'Explaining' Obamacare . . . by Bashing Insurers -- By: Paul Howard | read this item
President Obama’s favorite explanation for why his health-care reform plan is unpopular is that he needs to explain it “more clearly.” Explain it more clearly? After dozens of presidential health-care speeches and town halls, and even a bipartisan “summit,” people understand Obamacare quite well. They just don’t like it. In the latest Rasmussen polls, 53 percent of voters oppose the legislation, and 57 percentthink it will hurt the economy if it becomes law. Clarity is killing Obamacare because voters understand that it will raise health-care costs and explode the deficit, creating a permanent new drain on the economy.
Desperate Democrats have decided that if they can’t sell their plan, they’ll just attack the Evil Insurance Companies. Hence the president’s latest proposal for a federal regulator that would have the power to approve (read: deny) insurance-premium rate increases that are considered “excessive,” a ploy based on Anthem’s recent announcement that it will raise rates for individual plans in California by up to 39 percent.
Obama’s plan is a bad, poll-driven idea that would wreak havoc on the individual insurance market. State insurance experts interviewed in the New York Times this week explained why: Rate reviews at the state level are primarily designed to make sure that insurers will remain solvent and can pay their claims. The experts called this the “ultimate consumer protection.”
“You’re not necessarily helping the consumer if you keep the rates artificially low,” one state regulator told the Times. “What’s worse for the consumer: having a premium increase or having to pay the full amount of a medical expense because the company is out of business?”
The president also ignores the logic of competitive markets: If one insurer raises rates above what is justified by underlying costs, competitors will undercut them, shaving off market share and profits.
For instance, according to eHealthInsurance.com, a 40-year-old single male resident of Santa Monica, Calif., has 124 plans to choose from, starting at $88 a month for an Anthem Blue Cross plan. If a 39 percent increase hit this plan, its new cost would be about $122 a month — leaving it vulnerable to competition from Kaiser Permanente or Aetna.
A 2009 survey from eHealthInsurance also found that individual health-insurance premiums are less expensive in California than the national average: $150 a month versus $161. New York — a state with many of the health-care regulations found in Obamacare — was more than twice as expensive as the national average: $339. Individual insurance markets undoubtedly need more competition, but the Democrats’ embrace of heavy-handed regulations and mandates would drive prices up, not down.
This brings us back to why the president is talking about insurance companies, and not about the fine print in his plan. Skeptical voters know that the administration is cherry-picking its budget numbers to make the Democrats’ legislation look much cheaper than it really is. For instance, the president claims that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office scores the Democrats’ legislation with a small savings in its first ten years and lowers the deficit by $1 trillion the following decade.
This estimate reflects what David Brooks calls “gimmicks and dodges [that are] designed to get a good score from the Congressional Budget Office but don’t genuinely control runaway spending.” The score leaves out $300 billion in Medicare physicians’ payment increases that were dropped from earlier versions of the Democrats’ legislation because it made the price tag look too high. The estimate also depends on massive reimbursement cuts to Medicare and Medicaid providers that are unlikely to ever actually materialize.
Major legislation, the CBO also observes drily, does not often remain unchanged for 20 years. Translation: Good luck collecting that $1 trillion.
The administration and its allies have been trying to have it both ways by invoking the CBO score as if it was handed down by God’s own accounting office, while ignoring CBO assumptions that don’t fit their narrative — like the fact that their favorite demonstration projects and pilot programs don’t save any real money.
Once you peel off the gimmicks, the legislation will create a massive new health-care entitlement that the country cannot afford. Attacking insurance companies is meant to distract voters — and wavering Democrats in Congress — from Obamacare’s glaring deficiencies. If it becomes law, expect this to be a health-care “cure” that’s worse than the disease.
– Paul Howard is director of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Medical Progress and managing editor of MedicalProgressToday.
The Death of the 'Iran Won' Myth -- By: Victor Davis Hanson | read this item
Did the fall of Saddam Hussein and the violent birth of Iraqi democracy really empower Iran?
That conventional wisdom might have been true in the shorter term during the chaotic Iraqi insurrection, but it was never an accurate assessment over the longer haul — as we are beginning to see, nearly seven years after the Iraq War began.
In the last twelve months, mass civil disobedience has spread throughout Iran, most notably when nearly a million people hit the streets to protest last summer’s rigged elections. There is unrest in Iraq as well, and a myriad of conflicting interests, but note that the tension is of a completely opposite sort. Whereas in Iran an unpopular government uses violence to squelch a majority that seeks free elections, in Iraq a legitimately elected government enjoys public support against occasional attacks from small cadres of terrorist extremists. So in an Iran supposedly at peace, more died voting than in an Iraq purportedly at war.
