, Senator Marco Rubio, and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

And people with even more money than the candidates are bankrolling their campaigns. The New York Times reported that “fewer than 400 families are responsible for almost half the money raised in the 2016 presidential campaign, a concentration of political donors that is unprecedented in the modern era.”

The Times found an especially astounding concentration of wealth among contributors to GOP campaigns. “Just 130 or so families and their businesses provided more than half the money raised through June by Republican candidates and their super PACs,” the paper reported. 

The Washington Post followed up with an editorial warning of an emerging “American oligarchy.” The Post wrote that big donations from the super-rich have “the potential to warp the political system.” In this sea of money, Trump still stands out. He is so rich that he doesn’t need to raise money to run his campaign. He recently took to Twitter to slam Republican candidates for going to a conference held by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. He said the politicians who went to the event were guilty of begging for money.

Trump’s derision drew lots of snickers, but his surprisingly successful campaign — built in part upon boasts about the power of big money — has traction with voters. Pew Research reported last December that the nation’s rich now have a “median net worth that is nearly 70 times that of the country’s lower-income families, [and there is now] also the widest wealth gap between these families in 30 years.” The top 1 percent now controls more than 80 percent of the nation’s wealth. 

Sanders gets a rousing response when he states that the gap between the very rich and everyone else in America is wider today than at any time since the 1920s. Senator Elizabeth Warren has become a folk hero on the left by calling for more help for middle- and working-class families while pushing a crackdown on the rich — specifically, on Wall Street’s risky but high-profit business ventures, which rely on government bailouts when they go sour. 

But somehow the richest of the rich candidates leads the GOP race. Trump says his wealth is evidence of his ability to make deals and thus become “the greatest jobs president that God ever created.” Trump offers no specifics about how he will produce those jobs.

Conversations with voters — right or left — deliver one consistent theme: Economic anxiety is high. But there is no consensus on how to level the playing field. Polls show most conservatives do not want government action — other than lowering taxes. Among Democrats, more than 90 percent tell Pew that they want government intervention, such as raising the minimum wage, but only 40 percent of Republicans agree. Hillary Clinton has endorsed a proposal to raise the minimum wage in New York. So has Sanders, who calls the current $7.25 federal minimum wage a “starvation wage.” Trump and most of the GOP contenders oppose raising the minimum wage. They favor tax cuts, which they say would ignite growth.

Last year, President Obama proposed raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. The Republican Congress blocked his effort. According to 2012 exit polls, voters with annual family incomes under $51,000 made up 41 percent of the electorate. They voted for President Obama by 22 percentage points over Republican Mitt Romney. 

Today, most Americans polled say the economy is better than it was when President Obama came to office. Unemployment is down, and Wall Street profits are up to record levels. But wages are stagnant and median household income has not gone up for 20 years.

Meanwhile, loopholes and deductions taxes on the wealthy remain near historic lows, in part because of the extension of Bush-era tax cuts. And now the wealthy, under the new, more permissive campaign finance rules approved by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case, are exerting more financial influence to mute any response to the populist impulse.

If politics is a mirror to the nation’s soul, then Trump and his boastful billions are a true reflection of America.

Juan Williams is a Fox News political analyst.

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Fixing the Lines

This week marks the 271st birthday of the politician who first approved of “gerrymandering.” As governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry (also the nation’s fifth vice president) agreed to the idea of drawing congressional districts in odd shapes to ensure that the political party in power won the majority of the state’s seats in the House. His enduring legacy is the partisan split in Congress that dismisses compromise and disdains bipartisan solutions to the nation’s biggest problems.

But last month, the Supreme Court took a first step toward burying the corruption of gerrymandering. In a 5-4 decision, the justices approved of voters deciding by referendum to create independent, nonpartisan commissions to draw a state’s congressional map. Last week, the Florida Supreme Court followed up by ruling that parts of a current redistricting plan violate the state constitution by being crassly political.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s majority opinion said voters have the right to go around politically skewed state legislatures and “address the problem of partisan gerrymandering — the drawing of legislative district lines to subordinate adherents of one political party and entrench a rival party in power.”

“Entrench” is the right word. One popular joke around Washington is that redistricting by state legislatures allows members of Congress to pick their voters instead of voters picking their members of Congress.

When it comes to 2016 House races, more than 400 of the 435 seats in the House are rated as “safe” for incumbent Republicans and Democrats because of gerrymandering. That leaves only about seven percent of the seats in Congress open to a meaningful contest.

