While hosting Bill Bennett’s radio show, Michael Steele, head of the Republican National Committee, enlightened listeners with his novel and profound solution for health care reform:
So if it’s a cost problem, it’s easy: Get the people in a room who have the most and the most direct impact on cost, and do the deal. Do the deal. It’s not that complicated. If it’s an access question, people don’t have access to health care, then figure out who they are, and give them access! Hello?! Am I missing something here? If my friend Trevor has access to health care, and I don’t, why do I need to overhaul the entire system so I can get access he already has? Why don’t you just focus on me and get me access?
Hard to believe the quote, but Matthew Yglesias provides the Youtube recording at Think Progress. It’s incredibly reassuring to understand that the most intractable domestic public policy problem in a generation can be solved by simply “doing the deal”. When he took the RNC job, Steele made it clear that his first priority was to update the Republican party’s image:
It [GOP] will be avant garde, technically. It will come to the table with things that will surprise everyone – off the hook.
Steele has indeed surprised everyone. The surprises have had nothing to do with substance, nothing to do with ideas and nothing to do with policy prescriptions. Instead, he aims to transform the Republican party into a modern day Monte Hall — “Let’s Make a Deal!”
If Steele’s detachment from reality were not so fascinating, it would be alarming.
-SF