The use of Saddam Hussein as a proper balance to Iran was always an atrocious idea — and it is bizarre to hear critics of the war cite post facto his obscene government as a once-necessary check on the Iranian theocracy. Given Saddam’s genocidal policies, and America’s war against him in 1990-91, there was no way that the United States should ever again have used his dictatorship to thwart Iran’s. And while the present democratic government of Iraq is dominated by Shiites — logically, given demographic realities — it is not true that they are all pro-Iranian Muslims who have forfeited their Iraqi identities. In time, a stable democratic Iraq may be one of the very few mechanisms by which Iranian regional influence can be checked.
That is why Iran for the last five years has done its best to destroy Iraqi democracy, by supplying money and weapons to cross-border terrorists. Yet Iraq has survived, and it is now slowly proving subversive to Iran, albeit in quite a different manner — by reminding Iran’s uneasy Shiite population that free elections are not incompatible with their religion, as they can now readily see from the free, uncensored media across the border. The percentage of Iraqis who turned out for this round of voting was greater than the percentage of Americans who turned out for our landmark election of 2008.
As a result of Saddam’s removal, and the success of the subsequent democracy, Iran is looking not just at a free Iraq, but also at a semi-autonomous, prosperous, and pro-Western Kurdistan, and a Lebanon without Syrian occupation troops. In the short term, Iran must also weigh in the fact that there are hundreds of American aircraft just across the border in Iraq — basing that would have been impossible under Saddam. And whereas a few years ago Iran was threatening Israel, hand in glove with Saddam Hussein, who was subsidizing the families of suicide bombers on the West Bank, today Iraq is not fueling unrest in the Middle East. If anything it may be, along with Saudi Arabia and Jordan, secretly not upset that Israel might address the ominous Iranian nuclear facilities.
Iraq last month also achieved its highest level of oil exportation since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. And with the latest round of auctions and the new transparent oil contracts, the Iraqis are hoping to reach an incredible figure of 10 million barrels of oil pumped per day within seven years.
Given international interest in Iraq’s oil, competitive bidding, and the growing security in the country at large, Iraq might well come close to meeting such once unimaginable goals. If it were to pump another seven or eight million barrels per day, such a spike in production by the nation with the third largest known oil reserves in the world would work to moderate oil prices for years — and thus especially irk Iran.
To pay for its vast terrorist enterprises and its nuclear program, Iran counts on high oil prices. Thus it desperately needs unrest in other countries in the region, depressing their oil production and ensuring price speculation. Meanwhile, its own oil sector is suffering declining sales from sanctions, incompetence, and the country’s pariah status. So Tehran may soon face the specter of chronically pumping fewer barrels, without much hope of a near-term return to the old sky-high oil prices — all at a time when its Iraqi neighbor is suddenly swimming in petrodollars.
For a year, the Obama administration seems to have failed to appreciate these new realities. It snubbed Iraq’s legitimate prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and instead bragged about its outreach to Iran’s thuggish president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The administration apparently thought that Iraq’s future would entail perpetual civil unrest and combat,declining oil production, and a quagmire for the United States. All that, of course, would have helped Iran, just as its antithesis — a stable, consensual oil-exporting state — is increasingly worrying it.
But now the Obama “reset” policy has itself seemingly been reset. Recently Vice President Biden — of “trisect Iraq” fame — predicted that Iraq would become one of the administration’s “greatest achievements.” And soon afterward, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton all but confessed that the much-ballyhooed Obama policy of reaching out to the theocracy with diplomacy, videos, and personal letters, while keeping mum about its brutal crackdown on dissidents, was a failure.
Clinton pointed to a military coup by the Revolutionary Guards that had supposedly seized power from more “moderate” Iranian theocrats, and thus apparently unexpectedly thwarted Obama’s otherwise sound policy of American engagement: “We see that the government of Iran — the supreme leader, the president, the parliament — is being supplanted and that Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship.”
It is disturbing that Secretary Clinton did not appreciate the long, pernicious history of the Revolutionary Guards’ influence inside Iran and their cozy relationship with many in the theocratic elite; but at least she can now, at last, cite some “unforeseen” development that may allow her to backtrack on the administration’s disastrous policy of appeasing Iran.
Don’t expect very many observers to accept the heresy that the post-Saddam Iraq is increasingly becoming Iran’s worst nightmare. The Iraq War has left such poisonous antiwar feelings here at home, advocacy for Middle Eastern democracy has been so caricatured as a “neocon” pipe dream, and the cost to America in blood and treasure was so high, that in the current climate it is nearly impossible for most Americans to appreciate the salutary geostrategic effects of the removal of Saddam Hussein and his replacement by a consensual government.
As a first step, just look back at the last few months in both countries, as if the roles had been reversed. Imagine a free and open Iran now holding elections marred by only a few radical Islamic terrorist attacks, while an autocracy in Baghdad ran phony plebiscites and then cracked down on a million Iraqis demanding democratic reform.