Gerrymandering has distorted congressional politics by eliminating the need for either party to appeal to the political middle. Instead, the members of Congress live in fear of a challenge from the far right (in the case of Republicans) or the far left (in the case of Democrats).

Gerrymandering is the mother of the “Tea Party Caucus” that undermines the Speaker, John Boehner (R-Ohio), by denigrating him as insufficiently conservative when he tries to make budget deals with Democrats.

Gerrymandering is the reason President Obama tells supporters the best thing they can do to help him is to move to a red state and help break the GOP hold on Congress.

In the 2014 cycle, an off-year election, Republicans had the edge in voter enthusiasm as well as control of more state legislatures. As a result of the power of gerrymandering, the GOP won 57 percent of all House seats even though they had just 52 percent of the votes.

Even in election years when majority control of the House changes from one party to the other, the reelection rate tied to gerrymandered districts is staggeringly high. In 2006, when Democrats won the House, 94 percent of incumbents were reelected. In 2010, when Republicans rode a Tea Party wave back to the majority, 85 percent of representatives retained their seat. This is the politics of back-room congressional mapping.

This era of unprecedented polarization and dysfunction borne of gerrymandering has current congressional approval ratings down to 15.8 percent, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. Obviously, Republicans as well as Democrats disapprove of what is going on in this broken Congress.

Senator John McCain has often said that the only people approving of Congress these days are “paid staffers and blood relatives.”

The adoption of independent state commissions to draw congressional maps is by far the most important step available to voters longing for a Congress that works. Seven states already have nonpartisan commissions in place: Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, New Jersey, and Washington state. With the Supreme Court’s recent ruling, the door is open to more. It is not as sexy as the court’s recent rulings on gay marriage and Obamacare, but this high court ruling also has historic potential. It opens the door for voters in more states to get referendums on the ballot calling for nonpartisan panels to set the lines for congressional districts — and so revive a functional Congress.

Juan Williams is an author and political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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The Voter Fraud Myth

President Obama twice won the White House by bringing young people and minorities, his biggest supporters, into the political process and into the voting booth. Republicans are now pushing back to increase their electoral chances in 2016. And they are winning. 

Even most black Americans — people who, overwhelmingly, don’t vote Republican — currently favor new requirements for voters to have photo identification. Three-quarters of all voters — people of all races and political parties — favor such laws, according to polls. The black support for photo identification of voters can only be described as amazing. 

The current state of public opinion is doubly incredible because there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud anywhere in the nation. 

Jill Lawrence recently wrote in U.S. News & World Report that “a recent study of more than 1 billion ballots cast from 2000 to 2014 found 31 credible instances of voter impersonation — 31 out of over 1 billion.” 

The Washington Post‘s Wonkblog last year similarly concluded: “There is overwhelming scholarly and legal consensus that voter fraud is vanishingly rare and in fact nonexistent at the levels imagined by voter-ID proponents.”

Nevertheless, public opinion on this issue is with Republican governors and state legislatures and has given them a license to rope off the playing field for the upcoming elections. Their goal is to enhance the value of the declining pool of older, suburban, white, and more affluent Republican voters — people with a long history of regular voting — while depressing the odds that young people, recent immigrants, minorities, and the poor will get into a voting booth. 

Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are struggling to remind voters of the ugly ghosts of political disenfranchisement. “What is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our country to the other,” Clinton said recently.

Studies show that blacks, Hispanics, the young, and the elderly are the people least likely to have photo identification and most likely to be turned away at the polls. So how can it be that 71 percent of African Americans in a new Rasmussen poll say they favor the use of photo identification for voters? 

Three years ago, a Washington Post poll produced a very similar result: 65 percent of black voters said they agreed that all voters should be “required to show official, government-issued photo identification.”

In the Post poll, 63 percent of black voters said “voter suppression” during a presidential race is a “major problem.” In fact, 41 percent of all adults said they are concerned with qualified voters being denied their right. 

From a recent report from the Brennan Center for Justice: “Since the 2010 election, 21 states have new laws making it harder to vote — ranging from photo-ID requirements to early voting cutbacks to registration restrictions — and 14 states will have them in place for the first time in a presidential election in 2016.”

Clinton cited efforts to limit voter turnout in five major states: Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Texas, and New Jersey and called out several top Republicans for engaging in “fearmongering about a phantom epidemic of election fraud.”

Clinton named Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker for limiting early voting; New Jersey Governor Chris Christie for vetoing a law to extend early voting; and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush for allowing a preelection purge of voting rolls.

