A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.Needless to say, Frum is already being thrown under the bus by Col. Mustard and friends, who claim victory for stopping socialism, or Marxism, or communism, or whatever ism they are calling the plan this week.
At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.
Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.
This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.
Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.
Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.
No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?
We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.
Frum blames the Wingers, Jacobson snarls back that the Wingers stopped the bill from being worse? They're both wrong.
They're both wrong because the Republicans abdicated the right to govern. They refused to take responsibility for the country. They refused to lift a finger. They refused to do anything but whine like petulant children who didn't get 100% of everything they wanted.
Republicans? You rendered yourselves irrelevant to America. So today, America finally moves on without you.
The joke is that in the end, the Wingnuts, the moderates, the country clubbers, the Club For Growth, the Tenthers, the Birthers, the screaming tinfoil psychos and the old guard of the GOP all now have one thing in common:
You don't matter right now. And you did it to yourselves. Each and every one of you. You took yourselves out of the game. You dared the Democrats to unite to defeat you, because you were sure they would not. You managed through sheer stupidity and intransigence to do what 90 years of working with the Democrats couldn't do: make them go out and actually pass legislation.
Except...they did. And you lost. Thank you for stepping aside. The rest of us have a lot of work to do to clean up your mess, after all. And that begins now.
Swallow your pride and join us. It's still your country, too. But it's not your country alone. Not anymore. Get used to it.
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