I think Ezra Klein is getting some good traction with the narrative he’s been using. It’s a narrative that details flip-flops prominent Republicans (and the party itself) have made in recent years to show that policies that they used to be support (and some of which they conceived) are now being labeled as radical, socialist, and un-American.
What changed? Not a whole lot. There just happens to be a Democrat in the White House now, and the Republicans want him to fail.
This narrative has the benefit of being accurate, but, in a strange kind of way, it’s more convincing when we give the Republicans more credit for being reasonable in the recent past than they deserve. It makes their flip-flops seem more extreme and provides a starker contrast.
Here’s one example. When President Clinton was trying to pass HillaryCare, the Republicans came up with an alternative bill. The Dole-Chafee bill included an individual mandate. When Obama signed a bill with an individual mandate it suddenly became the biggest Constitutional crisis since Southern Secession. The Dole-Chafee bill shared many other features with the Affordable Care Act, and the two bills have been compared often. The problem with making too strong of a comparison, though, is that the Republicans knew when they introduced the Dole-Chafee bill that it had zero chance of becoming law. It was a fig leaf to cover over their true strategy, which was to hand the fresh-faced Bill Clinton a massive political defeat. Their strategy was laid out by William Kristol in a long memo. Kristol argued that the objective for Republicans should not be to win concessions but to kill the bill. He didn’t want the Democrats to have any kind of victory on health care because, “it will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle-class by restraining the growth of government.”
The Republicans attempted the same strategy with ObamaCare. The only difference between the two battles, aside from one bill passing where the other never came to a vote, is that the Republicans never offered a serious bill of their own to compete with the Affordable Care Act. If you take Klein’s narrative too seriously, you might wonder why the Republicans didn’t like Obama’s plan since it resembled their own plan from fifteen years earlier. The trick is, they didn’t really like their plan fifteen years earlier. In both cases, the idea was to avoid enabling the Democrats and letting them win the larger battle over what kind of government we’re going to have. It’s a war for the collective mind of the middle class. If the Republicans let the Democrats win a battle over expanding health care coverage, the Middle Class might start thinking about government in the positive way they did for the first thirty-five years of the post-war era. Policy details are irrelevant. The goal is to kill the bill and the rest is just scenery.
I think you can go down the list of flip-flops and find this same theme repeating itself over and over again. There are some cases where the Republicans are willing to expand the role of government, but two conditions have to be met before they’ll agree to it. First, it has to be a Republican president who signs the bill so that the Democrats can’t take credit for it. Second, under no circumstances can the expansion be paid for. All expansions of government must be added to the deficit. Once out of power again, the deficit then becomes the Republicans’ main concern and the cudgel they will use to beat up the big-spending Democrats.
So, really, the Republicans are actually rather consistent, and if we could convince the Middle Class of the truth of this narrative, it would be much more effective than convincing them of Klein’s narrative.