Clinton asked: “What part of democracy are they afraid of?” 

Fact-checking website PolitiFact reviewed Clinton’s allegations against the Republican governors and concluded her charges were “largely accurate.”

But even with the facts against them, the Republicans shot back at Clinton. 

“My sense is that she just wants an opportunity to commit greater acts of voter fraud around the country,” Christie said. Walker said, “Once again, Hillary Clinton’s extreme views are far outside the mainstream.”

Fifty years ago this summer, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. The Republican majority on the Supreme Court struck down the heart of the law in 2013. The GOP majority in Congress has done nothing to restore it. 

“It is wrong, deadly wrong, to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country,” the president said in 1965. In this bitterly political era, where facts don’t matter, Johnson might lose that argument.

Juan Williams is a Fox News political analyst and a former senior national correspondent for National Public Radio.

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Fight or Lose

Congressional Democrats, wounded by the November midterms, are failing to capture the political energy of the youth movement that has sprung up in the wake of recent incidents in Ferguson, Missouri, Cleveland, Ohio, and New York City. President Obama has met with young activists in the White House. He has gone on television to endorse peaceful protests and has spoken of his personal discontent with the “deep unfairness” in how the grand jury process can be manipulated by prosecutors to favor police. But the president, even the first black president, can only do so much.

It is up to Congress to address the cancerous distrust that young people and minorities harbor for the criminal justice system. Only Congress can bring the nation’s attention to high alert with public hearings and legislation to repair a broken judicial structure.

The Congressional Black Caucus has called for hearings on the shooting death of Michael Brown. But it will be up to the House Republican majority to call the hearings and set the agenda.

Speaker John Boehner and Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers have said they are “absolutely” open to hearings on the death of Eric Garner, a New York man choked by police as he was arrested for selling cigarettes. Boehner told reporters the deaths of Brown and Garner are “serious tragedies.”

But Boehner’s base voters — older, white Southern conservatives in particular — are reflexively quick to defend all police and are therefore likely to resist him if he allows hearings to take place. Unyielding pressure from House Democrats will be needed to force the Speaker’s hand.

The same dynamic is also now coming into play around Obamacare.

The incoming Republican majority on Capitol Hill is looking for ways to dismantle the law. It is clear who will get hurt if that happens. Before the Affordable Care Act took effect, 28 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 lacked health insurance, as did 10 percent of children under 18. Those young Americans are looking to the Democrats to replicate the fury of the Tea Party caucus on the far right and become loud, unabashed advocates for the success of national health care.

President Obama can talk about the success of Obamacare, specifically the 25 percent drop in the total number of Americans without insurance. He can veto efforts to defund and repeal the health-care act. But it will be up to Democrats on Capitol Hill to wage the day-to-day fight and open eyes to the benefits of a program that is lagging in polls because of unyielding attacks from the GOP.

Don’t expect to see Senate Democrats make the fight. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is already blaming Obamacare for the party’s declining fortunes in Congressional races. The liberal heart of the party is going to have to find its blood, its passion in the House.

On both fronts — the police killings and health care — the central political audience is young America, the voting base that will determine Democrats’ fortunes in 2016 and beyond. Almost a quarter of the U.S. population is under the age of 18. Another 36 percent of Americans are between the ages of 18 and 44. And these groups are filled with minorities, immigrants, and children of immigrants, as well as a disproportionate share of college graduates and single women of all races.

Congressional Democrats gave those voters little reason to go to the polls in 2014. No one on Capitol Hill was standing up for their agenda. As a result, exit polls from this year’s midterms gave Democrats only an 11-percentage-point edge over Republicans among 18 to 29 year olds and a mere 3-point edge among 30 to 44 year olds.

Basically, the Democrats’ lead over Republicans among young voters was cut in half in 2014. And among 18 and 19 year olds, turnout dropped from 19 percent in 2012 to 13 percent in the midterms, a loss of about 14 million voters.

The exit polls also showed a five-percentage-point jump in young voters who self-identify as Republicans — 31 percent this year as compared to 26 percent in 2012. The big question for the coming Congress is whether the House Democrats will get off the floor and fight for the interests of young voters.

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Midterm Election Lessons

A trouncing! A tsunami! A shellacking! 

That’s the conventional wisdom about last month’s midterm elections. But it’s wrong.

Yes, the GOP picked up 12 seats in the House and gained at least seven seats in the Senate, but calling that a shellacking requires closing your eyes to some really big numbers.

