Month: August 2009

That's what Peggy Noonan calls Obama's healthcare proposals. Where is there an entitlement? There is an effort to subsidize private insurance for the working poor who now increase healthcare costs with emergency room care. The cost of all this is around $1 trillion over ten years and the struggle is finding ways to pay for it. The reason for the price-tag and its future is that healthcare costs keep sky-rocketing – something that is killing US companies as well who have to compete with international rivals who have to pay for no healthcare for their employees. Noonan makes no reference to this, as if the most pressing issue of future fiscal sanity is something we should put off … because of fiscal conservatism. Excuse me? Now recall the Republicans' last major initiative on healthcare – the prescription drug benefit. That cost $32 trillion over the long run, and there was not even a gesture toward actually financing it. Much of the right was silent – as they were over all the other fiscally reckless policies of the past eight years.

But only now is Peggy "terrified".

She is not terrified by massively escalating healthcare costs, which are bankrupting the government and the private sector. She doesn't mention these once in her know-nothing column. She just channels the "feelings" of others and wants that to guide public policy. She does not mention the crises on many people's lives because of our current healthcare system. In fact, there is not a scintilla of a constructive proposal in the column – just an amorphous sense that anything that costs money shouldn't happen now:

And we are not now? And we didn't debate this ad nauseam in the last campaign? What we have now is what we had in 1993: a radicalized base of a party that simply refuses to accept the legitimacy of another party in government. But then Clinton had only a plurality of the votes, not the commanding majority Obama won. This is genuine rage all right – amorphous, fear-driven rage. Maybe it is enough to kill any attempt to reform healthcare on any lines. And maybe it is just a raging at the dying of the conservative light.

A reader writes:

I read your post about Martinez and had to smile and send you my thoughts on the GOP and how they have lost me forever.  I am a second generation Cuban American and hitting the big 40 this year.  I am a Regional Sales Manager and for  electronics company based in Orlando.  I fit the demographic for a typical GOP voter for life.  I did not switch my party affiliation until 2004 and there won’t be any  turning back.

The Republicans have not had answers for any of the country’s problems for years.  The last person was Regan and his answers got us in the ditch that we find ourselves in now.  From healthcare, education, immigration (what can you say about that one?), foreign policy, the environment….I could go on but you get the picture.  When the GOP stops being the party of No and finally has solutions to offer then maybe others will listen.  That is why Obama did so well and I knocked on so many doors. Finally someone that actually wanted to DO something about the problems we  and our children face as a nation. 

They knew Julia Child intimately. Their review of the movie is here.

Killing the leader of the group that protected bin Laden seems like a big deal to me. Think for a minute about the attempt to paint Obama as Carter. Now think of three real-time operations – the killing of the Somali pirates, the release of the NoKo hostages, and now the targeted killing of the Taliban's leader. Does that sound like Jimmy Carter to you? Now how about getting Osama? Wouldn't that be a coup? I suspect he's working hard on it.

The passions out there are somewhat mystifying to me. Here is what we are debating: should we demand that insurance companies provide policies to anyone regardless of pre-existing conditions? Should we help the working poor buy that insurance with subsidies? Are competitive exchanges for health insurance a good or bad thing? Would a public option or a co-op help bring down healthcare costs? Does it make sense for the government to study the effectiveness of various treatments as a guide for doctors? These are all worth debating – and if you break it down into these questions, a majority would back them. Obama's proposals were very, very well illuminated in the campaign; there's nothing here that we weren't told to expect; in fact, he seems over-eager to placate moderates and keep some Republicans within the healthcare reform tent.

But the vicious anger from the far right, which is to say what is currently the right, seems totally out of proportion to these reforms. Where does that come from? It comes from the same place as the tea-party protests. It's partisan, of course – most Republicans, including Glenn Reynolds, ignored the deficit under Bush, blamed Obama for it within minutes of his election, and never refer to the impact of the recession on deficits. But it is also surely cultural – an expression of the rage some in white America feel at the new social make-up of their country. I just sat through a PJTV segment on Sarah Palin, in which the host blithely referred to the heartland as "real America."

If that is what you really believe – that people in cities or suburbs, that minorities, that gays, that blacks and Hispanics are not part of "real America" – then of course, you are angry. You believe a fake America has taken over. You cannot understand this. So you start believing that we have a fascist/communist dictatorship, that there was some fraud allowing a non-citizen to become president, that the government is about to "take over" all healthcare provision … and on and on. And no one is left in the GOP to challenge this, to calm it down, to present practical alternatives to the obvious crushing problems the country and the private sector have in paying for increasingly costly healthcare.

To me, this is a triumph of ideology. And conservatism is now an abstract anti-government ideology, fueled by cultural, racial and sexual resentment. This is a recipe for more violence, and more marginalization.

(Photo: an infant protests Hitler at a Nancy Pelosi town hall meeting.)

Referencing the recently released CBO letter, James Capretta of the New Atlantis writes:

Amid all the flurry of news in the hectic last days before the House recessed for the August break, something important went largely unnoticed — a development that should be the knockout blow to the kind of sweeping health-care bill the Obama administration is pushing, at least as it has been cobbled together in the House. […] CBO expects the spending in the bill would grow at a rate of least 8 percent annually into the indefinite future, while the revenue to pay for it will only grow at about 5 per cent per year. Hence the “substantial increases” in federal budget deficits beyond 2019.

I referred to this damning statistic in my column. It shows that even this modest attempt to curtail healthcare costs is, in fact, far too modest. And yet this modesty is being called fascism. What we are seeing is whether the American polity is capable of tackling its long term collective problems. So far, it's a struggle. And if Obama is unable to do it, who can?

(Hat tip: KHN's Kate Steadman)

A slight recovery in confidence?

A reader writes (in one of the most extended metaphors I've ever read) about News Corp's big move:

This is closer to riding your horse at full speed into the bright daylight, bragging about how people need your horse and love seeing it for free, then complaining about all the free pictures being taken of your horse, then getting thrown from your horse and watching it run away with all its freeloading admirers.

Then you wait about 10 years, sulk back to your barn, lock the door and demand that your horse return to its stall. I don’t like to say this; I’m an ex-newspaperman who loved the business with a passion and would have stayed forever if it hadn’t collapsed.

But dude, the horse is never coming back.

That wasn't expected. And it's good news for Obama. The stimulus has worked modestly so far, partly because it was a two-year program and its earliest stimuli were tax cuts which people saved. But if the economy is rebounding and ARRA keeps its momentum chugging along, then the economic trajectory bodes well for the Obama administration. Remember: the GOP knows tactics, like these town hall meetings. But Obama has the strategy. If the recession is over by the mid-terms – a big if, of course – and unemployment (which will probably go higher) is on the way down, he wins. And he is the only one actually proposing things to tackle real problems. In the end, that matters. In the end the GOP has to find some answers rather than refusing to hear the questions.