I usually think Andy McCarthy is the dimmest bulb at the Weekly Standard, which is an accomplishment of sorts. But his little missive this morning is mostly accurate in the larger sense, even if it is wrong in many particulars. McCarthy argues that since the Democrats have already internalized that they are going to lose seats in November, they might as well pass a stronger bill.
Since the Dems know they will have to ram this monstrosity through, they figure it might as well be as monstrous as they can get wavering Democrats to go along with. Clipping the leadership’s statist ambitions in order to peel off a few Republicans is not going to work.
There is the barest hint of self-awareness here, as it finally begins to dawn on some Republicans that they could have cut a deal to get a less comprehensive outcome.
I’m glad Republicans have held firm, but let’s not be under any illusions about what that means. In the Democrat leadership, we are not dealing with conventional politicians for whom the goal of being reelected is paramount and will rein in their radicalism. They want socialized medicine and all it entails about government control even more than they want to win elections. After all, if the party of government transforms the relationship between the citizen and the state, its power over our lives will be vast even in those cycles when it is not in the majority. This is about power, and there is more to power than winning elections, especially if you’ve calculated that your opposition does not have the gumption to dismantle your ballooning welfare state.
Obviously, McCarthy describes a Democratic leadership more like we would wish for than that we actually have. But, he’s right about the hoped-for effect of creating access to health care for 30 million constituents. It’s not that we want to do anything radical, but giving people subsidies to buy health care does transform their relationship to the state, and that will have positive electoral consequences for Democrats in the same way that Democrats benefitted from the creation of Social Security and Medicare. The Republicans keep arguing that polls show that the people don’t want health care reform, but they don’t seem confident that the people will feel that way once they begin to benefit from those reforms.
This next bit strikes me as pretty ironic, as I kept waiting for the Republicans to moderate their positions in the 2006 and 2008 cycles, and it never happened.
Consequently, the next six weeks, like the next ten months, are going to be worse than we think. We’re wired to think that everyone plays by the ususal rules of politics — i.e., if the tide starts to change, the side against whom it has turned modifies its positions in order to stay viable in the next election. But what will happen here will be the opposite. You have a party with the numbers to do anything it puts its mind to, led by movement Leftitsts who see their window of opportunity is closing. We seem to expect them to moderate because that’s what everybody in their position does. But they won’t. They will put their heads down and go for as much transformation as they can get, figuring that once they get it, it will never be rolled back.
That’s the basic idea. That’s what we did under Roosevelt and what we did under Lyndon Johnson. That’s what we’d like to do now. The only quibble I have is that we’re not asking for this because we want or intend to lose any seats over it. I do expect to lose seats in November, but I expect to lose many more of them if reform fails. The stronger (more statist) the bill is, the fewer Democrats will be in trouble. I not only hope this, but polling consistently shows that a public option is vastly more popular than private insurance. If the Democrats pass this bill without a public option then the Republicans will pivot and argue that we’re limiting people’s freedom in an unconstitutional manner by mandating that they buy insurance from a private corporation. And they will get some mileage out of that argument precisely because people hate the insurance industry.
But, however you slice it, Democrats are trying to give people something they will like and benefit from, and they do expect that people will reward them for it for decades to come, just as they did after the New Deal. If only we could get the “leadership” to push for something more popular, we might just get our wish.