First, the average pickup for the opposition party in midterm elections that take place in the sixth year of a presidency is 29 seats in the House and six seats in the Senate. Second, 60 percent of voters told exit polls they were either “dissatisfied” with Republican leaders in Congress (37 percent) or “angry” with them (23 percent). Yet the lesson drawn by Republicans on Capitol Hill is that the midterm vote was a repudiation of President Obama.

Admittedly, the president’s approval rating is on the low side, at 44 percent among last week’s voters. But nearly half of the voters, 46 percent, said President Obama was “not a factor” in their vote. 

The real message from the elections is that the public is turned off by the current state of our politics. Two-thirds of eligible voters did not go to the polls. Among those who did, exit surveys show a populist, angry vote against status quo politics. That vote is spearheaded by older, white men in red, mostly southern states won by Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race.

Even some conservative commentators have warned Republicans that the GOP did not win the election so much as Democrats lost it; and that this was more an anti-status quo election than a pro-Republican one.

How can a Washington political class that is so distrusted by the American people get back on track? 

At a White House press conference after the election, the president said the looming challenge is now “actually getting some good done.” But he did not display any new ideas for dealing with the GOP. 

Critics in the media like to say Obama needs to do more outreach to Republicans. The Republican leadership, however, has its hands tied by the far-right of the GOP and the talk-radio crowd. Making any deal with a president demonized by the GOP base is politically perilous for them.

The Republicans have had no agenda for the past six years except hating Obama. Even now they do not have a program for government. Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are saying they will formulate their policy plans over the next few weeks through op-ed articles and meetings with the president and fellow Republicans. 

“The American people have spoken,” McConnell said in a news conference after the election. “They’ve given us divided government. The question for both the president, and for the speaker and myself and our members is: ‘What are you going to do with it?”’ 

There are some grounds for hope: First, Congress passes more bills when both Houses are under the control of one party and the opposing party has control of the White House.

Second, more Republicans and Democrats tell pollsters they want compromise so that bills get passed.

But there is also this compelling reality: “Republicans were not elected to govern [the country],” said Rush Limbaugh, the king of conservative talk radio. “The Republican Party was not elected to compromise. The Republican Party was not elected to sit down and work together with Democrats. The Republican Party was not elected to slow down the speed [at] which the country is headed for the cliff and go over it slowly.”

You might not guess from Limbaugh’s bellicose tone that the GOP in the Senate still lacks the 60 votes to halt a filibuster and is miles from the 67 votes needed to override a presidential veto. Yet, despite that, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a likely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, is himself talking like a conservative radio host, demanding that the new GOP committee chairmen begin hearings on “the abuse of power, the executive abuse, the regulatory abuse, the lawlessness that sadly has pervaded this [Obama] administration.”

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. But my weather forecast for Capitol Hill predicts more partisanship and a steady blizzard of 2016 politics starting now.

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Inequality Issue Can Boost Dems

A year ago, top political strategists pointed to a big stick Democratic candidates could use to beat back a possible Republican landslide in the 2014 midterm elections.

The issue: rising income inequality.

Now the strategy is coming to life with help from Republicans in Congress.

With the GOP majority in the House blocking an extension of long-term unemployment insurance, a group of House Democrats, led by Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), circulated a letter recently asking for a meeting to discuss the topic not with Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) but with the incoming House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

Press reports described this as an “end-run” around Boehner who, along with the outgoing Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), had refused to take up the issue for a vote in the House.

The Democrats, smelling a ripe campaign issue, are quick to point out that if Congress does not act before the end of the year, more than 5 million Americans will lose their unemployment benefits and be left out in the cold.

Democrats also have ammunition on income inequality from the Republican refusal to renew the Highway Trust Fund.

President Obama has said that without congressional action to renew the trust fund, which is used for infrastructure spending, many states will have to stop working on projects. He estimated that 700,000 people could lose their jobs.

“That would be like Congress threatening to lay off the entire population of Denver, or Seattle, or Boston,” the president said in an artfully positioned speech on the Washington, D.C. waterfront with a bridge under repair behind him. “Middle-class families can’t wait for Republicans in Congress to do stuff,” the president added.

He proposed restoring infrastructure projects by closing loopholes in the corporate tax system. “It’s not crazy,” Obama said. “It’s not socialism. It’s not ‘the imperial presidency.’ No laws are broken. We’re just building roads and bridges.”

