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The omnibus health care plan is ill-timed and distinctly unpopular. How many times will the Democrats ignore a chance to retreat?
Lucretius has been after me for some time to write an article on the Health Care Bill that seems to have been nearly the sole occupation of the Congress for President Obama's first Presidential term.
This Bill has occupied much of my mental energy, not to mention many of my posts on Facebook, and so I have intended many times to humor Lucretius in this. What has foiled me is that it keeps on seeming as if the point would be moot. But moot which way? One day it will appear that the bill is almost certainly dead. A month later, it is seen in radiant good health, riding barechested on horseback alongside Vladimir Putin. A few weeks pass, and we hear it is really dead, only to disover the bill has been caught on camera snorting cocaine with Marion Barry. Now, from what we hear, it is back in Intensive Care, having its failing kidneys milked by stricken, insomniac Congressional aides.
By now it must have ocurred to Democrats that a bill this difficult to pass ... might be something Democrats should pass on.
And yet they persist. How they perservere! As I write this, President Barrack Obama is flying to the site of a major disaster, to focus attention and to inspire men and women to action. Is he flying to Haiti, where last week a massive earthquake killed (at least) tens of thousands of people and doomed (in lieu of strenuous outside effort) hundreds of thousands more? No, he is flying to Massachussetts, where a little-known state senator named Scott Brown is threatening to snatch the Senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy. If Brown wins, the Democratic supermajority is broken, and the Health Care Bill, which had been assured passage in some form, could yet fail.
Aside from being bad policy, the omnibus Health Care Bill is a bad political bet, and the Democrats need to stop doubling down. I sincerely wish they would stop, for their own political health. For I am none too pleased with the Republicans either; I think the Republican Party will learn to behave better if it has a little more Time Out. The worst thing about the course the Democrats are pursuing is that it threatens to restore the Republican Party to power without having learned to behave. Peggy Noonan relates the following anecdote recently in her Wall Street Journal column:
"I spoke a few weeks ago with a respected Republican congressman who told me with some excitement of a bill he's put forward to address the growth of entitlements and long-term government spending. We only have three or four years to get it right, he said. He made a strong case. I asked if his party was doing anything to get behind the bill, and he got the blanched look people get when they're trying to keep their faces from betraying anything. Not really, he said. Then he shrugged. "They're waiting for the Democrats to destroy themselves." "
Of what possible use is a George W. Bush-style Republican Party without any sense of fiscal responsibility? Right now, the electorate seems to be vastly wiser than those they have elected. Scott Brown is electable in Massachussetts precisely because he speaks the words of power long forgotten in the halls of the G.O.P. He speaks of halting and reversing spending. He speaks of government frugality. He speaks moderate, conservative words whose good sense is resplendent in a deep recession which threatens still to tip into Depression.
That is all I know about this Scott Brown. He may eat babies; he may kiss the ass of the horned god Baphomet, for all I know. But the fact that he is threatening to win Ted Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts should tell us that he is speaking the people's language right now. Shouldn't the Democratic establishment take heed of this in some way?
Obama should say a few words in Massachussetts and then fly direct to Port-au-Prince, where people no one strenously claims have a 'right' to health care urgently need it nevertheless. It would be good of him to arrange for at least fifty thousand troops to arrive as close on his heels as possible to allow the delivery of national and charitable aid contributions. He should concede that the Health Care Bill is controversial, signal that he understands trepidation in light of the economic situation facing America, and announce his willingness to parley with the Republican party to arrive at a more mutually agreeable reform of America's systems of health care. If he does this now, and then goes on to do some other things right, the electorate -- and history -- may yet look kindly upon him and his Party.
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