In such a scenario, one would expect outrage from the American Left, as it praised a democratic Iran while damning a hopelessly corrupt and violent American puppet in Iraq — and always castigating the United States for ignoring the brave Iraqi protesters in the street.
Why, then, when we have before us reality — and not a “what if?” fantasy — do we show so little appreciation for Iraq’s recent successful elections, and even less outrage over the farcicalIranian voting?
In short, the idea of the Iraq War empowering Iran has became as entrenched a myth as “No blood for oil.” Both are now deeply embedded within the liberal antiwar narrative. Yet one need not think that the war to remove Saddam Hussein was primarily motivated by a desire to weaken Iran (it was not) to acknowledge that precisely such a welcome development is fast becoming one of the unforeseen dividends of the surprising continuance of Iraqi democracy.
A tripartisan trio of senators — John Kerry (D., Mass.), Joe Lieberman (I., Conn.), and the New York Times’s favorite Republican environmentalist, Lindsey Graham (S.C.) — is working overtime to build support for “doing something” about climate change in the upper chamber of Congress.
Their chosen solution for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, a combination of energy taxes and carbon controls, is politically inexpedient. That means that the Senate’s Green Three will have to buy the votes they need, sweetening the deal with special favors and parochial giveaways.
We’ve seen this before. Early last April, the House of Representatives took up a cap-and-trade scheme, the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act. It was 600 pages long. Two months later, Nancy Pelosi had whipped up enough votes to pass the bill, which by that point was 1,500 pages long. The legislation had been fattened as Henry Waxman (D., Beverly Hills), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee and a co-author of the bill, bought off members of the Democratic caucus with the trillion-dollar proceeds of the cap-and-trade tax. Even with all those giveaways, it was a close-run thing, and we were treated to the unseemly spectacle of wavering lawmakers literally lining up on the floor of the House on the day of the vote to demand that Waxman concede more and more special favors. Waxman agreed to practically every one of those demands.
But ACES was dead on arrival in the Senate, so Kerry, Lieberman, and Graham had to start their own vote-buying program from scratch. Manufacturing-state senators want billions of dollars to compensate industry. Farm-state senators want billions of dollars for agricultural producers. Nuclear-state senators want billions of dollars for carbon-free nuclear power. Coal-state senators want billions of dollars for clean-coal technology. Senators from natural-gas states want billions of dollars for fuel-switching. Unfortunately for the American taxpayer, the list goes on and on, and some of the demands are even worse than simple pork expenditures: Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan has demanded a carbon tariff, or “border adjustment” as it is being called these days, on manufactured goods entering the United States from countries without similar emissions controls, a substantial restriction on free trade that invites retaliatory measures from our trading partners. President Obama, to his credit, has rejected this approach, so far, as protectionist. In a similar vein, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio has called for “a bill that promotes the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing through targeted retooling assistance and border-equalization measures. A great risk of a weak bill is that U.S. industries incur increased costs, and as a result, cheaper products would be imported from abroad.”
In their effort to come up with a bill that will satisfy everyone, Graham, Kerry, and Lieberman have met with the industry groups that environmentalists usually vilify, among them the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, Edison Electric Institute, American Petroleum Institute, Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, National Mining Association, American Farm Bureau, Association of American Railroads, American Forest and Paper Association, and Air Transport Association. But there isn’t enough booty to placate all the rent-seekers. Recently, Conoco-Phillips and British Petroleum expressed their belief that the oil and gas industry was treated unfairly by the House’s cap-and-tax, because it didn’t receive as many freebies as did clean coal. The nuclear-power industry, too, has expressed displeasure with its share.
Which suggests there is a possible silver lining to this unseemly quid pro quo: By trying to satisfy everyone, the Green Three may end up satisfying no one, thereby sparing the United States this legislation and its potentially ruinous consequences, which include trillions of dollars in misspent capital, higher prices on practically every good produced in the United States, and a permanent reduction in our global competitiveness, particularly vis-à-vis Asia and the European Union. And all of this for little or no real environmental benefit.
Rep. Henry Waxman gave away the farm to pass ACES in the House, so there isn’t much left for the senators to use to buy off the remaining special interests. Assuming that the House’s climate legislation represents the upper limit for revenues generated by carbon taxes, and that the industries that stand to profit from ACES won’t accept a less lucrative deal, how will Kerry, Lieberman, and Graham find enough financial grease to keep the political wheels moving? Who knows? But it is certain that the nation will be better off if they don’t.
1994 and 2010 -- By: John J. Pitney Jr. | read this item
Republicans hope that 2010 will be a rerun of 1994. There are some striking similarities, which should give them hope. But there are also key differences, which should give them pause.
