Let's Do It the Hard Way

Remember back in 2005? President Bush campaigned to reform Social Security. His plan was to partially privatize Social Security and get rid of the unfunded liability.

Democrats, liberals, unions, and the AARP joined together in a campaign to stop reform.

Of course, part of President Bush's plan was a curb on Social Security benefits. His opponents naturally focused on that part of the plan.

Now we have Democrats under President Obama proposing a reform of health care. One of the key provisions is an attempt to reduce the cost of Medicare with end-of-life counseling.

Republicans, conservatives, and senior citizens have joined together in a campaign to stop reform.

They don't like the end-of-life care proposals, calling them "death panels."

Now, as a conservative, I regard President Obama's proposals oppressive and anti-freedom. But they are a serious, if dishonest, attempt to address the Medicare unfunded liability which is now, apparently, hitting $83 trillion.

If ObamaCare goes down just like President Bush's initiative on Social Security reform, then US voters will have sent an unmistakable message.

We don't want to solve the entitlement problem now. We would rather wait and solve it the hard way, in a total government spending train wreck, further down the track.

ObamaCare on Life Support

Just in time for a late summer weekend all the conservative commentariat is signing the death certificate for ObamaCare.

The most penetrating analysis is Peggy Noonan, once conservatives' sweetheart.

Every big idea that works is marked by simplicity, by clarity. You can understand it when you hear it, and you can explain it to people. Social Security: Retired workers receive a public pension to help them through old age.

But ObamaCare is full of the "secret language of government that no one understands—'single payer,' 'public option,' 'insurance marketplace exchange.'" People are right to be suspicious of it, and vote No.

So President Obama should pull the plug and admit he made a mistake. Unlike President Bush.

(Yeah, like that makes any sense. If President Obama admits he made a mistake the MSM will all coo that he's wonderful and modest. But President Bush was fighting a war. You can't say that Americans lost their lives in a mistake. And if Bush had said that Iraq was a mistake then the MSM and Democrats would have eaten him alive.)

It's also kinda fun to read Charles Krauthammer say that Palin is wrong about "death panels" except that she's right. End-of-life counseling will obviously nudge people towards letting go, he writes, and when government nudges, it will feel like a shove.

Anyway. One thing we are learning, according to Jonah Goldberg, as if we didn't know.

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, liberal Democrats have to accuse their opponents of racism.

It doesn't matter that America elected a black man as president. Liberals are still going to accuse anyone that opposes him of racism.

Actually, Goldberg has a darker suggestion. The racism charge is all about finding a scapegoat. Liberals are all casting around to find the right language to do this.

They'll keep trying until they find a scapegoat that works, because that is what they do.

But let's broaden the canvas. Politics is all about finding the scapegoat, because that is how you keep a political community together. It's buried deep in the DNA of evolution. When something goes wrong, you need to pile all the blame onto a scapegoat. That's how you manage to deal with the disaster and then go on.

Rene Girard has a slightly different take. He writes in Violence and the Sacred that the sacrifice of the scapegoat is how human communities get back together after being divided.

There is another way. It is called freedom, liberty, capitalism. In that way, people take responsibility for their own mistakes. You don't need scapegoats, because in the world of liberty mistakes are OK and they don't threaten the whole community. If you aren't making mistakes you aren't learning anything.

Meanwhile, back to the bleachers to watch our liberal friends deal with their imploding dreams of universal health insurance.

How Big Could It Get?

I was reading recently some liberal acquaintances parroting the current Democratic talking points: that the opposition to President Obama is all racism and/or astroturf organized by the insurance companies.

Poor dears. They are really in "denial," as they like to call it. They have to believe that the opposition to the president is all a cooked-up deal.

Let's be honest, here on the right. We don't know how big this is, and how big it will get. Nobody does.

But if you ask me this is the biggest thing since the anti-war movement of the 1960s.

Let's review the big Republican political years of the recent past.

Starting the 1970s we have had the pro-life movement. It has been solid and persistent, but it has never gone viral.

Starting in the late 1970s we had the Moral Majority and the Christian Right. But it was top-down, run by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.

In 1980 we saw the Reagan Democrats taking over the Republican primary process. But this was top-down politics organized by the Reagan campaign.