Meanwhile an unlikely ally — the business community — is bolstering the Democrats’ complaints about the lack of GOP support for growing the economy. The president of the National Association of Manufacturers, Jay Timmons, has charged Republicans with ignoring the concerns of the people who create jobs.

The business leaders’ priorities include reviving the highway trust fund, acting on immigration reform, and giving legislative approval for the Export-Import Bank.

Timmons, citing Cantor’s defeat in a recent primary, criticized Tea Party Republicans for siding with Democrats on the far left and “demonizing American businesses and trying to throw out those who are willing to govern.”

Gerald Seib, a Wall Street Journal columnist, described Timmons’ speech as “an especially telling sign of the times” because he “questioned the business community’s traditional leaning on Republicans to advance [the business] agenda in Washington.”

The power of income inequality as a political issue is evident in polls. The economy is still the number one concern of voters, left, center and right, in every opinion poll. Gallup polling from earlier this year found that 67 percent of Americans say they are concerned about income inequality.

The House Republicans’ aversion to anything resembling “stimulus spending” puts them in a dangerous political box. They fear offending Tea Party Republicans who refuse to acknowledge that the last stimulus helped lighten a depressed economic picture. But their indifference puts them at risk of alienating voters calling for Congress to expedite the nation’s recovery.

Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.), the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, recently announced plans to force Boehner to act on extending unemployment benefits before the year’s end.

Levin’s tactics come in addition to Cicilline’s plan to get Boehner’s attention and focus midterm voters’ attention on Republicans’ refusal to help the unemployed.

Cicilline has joined with Reps. Frank LoBiondo (R-N.J.) and Dan Kildee (D-Mich.) to introduce a bipartisan bill extending coverage for the long-term unemployed. Some Republican congressmen have joined the effort.

Their legislation is an identical House companion to the bipartisan bill sponsored in the upper chamber by Sens. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.).

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is giving a taste of the power income inequality could have as an election-year issue. “Republicans,” she said in a Senate speech earlier this year, “line up to protect billions in tax breaks and subsidies for big corporations with armies of lobbyists, but they can’t find a way to help struggling families trying to get back on their feet.”

Look for Democrats to put jobs, income inequality, and lapsed unemployment benefits front and center in their campaigns this year. Those issues could keep them from losing their own jobs.

Juan Williams is a Fox News political analyst and author of the bestseller Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965.

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Living in the Educational Past

This May, 60 years after the Supreme Court ruled racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, with its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, a group called the Journey for Justice Alliance sent civil rights complaints to the Justice and Education departments. The group argued that too many failing public schools in black neighborhoods are being closed and replaced with charter schools.

You read that right.

The debate over racial inequality in education has been reduced to complaints that black children are victims of discrimination because they can’t walk to bad schools in their neighborhoods.

“Children are being uprooted, shuffled into schools that are no better than the ones they came from,” Judith Browne Dianis, a leader of one of the Justice Alliance’s organizations told The Washington Post.

The complaints meld perfectly with the views of teachers’ unions. The teachers oppose closing neighborhood schools that operate under union contracts and oppose opening charter schools, which are typically non-unionized.

This attack on charter schools comes a week after the House, in a rare bipartisan vote, approved a bill to put more federal dollars into expanding charter schools. The House Education and the Workforce Committee bill was written by its Republican chairman, John Kline of Minnesota, and supported by its ranking Democrat, George Miller of California.

Kline told reporters that Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, supports the bill and will urge Senate Democrats to pass it. In a Congress that’s politically paralyzed over efforts to update the Bush administration’s plan for improving public school performance — No Child Left Behind — the charter school bill is the first sign of a breakthrough.

In the last decade, cities from New Orleans to Chicago and Newark have closed record numbers of neighborhood schools and invested money in charter schools. The charters can be located anywhere and draw students from across the city.

The flight to charter schools conforms with the Brown ruling’s central premise: that students should be able to attend the best public schools without regard to income or race.

Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who won the Brown case and later became a Supreme Court justice, told me as I was writing his biography that the case was not really about having black and white children sitting next to each other. Its true purpose was to make sure that predominantly white and segregationist school officials would put maximum resources into giving every child, black or white, a chance to get a good education.

In filing complaints, liberal activists are putting more value on having a bad neighborhood school than getting a child into an excellent school. The charge that some charter schools are no better than the neighborhood schools being closed ignores the truth that some charter schools have produced better results. Also, parents have the choice to pull their kids out of charter schools that don’t help their kids.