As was the case 16 years ago, big fiscal measures and a muddled health-care proposal have hurt the president’s standing. In fact, Obama is a bit less popular than Clinton was at this point in the election cycle. In early 1994, Clinton’s Gallup approval rating stayed between 50 and 58 percent. Since the start of the year, Obama’s numbers have varied between 47 and 52 percent.
Then, as now, polls showed the public giving low marks to Congress. The chair of the Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski, was in deep ethics trouble, as is the current chairman-on-leave, Charles Rangel. House Speaker Tom Foley was in danger of losing his seat, as is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
In recent months, statewide elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts have signaled erosion in Democratic support. In 1993, Republicans won the Virginia and New Jersey governorships, and Kay Bailey Hutchison won a special election to succeed Lloyd Bentsen as a Texas senator, becoming the first Republican to hold that seat since Reconstruction. In May of 1994, Republican Ron Lewis won a Kentucky House seat that had not belonged to a Republican in more than a century. The result startled Democrats, including the president. In his memoirs, George Stephanopoulos recalled Clinton’s reaction: “It’s Nazi time out there. We’ve got to hit them back.”
As Clinton’s comment suggests, the Democrats of 1994 had a low opinion of their grassroots opponents. Back then, many of those opponents were religious conservatives. Rep. Vic Fazio (D., Calif.), chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, lashed out at “the fire-breathing Christian radical right.” Without meaning to, Fazio and company gave the impression that they were putting down all evangelicals. Likewise, current attacks on “teabaggers” reverberate beyond their intended targets. Liberal Democrats sometimes sound as if they regard much of the country as truck-driving, gun-clinging, Harvard-professor-arresting yahoos. Seeming to sneer at voters is seldom smart politics.
A myth has developed about 1994: Democrats were oblivious to danger until Election Night. “We were caught napping,” says House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. “Nobody’s caught napping now.” But in reality, 1994 wasn’t nap time, either. Fazio called the Kentucky result “a wake-up call.” Charles Cook, an election expert trusted by both sides, said: “The question is whether Democrats are going to take a hit, take a big hit, or take ‘the big hit’ — that is, lose control of both chambers.” Democrats knew that something bad was heading their way; they just couldn’t stop it.
One important difference, however, is that the GOP congressional leaders of 1994 had much higher profiles than John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, though it’s not clear what that means for this year: Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole had been national figures for years, but their prominence was a mixed blessing at best. Gingrich was great at inspiring the Republican grassroots. He was also becoming a bogeyman in Democratic fundraising letters. Dole lent the party gravitas without giving it an appealing face. When Dole delivered the GOP response to Clinton’s 1994 State of the Union, journalist Lloyd Grove observed his “Mister Rogers-meets-Freddy Krueger smile.” The GOP’s current state of “leaderlessness” is not necessarily a bad thing. Today, Democrats want a punching bag, but so far, they’re mostly swinging at the air.
In 1994, House Republicans had been in the minority for 40 years, so they did not have to worry about bad memories from their last time at the helm. This time, Democrats will remind voters of the various scandals and policy failures that helped end GOP control just four years ago. GOP majorities have tarnished the party’s reputation for spending restraint among its fiscal-conservative base (though last week’s votes to abandon all earmarks will surely help in that regard). According to the Pew Research Center, 63 percent of respondents had a favorable image of the GOP in 1994, compared with only 46 percent today. That’s the bad news for Republicans. The good news is that Democrats have suffered a similar drop.
The most important differences between the two years stem from the depths of the country’s problems. In 1994, the deficit was 2.9 percent of gross domestic product. In 2010, it’s 9.2 percent, and the Baby Boom generation stands 16 years closer to busting Social Security and Medicare. Back then, the Cold War had recently ended and the scope of terrorism was not yet clear. Now the threats are painfully obvious.
If the Republicans want to present the electorate with a serious policy agenda, they will have to deal with these problems in a realistic and mature manner. That won’t be easy. Deserving victory never is. – John J. Pitney Jr. is the Roy P. Crocker Professor of American Politics at Claremont McKenna College.
The Boren Supremacy -- By: Duncan Currie | read this item
Shortly before the February 25 health-care summit, President Obama unveiled his proposal for comprehensive reform, which was broadly similar to the Senate legislation that won approval on Christmas Eve but also borrowed some ideas from the House bill that passed on November 7. “The administration’s package includes nearly every major [problem] that caused me to vote against the first piece of health-care legislation last fall,” grumbled one congressman, adding that “there is no chance I am voting for this bill, because it raises taxes on businesses, creates job-killing mandates, grows the government, and cuts services to seniors.”
Those sound like standard Republican talking points — but they came from Oklahoma Democrat Dan Boren, who has been a persistent critic of both Obamacare and his party’s cap-and-trade energy scheme. Indeed, the 36-year-old Boren, who refused to endorse Obama during the 2008 campaign, may well be the most conservative Democratic lawmaker on Capitol Hill.
