My newest column at American Issues Project is up. This week, I examine the supreme folly of getting Michelle Obama involved in the push for health care. It’s the last ditch effort to get more voters on board — especially woman voters — but it’s one that’s likely to fail.

We all remember the disaster that was “Hillarycare”. When Bill Clinton became president, one of the first things he did was establish the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, and made his wife, then First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, the chair. The Clinton health care plan would have been a dangerously close step to universal health care, and is eerily similar to Obama’s government run health care reform plan. It was a massive failure and continues to haunt the Clintons, and Hillary in particular. It was a bureaucrat’s dream and a conservative’s nightmare, and also would have greatly restricted patient choice. Americans were as ardently against Hillarycare then as they are against Obamacare now. Of course, shortly after Hillarycare died, it had introduced Democrats and the Clintons as the big-government liberals that they were. Hillarycare was undoubtedly a driving force in the Republican revolution of 1994.

With all that said, it may seem hard to understand just why the Obamas seem to willing to ignore history and repeat the Clintons’ mistake. But so far, the Democratic push towards socialized health care has been an epic failure. Americans are just as ardently against it as they were in the beginning. And the new plan, to smear everyone who disagrees with Obamacare as racist, has backfired as well. So, the new plan is to try to bring out Michelle Obama, and see if the most over-hyped First Lady in history can try to sell it better, even though it was a disastrous move for the Clintons.

The Obamas are taking a different approach to using Michelle Obama as their new secret weapon, however: the soccer mom sell. She apparently won’t be wasting her time with specifics on policy or details of the reform. No, Michelle’s message is going straight to the women, who she’s hoping will be easily influenced by rhetoric as empty as the “HOPE!” and “CHANGE!” mantras the Obamas used to take to victory last November. She’s just going to be telling moms that they need to make sure that their kids eat healthy, get lots of exercise, and plenty of preventative care. Moms, I guess, don’t already know this. And of course, universal health care just goes hand-in-hand with common sense child-rearing.

As you’ll see in the column, the poll numbers are still dismal. The Obamas don’t even have a lock on the uninsured yet. And I really wonder what people will think when they read the details of the patient-dumped scheme Michelle engineered in Chicago.

Be sure to read the whole thing.