Dear Mr. President,
Thank you, thank you -- sort of.
You have been able to do something my father was never able to do -- bring my sister Patti and me together politically.
You remember my rebellious sister Patti Davis? The liberal activist?
Maybe you saw her in Playboy in 1994. Or read one of many good books, or seen her latest, “The Blue Hour,” which is a ghost story.
But really she’s most famous for publicly falling out with her father over his conservative politics.
Patti’s almost as liberal as you are, Mr. President.
We disagreed on my father’s presidency. We disagree on abortion. We disagree on gay marriage. We disagree on guns.
Heck, we’ve disagreed on every big and little political issue in the last 20 years.
But now, thanks to you and that train wreck of yours called the Affordable Care Act, Patti and I have been brought together.
She and I are both asking the same question about Obamacare:
Why are we losing our private health insurance when you promised over and over that we could keep it?
Patti generated some publicity for herself (and her latest book) last week when she tweeted what millions of other Americans would like to know:
“Could the president’’ – i.e, you, Mr. Obama – “please explain why I and others are losing our health ins. plans? Wasn’t supposed to happen!”
Poor Patti.
Now she knows what it feels like when you and your soul mates in Washington dump one of your sweeping, coercive, bureaucratic, socialist government programs on the rest of us.
She’s feeling the same pain as hundreds of thousands of people in Florida and Pennsylvania who’ve been dropped by their insurance companies.
Or those employees at companies like IBM that have decided to drop their company-provided health coverage and have their workers get coverage through state marketplaces.
Patti’s been hit upside the head by your pipe dream to turn us into Europe Lite. And it’s knocked a little sense into her.
She’s seriously disappointed in you, Mr. President. You’re apparently not as perfect as she thought you were when she voted for you twice.
Earlier this month, in an open letter to you on her website, she even expressed her displeasure to you for the way you dealt with the government shutdown:
“We all remember your campaign tag of ‘no drama Obama,’” she wrote. “Interesting that there has been one drama after another in your presidency, this last one really tipping the scales.”
I could have written that line myself.
That’s scary, Mr. President. You’re slowly turning my sister into a non-liberal.
She’s starting to emulate -- or at least channel -- her older brother. She even compared your “me-me” persona unfavorably with her father’s humbler, drama-free conduct.
I don’t want to rub it in, Mr. President, but Patti scored another point with me when she noted that for a saint, you had a bad attitude.
You seem to be “annoyed” when you talk to our fellow Americans, “as if this job you campaigned for is keeping you from something else you’d rather be doing.”
Did Patti mean golf, Mr. President?
Don’t worry, Sir. My sister is still a true-blue liberal.
Like those in the mainstream media, she thinks Republicans were mostly to blame for that over-hyped, politically manipulated government shutdown you tried to scare us into thinking was a national crisis.
But I’m afraid you’ve lost Patti’s unconditional love, Mr. President.
She’s learned what we non-liberals have been trying to warn everyone about for years– that Obamacare is an absolute train wreck for the people of America.
So thanks again for your bad work, Mr. President. I hope this is a beginning of a new relationship between my sister and me. Next time I go on vacation, maybe I can get her to write one of my columns.
Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com.