Compared with other Democrats who represent districts that went for John McCain, Boren is also unusually popular back home. Consider a recent survey by Public Policy Polling (PPP), a Democratic outfit based in Raleigh. “Dan Boren is the first Democratic member of Congress Public Policy Polling has found with an approval rating over 50 percent since last October,” PPP reported last week, “and because of that he holds a solid lead over all of his potential Republican challengers for this fall’s election.” According to the poll, most Democrats (55 percent) and a plurality of Republicans (47 percent) in Oklahoma’s second district approve of Boren, as do 52 percent of Obama voters and an equal share of McCain voters. Boren leads his closest GOP rival by 16 points.
Moreover, the poll suggests that if his constituents were better informed about his position on Obamacare, Boren’s numbers would be even higher. Roughly a third (32 percent) of survey respondents incorrectly thought that Boren had supported the Democratic health-care bill last November, and another 38 percent weren’t sure how he had voted. Only 17 percent of Boren’s constituents favor the legislation; 61 percent oppose it, including a plurality (42 percent) of Democrats.
“They’ll have to walk across my dead body if they want my vote on this issue,” Boren told Fox News last week, referring to House Democratic leaders. “This is so galvanizing in my district. I think the votes are not there, and I don’t see where we get them.” According to the PPP survey, Obama’s approval rating in OK-2 is a dismal 27 percent, and 64 percent of Boren’s constituents feel that congressional Democrats are too liberal. “They can break my arms,” he told Fox. “They can do whatever they want to. They’ll never get my vote — ever.”
Boren’s largely rural district comprises a hefty chunk of eastern Oklahoma. Once solidly Democratic, it started becoming more Republican in the 1980s and has recently turned into a GOP stronghold at the presidential level. Yet even though the second district voted overwhelmingly for George W. Bush in 2004 and McCain in 2008, Boren has romped his way to three consecutive landslides. He won election to Congress by a 32-point margin in 2004, the same year Bush carried OK-2 by 18 points. Four years later, McCain took the district by 32 points while Boren coasted to reelection by 40 points. That 72-point gap was the biggest such differential in any congressional district.
“Dan Boren’s district contains 40 percent of all Democrats in the state,” says University of Oklahoma political scientist Keith Gaddie. “But they’re not your typical Democrats. They’re rural, old-school Democrats.” In cultural terms, southeast Oklahoma resembles east Texas, and Boren’s constituents include a sizable number of pro-life evangelical Christians. OK-2 is among the poorest rural districts in America, yet it boasts a high rate of homeownership, contains the 45,000-acre McAlester Army Ammunition Plant, and has weathered the economic slump better than many other impoverished areas. (To be sure, the local economy is hardly booming, but it has notexperienced crushing job losses.)
Much of Boren’s popularity reflects the stature and legacy of his father, David Boren, a Yale-educated Rhodes Scholar who governed Oklahoma from 1975 to 1979 and then spent 15 years as a U.S. senator. Boren père, who has been president of the University of Oklahoma since 1994, remains the most popular and influential political figure in modern state history. During the 1980s, he stood out among Democrats as a relatively hawkish conservative; for example, Senator Boren championed the Reagan tax cuts, backed aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, and endorsed Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination.
His son has garnered a similar reputation in the House. While the younger Boren is no Jim DeMint, he has consistently bucked the Democratic leadership on a range of issues, including taxes, energy, guns, and abortion. His opposition to Obamacare is no surprise. “He knows where his constituency is on health care, and he’s not going to go against that,” says Gaddie.
For Boren, there is zero risk in attacking his party on health care — quite the opposite, given public opinion in OK-2. Other Blue Dog Democrats are in a much tougher position. Take Allen Boyd, a seven-term congressman who represents a district on the Florida panhandle. After supporting the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade legislation in June, Boyd rejected Obamacare in November. Now he’s facing a primary challenge — from Al Lawson, the top Democrat in the Florida state senate — as is North Carolina’s Heath Shuler, the former NFL quarterback who joined Boyd in voting against the Democratic health-care bill last fall.
Michigan’s Bart Stupak voted forthe health-care bill, but only after Democrats agreed to insert his anti-abortion provision. The Stupak Amendment is now complicating House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s efforts to pass the Senate bill. Earlier this week, the Detroit Free Press reported that Connie Saltonstall, a former Charlevoix County commissioner, would be seeking to oust Stupak in the Democratic primary. Saltonstall made clear that health care was the chief impetus for her campaign: In a statement, she declared that Stupak “has a right to his personal, religious views, but to deprive his constituents of needed health-care reform because of those views is reprehensible.”
Does Boren expect the health-care bill to win House approval? The odds of passage “are probably over 50 percent,” he says. “But it certainly is going to be a squeaker if it does pass.” Either way, he believes the issue has damaged his party’s electoral prospects. “Aside from the politics, it’s really bad public policy,” Boren adds, contending that the Democrats should have tried to enact health-care reform “on an incremental basis.”
