Regrettably, the Republican strategy to scare elderly Americans about health reform appears to be working. To be sure, Democrats have employed identical tactics when Republicans have attempted to reform Social Security and Medicare. In both cases, fear mongering poisons the opportunity for much needed reform.
Politics is fiercely competitive. Policy debates matter. Brazenly perpetuating disgraceful misinformation about health care “death panels” and “rationing” goes too far. Moderate, reasonable Republicans must say enough. A functioning democracy presupposes an informed electorate and a constructive opposition. The current antics of the GOP imperil the balance and long-term effectiveness of American democracy. Joe Klein’s Time column captures the lamentable state of affairs.
How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists? And another question: How can you maintain the illusion of journalistic impartiality when one of the political parties has jumped the shark?
I’m not going to try. I’ve written countless “Democrats in Disarray” stories over the years and been critical of the left on numerous issues in the past. This year, the liberal insistence on a marginally relevant public option has been a tactical mistake that has enabled the right’s “government takeover” disinformation jihad. There have been times when Democrats have run demagogic scare campaigns on issues like Social Security and Medicare. There are more than a few Democrats who believe, in practice, that government should be run for the benefit of government employees’ unions. There are Democrats who are so solicitous of civil liberties that they would undermine legitimate covert intelligence collection. There are others who mistrust the use of military power under almost any circumstances. But these are policy differences, matters of substance. The most liberal members of the Democratic caucus — Senator Russ Feingold in the Senate, Representative Dennis Kucinich in the House, to name two — are honorable public servants who make their arguments based on facts. They don’t retail outright lies. Hyperbole and distortion certainly exist on the left, but they are a minor chord in the Democratic Party.
It is a very different story among Republicans. To be sure, there are honorable conservatives, trying to do the right thing. There is a legitimate, if wildly improbable, fear that Obama’s plan will start a process that will end with a health-care system entirely controlled by the government. There are conservatives — Senator Lamar Alexander, Representative Mike Pence, among many others — who make their arguments based on facts. But they have been overwhelmed by nihilists and hypocrites more interested in destroying the opposition and gaining power than in the public weal. The philosophically supple party that existed as recently as George H.W. Bush’s presidency has been obliterated. The party’s putative intellectuals — people like the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol — are prosaic tacticians who make precious few substantive arguments but oppose health-care reform mostly because passage would help Barack Obama’s political prospects. In 1993, when the Clintons tried health-care reform, the Republican John Chafee offered a creative (in fact, superior) alternative — which Kristol quashed with his famous “Don’t Help Clinton” fax to the troops. There is no Republican health-care alternative in 2009. The same people who rail against a government takeover of health care tried to enforce a government takeover of Terri Schiavo’s end-of-life decisions. And when Palin floated the “death panel” canard, the number of prominent Republicans who rose up to call her out could be counted on one hand.
The cost of the current American health care system threatens the competitiveness of American business and the financial security of many American families. Conservatives recognize that we cannot afford our health care system. Will the Grand Old Party please stand up?
- SF
Thank you for voicing this.
I suspect we disagree on quite a few issues – but we certainly agree that we need rational, substantive debate on the issues rather than fear mongering.
Yesterday on my blog I posted a call for civility and trust. Honestly, if we can’t establish some basis for trust and dialogue I fear far more than health care reform will be lost.
http://hippieprofessor.com/2009/09/06/about-trust/
Again – thanks for posting this – I think it is what we really need.
– hippieprof
I agree with the previous comment. How about Giuliani on Meet the Press this weekend? He kept referring back to his pet talking points, rather than debate the real issue. Is Giuliani’s “Malpractice Reform” really what matters in the Health Care debate? No. I am disappointed over and over by the Right’s inability to constructively debate health care reform. That said, they sure have succeeded in playing nasty politics.
You have got to be kidding.
Democratic congressmen write multiple versions of a 1,000 page long plan (that not a single one of them has read cover to cover) to hugely alter 16% of the economy, and at the President’s insistence try to ram it through before they have to take a break to check in with their constituents.
The President constantly lies about the program, saying it will save money when the CBO proves it won’t, either in the short term or the long term. He also lies about the nature of the “public option” and whether it will or won’t lead to a single payer system, admitting in private that it will, but insisting in public that it won’t.
And you’re complaining about the force of the negative reaction to this rather than about the way this was set up in the first place?
If anyone should be condemned here, it should be the Democrats.
ETC:
Did Republican Congressmen read every page of the Prescription Drug Benefit? Spare me the phony outrage about the number of pages in any legislation. Staffs write, edit, review and brief their bosses. Few Congressmen of either party “read” every page of the bills. Do you really know whether “not a single one of them have read it”? Your argument reinforces my point that opposition, like yours, is not based on facts and substance, but based on distractions like the “the length of the bill”, “the President’s alleged lying” and presumed motives.
Did we debate President Bush’s motives when passing the Prescription Drug Benefit? The long term cost of that program was far less transparent. Did you use language like “lying” then?