It is also proven that getting black and Latino students out of low-income neighborhoods is good. This year, a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that minority children from schools with a racial mix were more likely than students remaining in racially isolated neighborhood schools to graduate, go to college, and get a degree.

Earlier this year, a study by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA found neighborhood schools enforcing a “double segregation,” in which minority students remain isolated by race and income. That double burden left schools in poor neighborhoods with the disadvantage of educating students with high levels of poverty, more health problems, more street violence, and fewer positive role models.

In 2012 the same group reported “teachers of all races viewed schools with high percentages of students of color and low-income students as less likely to have family and community support,” which are critical to the success of any school.

Duncan recently described the nation’s school dropouts as disproportionately black, Latino, Native American, and poor.

Duncan also noted that in the fall of this year, the majority of American public school students will be non-white. And yet there are now minority parents and civil right groups being used as props by teachers’ unions to oppose school choice by calling efforts to close failing neighborhood schools the “new Jim Crow.”

Ending racial and economic isolation of students is a sign of progress that is in the best tradition of a nation still struggling to offer every child a quality education.

Juan Williams is a Fox News political analyst. Previously, he was the senior national correspondent for National Public Radio.

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Perception Trumps Reality

In the run-up to the recent deadline for enrolling in Obamacare, I called one of the few people with a hand in designing both the Affordable Care Act and the Massachusetts health-care reform plan signed into law in 2006 by then-Governor Mitt Romney.

Obviously, Jonathan Gruber, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is personally invested in the success of health-care reform. So I expected him to give me an optimistic assessment of the future of the federal law.

Juan Williams

He did not.

Instead, his voice sounded low-key and uncertain. He said it is “too early to tell” the fate of Obamacare.

His cautious judgment is that a final verdict on its success or failure might be three years away. To hear such fretting from an architect of the health-care plan opened the door to the fact that even its biggest supporters see trouble ahead.

Gruber agrees with Republican critics who complain that the administration lacks information about how many of the more than 8 million people now signed up previously lacked health insurance; how many are healthy and young; how many have paid for their coverage; and how much premiums will go up next year.

So, is Gruber resigned to the plan ending up in history’s dumpster?

“No,” he said, before emphasizing that the basic plan is working fine, despite the initial website problems. The danger to Obamacare, he says, has nothing to do with the final sign-up numbers. The plan has enrolled enough people, including enough young people, to be sustainable, he said.

The problem is that the law is still vulnerable to being crushed by the negative political narrative being created in Washington.

“The risk is that people who oppose the law will find enough troubling anecdotes in aggregate, that they scare the public and a majority of Congress and the White House into making bad political decisions that are detrimental to the law,” he said.

In terms of the actual policy, Gruber said, there is not anything to worry about. But a threat to reform exists, he added.

The potential fatal threat he sees comes from the 50-plus votes taken by the House of Representatives to repeal the law, and the endless barrage of negative advertising by Republicans and their big-money backers.

“Those [House] votes, those advertisements are psychological attacks,” he said. “They create an air of uncertainty. If people think it is not working, then they are less likely to support the law.”

Without the political attacks, Gruber said, the Affordable Care Act will work.

“No doubt in my mind that if people left it alone for three years and let it run, it would be highly successful,” he contends, “but that is not the world we live in.”

Gruber recalls Romney and a representative of the conservative Heritage Foundation standing onstage with a Democrat, then-Senator Ted Kennedy, to sign the state law that is the model for the national version. The state law is popular and successful.

The reason congressional Republicans have no alternative to the federal Affordable Care Act, Gruber said, is that the individual mandate and exchanges at the heart of the current reform are originally “conservative, Republican ideas.”

The GOP devised the Massachusetts plan, Gruber said, out of opposition to Hillary Clinton’s proposal, during her time as first lady, of an employer-mandate to offer health insurance. The GOP also opposed a labor unions’ proposal for a single payer system, much like Medicare, that pushed private insurance companies out of the equation.

As evidence of the current policy’s success, Gruber points to millions of people now being able to buy health insurance; people not risking bankruptcy because of an accident or illness; and millions more people signing up for Medicaid.

He notes the popularity of letting young people stay on their parents’ insurance plan until they are 26 and not allowing insurance companies to turn away people with pre-existing conditions. The economist also stresses that the United States has been slowing its annual increase in health-care spending since the plan was signed into law.

“The key question at the moment is whether people who support the law can make enough stories out of the winners to create a positive [psychological] effect and give it time to succeed.” Juan Williams is a Fox News political analyst and former senior national correspondent for National Public Radio.