As for the economy, he regrets that President Obama missed an opportunity to bring the two parties together on a recovery package in early 2009. “We could’ve very easily had a bipartisan stimulus,” Boren says. Instead, the stimulus, which Boren voted for but criticized, wound up fueling partisan acrimony. Obama campaigned as a unifier — but you can’t do that while governing from the left, Boren argues. After the 2010 midterm elections, whether or not the GOP retakes Congress, Obama “will have to come to the center.”
While polls indicate that it will be a strong Republican year nationwide, Boren must be considered the heavy favorite in OK-2. “Dan Boren represents pre-culture-war Democratic politics,” says Gaddie. “In his district, that still matters.”
– Duncan Currie is deputy managing editor ofNational Review Online.
Health-Care Hell -- By: Jonah Goldberg | read this item
The time for talk is over.
So proclaimed the most talkative president in modern memory. I can’t remember when Barack Obama said that. Maybe it was during the first “final showdown” on health care. Or maybe it was the third. The fifth? It’s so hard to tell when pretty much every week since the dawn of the Mesozoic Era, either Obama or Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid has proclaimed that it is now Go Time for health-care reform.
So you’ll forgive me if I’m somewhat skeptical about the possibility that the health-care reform debate is about to come to an end.
The president recently said, “Everything there is to say about health care has been said, and just about everybody has said it.”
But wait. If everything, pro and con, has been said about a subject by everybody, that means someone isn’t telling the truth, right? I mean, if you’ve said X and not-X, that means you’ve probably said something that isn’t true.
That, at least, is the impression I got this week listening to Obama make his closing arguments for health care at rallies in Pennsylvania and Missouri. It’s telling that the president — long in favor of a single-payer system — is selling his health-care plan on the grounds that it will increase “choice” and “competition,” reduce “government control,” and “give you, the American people, more control over your own health insurance.”
You know your sales pitch for a government takeover of health care hasn’t worked when you have to crib rhetoric from free-market Republicans. And that’s after you’ve already tried to pin your plan’s unpopularity on the ignorance of the American people.
Obama’s talking points track reality about as well as the screenplay for Avatar. Indeed, the same week he was hawking competition, choice, and less government, Obama backed a new Health Insurance Rate Authority that would do even more to cement big health-insurance companies into their new role as government-run utilities.
This latest gambit is of a piece with the White House’s demonization of the health-insurance industry. I have no love for that industry myself, but let’s get some perspective. As of August, the health-insurance industry ranked 86th in terms of profit margins — behind anemic industries such as book publishing (38th), specialty eateries (71st), and home-furnishing stores (84th), according to data compiled by Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute.
Insurance companies account for less than 5 percent of American health-care spending — less than hospitals (31 percent), doctors (21 percent), and medicine (10 percent). But because health-insurance companies are unpopular, Democrats are beating up on them, even though if Democrats are serious about containing costs, the cuts will have to come from those other slices of the pie.
But enough with the substance. The health-care debate ceased being about substance a long, long time ago. Fair or not, the Democrats’ plan is unpopular, period. There is simply nothing Obama can say that will change that fact before Democrats vote for it. That hasn’t stopped him from talking out of every side of his mouth. But outside the Obama bunker, no serious pollster, pundit, or pol in Washington disputes this basic point: Obama cannot take the stink off this thing.
And that’s why every Democrat is contorting himself like a yoga swami in a hatbox, trying to figure out how to pass it. (Note: If it were simply popular among Democrats, it would have passed months ago.) The latest idea involves the “Slaughter Solution” — named after House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter — which would allow the House to fix-and-pass the Senate version of the bill without ever voting on the Senate version, or something like that.
But here’s the thing: There is no “over” to this debate. Obama, Pelosi & Co. have demonstrated time and again that no deadline is final if it means losing. Meanwhile, if Obamacare passes, Republicans will run on a promise to repeal it, and that means we’ll be debating health-care reform at least through 2010. Then, depending on how the election goes, the repeal debate will become part of the legislative process. That will in all likelihood carry the debate into the 2012 presidential election. In other words, there is time for talk as far as the eye can see.
Now, part of me thinks this is too cruel a future to contemplate. I can’t remember whether it was pederasts or mattress-tag removers, but I’m pretty sure someone in Dante’s Inferno is condemned to spend eternity listening to a C-SPAN panel on community rating, preexisting conditions, and rate pools.
But it’s a better prospect than losing. That’s one point that has bipartisan support.
Why Obama Needs a Republican Congress -- By: Rich Lowry | read this item
The undertakers of Bill Clinton’s political doom showed up in Little Rock, Ark., in 1992 for a meeting with the president-elect two months before his inauguration. They were the leaders of the Democratic Congress, and they might as well have been draped in black crepe.
