Matthew Continetti of the Weekly Standard demonstrates how to kill health-care reform in five-easy steps.
Step One: Get a small minority of people to throw a very loud hissy fit and then claim that they speak for the ‘silent majority.’ Avoid self-awareness of irony.
Congress returns this week, and here’s hoping that its members, Democrats in particular, learned a little something from this summer’s town hall meetings. The lesson to be drawn from these occasionally raucous events is that America is on the verge of–or already knee-deep in–one of those moments that periodically roil the country and rearrange our preconceived notions about public life. And not a moment too soon.
Popular outbursts serve as a check on, and corrective to, our elites’ behavior. The people know things the elites forget or don’t want to remember. The political class is supposed to serve the people, not the other way around. As Gerald Ford said after assuming the presidency on August 9, 1974, “Here the people rule.”
Step Two: Conflate unpopular Bush policies and popular Obama policies and falsely claim that politicians face no accountability and are just serving elite opinion. Have no shame.
For a while now, the message from Washington has been that we know what’s good for the public, whether the public likes it or not. One after another, both parties have attempted to foist a series of grand reforms on a skeptical populace–in areas ranging from Social Security and immigration to energy and health care. Politicians have made decisions affecting millions of lives without accountability and oversight. The upshot has been more government, more debt, and–coming soon to a 1040 form near you–more taxes. No wonder the public is anxious.
Step Three: Use the staggering debt run up by the preceding Republican president (mainly to fund tax-cuts for the have-mores) to argue against any spending for a new energy policy or health care reform. Claim you are on the side of ‘the people.’
It should hardly come as a surprise that the public views American elites with suspicion and disdain. Ordinary Americans have a point when they assign blame for the current mess to Wall Street CEOs, federal regulators, corrupt politicians, and gullible reporters. When Americans look at the economic landscape, they see dismal growth, high unemployment, and large deficits. But when they listen to the president and Congress, they hear that “stimulus”–borrowing ever more from tomorrow to spend today–will work like some kind of magic cure.
They hear that this perilous moment is the time to build a “new foundation” with even more expenditures and taxes through “cap-and-trade” and Obamacare. It’s as if spending and debt are no problem; as if it’s fine that the federal government–which failed in its fundamental duties to build guardrails for the financial system–owns large chunks of that system; as if the political, financial, and think-tank elites have proven themselves worthy of the public’s trust.
Step Four: Lie about the health care bill by saying the exact opposite of the truth. Be as dishonest as possible.
The worry that Obamacare will result in fewer personal choices and more government fiat is legitimate. That’s what Obamacare is set up to do. The debate is not merely a matter of which inputs will produce–voilà !–the desired outcomes, as the Obamacrats think. It’s about freedom and responsibility. It’s about a family’s ability to control its fate, an individual’s ability to shape his nation’s future.
Step Five: Claim your side is honest, virtuous, and wise. Claim that you are being unfairly maligned as misguided yokels. Seize the mantel of populism.
Rather than examine the reasoning and emotions behind the public expressions of concern, however, the president and his allies in Congress and the media have dismissed the opposition as crazy, misinformed, cynical, and artificial. To the contrary: In 1985, Irving Kristol wrote that the public activism of the Reagan era “is no kind of blind rebellion against good constitutional government. It is rather an effort to bring our governing elites to their senses.” That’s a fair description, it seems to us, of the public activism on display at town hall meetings across the country over the last month.
As for the elites, especially the liberal elite: They remain deaf, dumb, and blind.
They’ve succeeded in whittling down Obama’s support and raising skepticism about health reform. They’ve done a fantastic job of spooking the media. But the whole thing is a charade. A dishonest charade.