In 1994 we saw the Year of the Angry-White Male, as Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay organized the Republican takeover of Congress. But this was top-down politics also.

The thing about the Tea Party and the Town Hall movements is that nobody saw them coming. Our Democratic friends are all busy looking under their beds for a new militia movement (yeah, remember them?). They want it to be Southern racism redux. They want it to be neo-McCarthyism. Yes, really! Liberal columnist Richard Cohen wrote recently about echoes of McCarthyism in Sarah Palin's "death panel" remarks,

But the truth is that this is new, it is spontaneous, and nobody knows where it may lead.

It may sputter out if the Democrats pass on death panels and the public option. Or it may not. It may already be too late for that.

The Democrats may have woken a sleeping giant.

The fact is that health care provision in the United States is not what ordinary middle-class Americans would like if they had their druthers. It is a product of politics, which means that it is helping politicians get elected, not helping people get health care. If the American people get the idea that they can change health care by grass-roots political organizing, and if a movement gets to critical mass... Well, nobody knows nuttin'.

The movement could revive the Republican Party, or it could transform it. It could send change the balance of power in Congress, in 2010 and send a new President to the White House in 2012 or it could blow up tomorrow.

But the fact is that we've never seen anything like this on the right. Not in anyone's lifetime.

Liberals: Stop Scaring Moderate Women

Even though the current health care debate is a replay of the 1993/4 HillaryCare fiasco it is worth remembering what happened back then.

What happened is that moderate women decided they wanted to keep their current health care arrangements.

And that is what seems to be happening this time around.

Moderate women have two concerns about health care. The first one is that they want to set up arrangements for the health care of themselves and their children. This means, in the first place, health insurance, and in the second place setting up ongoing relationships with doctors, specialists, hospitals, clinics. Moderate women want to know that everything is in place when they have a health care problem.

So if you start to mess with the careful health care arrangements a moderate woman has set up she will be afraid that she won't be able to get the care she needs for her family.

The second health care concern of moderate women is the health of their mothers. No, they don't worry too much about their fathers; their mothers take care of that.

Their problem is that as their mothers get older and more frail in body and mind they find that they are stepping in more and more to supervise. At the end of life, they are the ones working with health care professionals and making the hard decisions.

So when you start to mess with the careful health care arrangements that moderate women have set up for their mothers with "death panels" based on comparative effectiveness research, you make moderate women fear that they won't be able to get the health care they need for their mothers.

Now you can see why liberals and their ObamaCare are scaring the pants off moderate women and driving them into the arms of conservatives and Republicans.

Democrats Divided on Health Care

Run of the mill pundits are not prognosticating that Obama has done the impossible: he has united the Republicans and divided the Democrats.

On the right, the Blue Dog Democrats are starting to realize that they made a pact with the devil when they signed up with Rahm Emanuel in the 2006 and 2008 election cycles to get elected as conservative Democrats from districts that normally vote Republican. If health care passes they are probably road-kill. Bruce Bialosky asks what the Blue Dogs were thinking when they signed up for the Emanuel express.

The Blue Dogs need to realize that Nancy Pelosi is [French General] Petain [at Verdun]. She is sending them into to battle not caring whether they survive – just hoping to win the war. The Blue Dogs may be lost, but the left will still achieve their goal through an extreme environmental bill and the move toward nationalized health care.

On the left, liberal Democrats feel betrayed as President Obama backs away from the "public option" of government health insurance. Jake Tapper reports on the feelings of some liberal officeholders like Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY):

"Some of us who have gotten roughed up pretty good at town hall meetings and stuck in there because we believe in this, now kind of feel like we have a tire track on our chest where the bus that rolled over us is," Weiner said.

(You mean that Obama is throwing the liberals under the bus?)

These liberals are saying that without a public option there will be no bill. Really? Is that a promise?

Of course it is also possible that the Democrats are heading into the perfect storm, in which the left doesn't get a health care bill and the Blue Dogs lose their seats in 2010.

But let's not count our chickens.