“You can trust us,” House Speaker Tom Foley told Clinton, in an assurance as false as it was sincere. “We all want to make this administration succeed.”
Two years later, Clinton stood among smoldering political ruins. Democrats had lost both houses of Congress. A Republican upstart had defeated Tom Foley. In trusting the Democratic leadership in Congress, Clinton had nearly destroyed his presidency.
He learned a bitter lesson in the perils of trying to govern a center-right country in league with a left-wing Congress. It’s not an accident that the most sustained period of political success for any of the last three Democratic presidents, outside of their initial honeymoons, came after Clinton lost Congress. Only then was he forced to govern from the center.
If Pres. Barack Obama is ever going to regain the ground he’s lost as a bipartisan healer determined to transcend ideological divisions, he’ll need to have Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Majority Leader Harry Reid or both shunted back to the minority. For Obama, a Republican Congress could be a counterintuitive political boon.
Recent history suggests that there are two broad options for a Democratic president yoked to a Democratic Congress. He can, like Clinton and Obama, get along with Congress and ineluctably get pulled to the left of the electorate. Or he can, like Jimmy Carter, keep his distance and his relative moderation, and suffer an acrimonious relationship that brands him as ineffectual.
In theory, it should be possible to escape this double bind. But Democrats with control of both the executive and the legislative branches have an irresistible FDR complex. They consider it their duty to establish vast new programmatic edifices, or die in the trying. Truer to his moderate-sounding election campaign than Clinton or Obama, Carter resisted this urge — and got a primary challenge from Ted Kennedy.
Outside of any ideological predilections, Congress is a drag. Congressional leaders generally don’t make appealing national figures. They rule over an unwieldy (and often unseemly) institution and rise to prominence based on their appeal to their fellow members, not their stage presence or post-partisan personas. At the health-care summit a few weeks ago, Pelosi and Reid characteristically jangled as Obama soothed. He’d have been better off without them — not for the first time.
On health care, the hog is on the wire, as they say in the Midwest. Either way it goes — win or lose — it’s going to hurt. Obama got in this situation partly out of excessive deference to the Democratic majority. It considered any serious compromise with Republicans anathema, and even now a faction persists in pushing for the out-of-reach public option. Since the bill was too ambitious to garner comfortable margins for passage, gross and self-serving special deals became indispensable to its progress. Obama has been saddled with the fallout, although he’s obviously been a willing victim.
He forcefully pushed for a stimulus bill loaded with years’ worth of pent-up liberal spending priorities, a cap-and-trade bill greased with corporate giveaways, and the health-care bill that features a new partisan outrage every other day. All of this positions Obama further to the left, and deeper into politics-as-usual, than before he signed up with Pelosi and Reid.
A Republican Congress would give him a handy foil and force him, right in time for his reelection campaign, into strategic bipartisanship. The Republican takeover in 1994 seemed the end for Bill Clinton. Long after Tom Foley had been forgotten, though, Clinton signed major bipartisan welfare-reform and deficit-reduction bills, while making incremental steps on health care that were popular and sustainable.
Obama probably doesn’t consider a Republican Congress in his interest. But with all he’s done to bring one about, who knows?
The Democrats Won't Talk About This Provision -- By: Mona Charen | read this item
On March 9, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said:
You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future.#…#We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy.
Pity the Democrats. They just can’t get their message out. Not with a charismatic president (who has delivered 52 speeches on the subject), control of both houses of Congress, the gooey enthusiasm of 90 percent of the press, and more than a year of ceaseless agitation. Their efforts have been thwarted, as they imagine it, by “misinformation,” “distortion,” and the “special interests.” So influential are these dark forces that the leadership cannot shout over them. Speaker Pelosi must pass the grossly unpopular bill in order to get the peace and quiet she needs to explain its virtues.
In fact, on this legislation’s most important variable — cost — Americans see through the optimistic projections. Asked by Rasmussen whether the health-care plan will cost more than currently estimated, 81 percent of voters said yes and 66 percent said it was “very likely” to exceed projections. Doubtless the Democrats can explain that Americans believe this only because they’ve been duped by lies and clever ad campaigns, not because 60 years of recent history demonstrate conclusively that government programs, particularly open-ended entitlements, nearly always exceed projected costs. In 1966, Medicare cost taxpayers $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that by 1990, we might be spending as much as $12 billion. The actual 1990 figure: $107 billion. In 1987, Congress estimated that the Medicaid DSH (disproportionate share hospital) costs would be less than $1 billion in 1992. The actual cost: $17 billion.