You are correct that the CBO disputes savings. I agree that none of the currently contemplated plans achieve real savings. If Republicans would engage in a debate about ideas, they could push harder for a bill that does indeed generate cost savings. Instead, they spread disinformation about death panels, rationing and the boogey man of a single payer system. No one is proposing any of this.
Yes, I thought Bush was lying when he passed the PDB. And, I questioned his motives. I thought he was doing it to secure Dem support for Iraq.
But I don’t see how any of this is relevant to your point, which is that you’re angry at the way the GOP is behaving.
The Dem plans for health care wouldn’t save any money by your own admission. Yet, rather than blame the party that wrote the plans, you blame the GOP for not pushing the Dems harder to save money? Why?
If the Dems really wanted to engage in the “debate about ideas” you propose, wouldn’t they have taken the budget reconciliation tactic off the table by now? They haven’t. So why are you upset at the GOP and not the Dems?
As for the supposed “disinformation” about death panels, rationing, and a single payer system, what one man calls disinformation another can reasonably in this case call wisdom.
If we’d both been present at the birth of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and if I’d correctly forecast that each program would grow well beyond its original limits and consume an ever bigger part of GDP and eventually threaten to bankrupt us all, you’d probably point to the letter of the bill and say “there’s nothing in here about consuming an ever larger part of GDP and potentially bankrupting us all.” Yet here we are, with tends of trillions of dollars in unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities.
ETC:
What are the GOP’s ideas for health reform? The status quo delivers empirically mediocre results with extraordinary costs. Other than medical malpractice reform, which doesn’t move the needle, what types of reform do the GOP support?
Instead of a debate about how to cut costs or how to pay for reform, we scream about grandma’s forced euthanasia, free health care for immigrants and covered abortions. Normally reasonable, moderate voices, like John McCain, refuse to knock down falsehoods about death panels, government takeovers and socialized medicine. Chuck Grassley, the supposed earnest bi-partisan broker of the Senate Finance Committee, distributes a fundraising letter bragging about his intent to defeat Obamacare. So no, I do not believe the GOP genuinely intends to participate in a constructive policy debate. I also do not believe death panels are one man’s wisdom. I believe they are exaggerated hypotheticals to scare people. The Democrats are guilty of the same on Medicare and Social Security reform and I find it equally destructive.
For decades, Republican and Democratic presidents have attempted, unsuccessfully, to reform a Byzantine and wasteful health care system. Now, Republicans not only refuse to engage, but their distortions destroy the possibility of constructive debate. Hard choices about cost reductions are less likely because of their “rationing and death panel scare”. Eventually reforms must occur. The status quo is not an option.
The Dems will get a bill that adds coverage for some of the uninsured. It would be a better bill if hard cost savings were achieved. Restrained spending is a fundamentally conservative principle. Scaring people about rationing undercuts that objective.
The elephant in the room is the inevitable bankruptcy of the middle class. Give all your money to an insurance company, right now, or else you will INEVITABLY lose everything. Very few people can afford to pay the expenses of getting old out of their pocket, and for most people the expense of insurance is everything they have. Want a raise? Forget it, it went to the increases in health insurance and be glad you even have it.
Even the communists, when they came for the gold in your teeth, would use collective bargaining when they spent it. Here, its verboten because its “socialist” .
I will be back with more later – but quickly – can we stop for a moment with dragging in this supposedly “huge” bill and how people supposedly haven’t read it? I wonder if people really have looked it. Yeah – it is 1000+ pages – but it has HUGE margins and HUGE spacing. The language is relatively clear.
This is hardly Moby Dick or Ulysses, folks. A reasonably intelligent person can get through it in an evening. Not that it would be interesting – but it isn’t really that daunting.
Even if a particular congressperson hasn’t personally read it cover-to-cover, you can bet their staff has read it and briefed them. That is what congressional staff do. At any given time a congressperson does indeed have a huge amount of reading to do – and it is always the case that some of it is farmed to staff members. That is the way it has always worked – and frankly the only way that makes sense.
– hippieprof
ETC — Conservative Columnist, David Brooks, has a different take on Obama’s position:
“Obama threw out enough rhetorical chum to keep the liberals happy, yet he subtly staked out ground in the center on nearly every substantive issue in order to win over the moderates needed to get anything passed.
First, Obama rested the credibility of his presidency on what you might call the Dime Standard. He was flexible about many things, but not this: “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future. Period.”
This sound bite kills the House health care bill. That bill would add $220 billion (that’s 2.2 trillion dimes) to the deficit over the first 10 years and another $1 trillion (10 trillion dimes) to the deficit over the next 10 years.
There is no way to get from the House bill to deficit neutrality. The president’s speech guarantees that the more moderate Senate Finance Committee bill will be the basis for the negotiations to come.
The Dime Standard also sets off a political cascade. Since the Congressional Budget Office is the universally accepted arbiter in such matters, the Democrats have to produce a bill that the C.B.O. says is deficit-neutral, now and forever. That means there will be a seller’s market for any member of Congress, Republican or Democrat, who has a credible amendment to cut costs. It also means the Democrats will have to scale back coverage and subsidy levels to reach the fiscal targets.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/opinion/11brooks.html?_r=1