Obama's Death Panels Under the Bus

The big idea behind President Obama's health reform plan is bring everyone within a single system so that the government can start to ration care. That's the only way that our liberal friends believe that they can deal with the Medicare unfunded liability.

So the central initiative is to take a whack at Medicare costs through the now notorious "death panels" that would make decisions about end-of-life care. The idea made perfect bureaucratic sense to all the liberal policy analysts and health care experts.

And it does make sense, in a rational, mechanical way.

Older people are less productive and less likely to benefit from medical care. A hip replacement for a healthy 50-year-old can return a person to work. A hip replacement for a vigorous 80-year-old can restore mobility for ten years. But a hip replacement in a frail 90-year-old isn't likely to be so successful. Chances are that granny will be too weak to walk again.

That's what "comparative effectiveness research" is all about. It is an expertise that enables government health bureaucrats to make rational decisions about expenditures for medical procedures paid for by the government.

It just shows how far our liberal friends are out of touch.

The reason we call it health care is that health care is about caring. We do healh care because it shows we care.

Well, men may not care very much, but women do care. And women go on caring when all hope is gone. They just do.

So when the government proposes to replace the caring that daughters do for their mothers--which echoes the caring their mothers did for them--with a rational system of bureaucratic triage, ordinary people, and particularly ordinary women, object.

Triage, let us not forget, is the rational procedures that armies use to dispose of the wounded. There are those that will get better without any care--so no care for them. There are those who will die whatever medical care is provided--so no care for them. Then there are those that might respond to medical care. Those are the chaps who get care. It's a sensible rational system--for armies.

But for grandma? That's why, in my view, liberals are in deeper trouble with the American people than they can possibly know.

The Upchuck Factor

I call it the Upchuck Factor. It's a highly scientific measure of how long it takes for the American people to upchuck the Democrats.

This is a center-right country. People believe in freedom, self-help, family, and God. So the party of socialism and government programs has to dissimulate. It has to pretend that it is in favor of truth, justice, and the American way. Instead of the opposite.

In the 2005-08 quadrennium the Democrats played this dissimulation game a treat. They were shocked, shocked by the waste and the deficits and the corruption in the Bush administration and Congress.

The American people are a truthful people, and they assume that other people tell the truth as well. So they kinda bought into the Democratic drumbeat.

Also, the American people tired of the Bush war on terror, and half believed the Democrats when they said that Bush was stupid and obstinate.

(Actually, Bush was probably trying to avoid dividing the country any more than necessary, and understood that the enthusiasm for the war on terror would eventually flag, and with it his presidency.)

In the 1930s it took six years before the American people upchucked. In the 1938 mid-term elections they upchucked 80 Democrats, and would have sent a Republican to the White House in 1940 if it hadn't been for WWII.

In the 1960s it took six years before the American people upchucked in 1966. They hadn't voted for the crazed war on poverty that President Johnson gave them. They sent Richard Nixon to the White House in 1968.

In the 1970s it took four years for the American people to upchuck President Carter. They sent Ronald Reagan to the White House in a landslide.

In the 1990s it look two years for the American people to upchuck President Clinton. They took one look at HillaryCare and sent 50 additional Republicans to the House in 1994. Then President Clinton got with the program and reformed welfare just before the 1996 election. Democrats complain that they voted for a Democrat in 1992 and got an Eisenhower Republican.

In the 2000s it looks as if the upchuck is only taking six months. Maybe it's the internet, or maybe its the Washington gang who couldn't shoot straight. Either way, the American people started seriously vomiting a month ago, and it doesn't look as if they have cleared out their bellies yet.

There's one little problem with this story. Americans do like some government spending money. In particular, they like the government to spend money on them. So they can't quite bring themselves to send the Democrats away for ever. That's a pity, because the welfare state is slowly de-socializing America. It is teaching them to be indifferent neighbors, spouses, students. It is teaching them to dump grandma on the care of the government. It is teaching them to lose compassion for the poor. (After all, the government takes care of that.)

It's a typical divine joke. The government of socialists teaches people to be anti-social.

But it makes sense. If the state takes over the things that society ought to do, then people lose the societal virtues.

So let's get beyond the upchuck, America. Let's stop the purging, and resolve upon a healthy and limited government diet. It's for the children.