But since Speaker Pelosi is so eager for us to know the details, let’s indulge her. Among the specifications of the House bill that passed last November are several sections that mandate racial and ethnic quotas for medical schools and other federal contractors. As Allan Favish reported in The American Thinker, the bill specifies that the Secretary of Health and Human Services, “in awarding grants or contracts under this section#…#shall give preference to entities that have a demonstrated record of#…#training individuals who are from underrepresented minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds.”
This, along with other provisions, is broad enough to cover every medical, nursing, and dental school and teaching hospital in the country and guarantees the institutionalization of racial, sex, and ethnic quotas in perpetuity (though the use of the word “underrepresented” before “minority” ensures that the quotas will not apply to Asians or Jews).
The rationale for these quotas, insofar as there is one, is that African-Americans and Hispanics have, on average, poorer health than other groups. Liberals assume that these disparities are the result of discrimination or lack of access to health care rather than other factors like poverty, eating habits, heredity, and fitness. If medical and dental schools are required to admit more minority applicants, newly minted minority professionals will tend to those “underserved” populations.
Of course, medical and dental schools have been practicing affirmative action for decades, but they’ve had trouble recruiting large numbers of minorities. Part of the problem is that African-Americans do not tend to gravitate to math and science (the solution to which is to be found in families and schools). Still, for the past few decades, less qualified minorities have been offered spots in medical schools, with the result that: 1) those minority professionals who would have qualified without affirmative action bear a stigma, and 2) less qualified minority graduates fail licensing exams at much higher rates than their classmates. Is it a service to the African-American or Hispanic communities to provide them with physicians and dentists who are less capable than others? Will it improve health outcomes for them to be treated by less qualified professionals?
President Obama asked this week whether anyone could oppose “holding insurance companies accountable” and “bringing down costs for everyone.” Funny, he doesn’t ask whether we object to this: a provision on “maintaining, collecting and presenting federal data on race and ethnicity” in order to “facilitate and coordinate identification and monitoring#…#of health disparities to inform program and policy efforts to reduce such disparities.” That’s an engraved invitation to social engineering.
But then, even to mention it is probably contributing to the “fog of controversy.”
In Praise of the Rotation of Power -- By: Charles Krauthammer | read this item
As the Afghanistan War intensifies — Marja, soon Kandahar, and the steady arrival of 30,000 new American troops — it has come to be seen as Obama’s war.
Not so. It’s become America’s war. When the former opposition party – habitually antiwar for the last four decades — adopted, reaffirmed, and escalated a war begun by the habitually hawkish other party, partisanship fell away, and the war became nationalized.
And legitimized. Do you think if John McCain, let alone George W. Bush, were president, we would not see growing demonstrations protesting our continued presence in Iraq and the escalation of Afghanistan? That we wouldn’t see a serious push in Congress to cut off funds?
Why aren’t we seeing those things? Because Barack Obama is now commander-in-chief. The lack of opposition is not a matter of hypocrisy. It is a natural result of the rotation of power. When a party is in opposition, it opposes. That’s its job. But when it comes to power, it must govern. Easy rhetoric is over; the press of reality becomes irresistible. By necessity, it adopts some of the policies it had once denounced. And a new national consensus is born.
In this case, the antiwar party has followed the Bush endgame to a T in Iraq and has doubled down in Afghanistan. And there is no general restiveness (over this, at least).
The rotation of power is the finest political instrument ever invented for the consolidation of what were once radical and deeply divisive policies. The classic example is the New Deal. Republicans railed against it for 20 years. Then Dwight Eisenhower came to power and wisely left it intact, and no serious leader since has called for its repeal.
Similarly, Bill Clinton consolidated Reaganism, and Tony Blair consolidated Thatcherism. In both cases, center-left moderates brought their parties to accept the major premises of the highly successful conservative reforms that preceded them.
A similar consolidation has happened with many of the Bush anti-terror policies. In opposition, the Democrats decried warrantless wiretaps, rendition, and detention without trial. But now that they are charged with protecting us from the bad guys, they’ve come to view these as indispensable national-security measures.
Some other Bush policies have been challenged by the new administration, with its proposed civilian trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Miranda rights for the Christmas Day bomber, and its pledge to close Guantanamo as of two months ago. But even in these cases, the governing administration is bending to reality. If (or, in my view, when) Obama does send KSM back to a military tribunal, that institution will become fully legitimized, understood to be the result of practical, empirical considerations rather than of a mere George Bush whim.
This is not to say that the rotation of power is all about consolidation. It’s also about challenge. Obama may have accepted (if grudgingly) much of post-9/11 anti-terror policy — even the wars — but he’s raised a fundamental challenge to three decades of Reaganite domestic orthodoxy.
This is also to the good. The Reaganite dispensation of low taxes, less regulation, and reliance on markets should be challenged, lest it become merely rote and dogmatic. Obama has offered a bracingly thorough attack on that dispensation with his unapologetic embrace of a social-democratic agenda whose essence — more centralized government exercising its power through radical health-care, energy, and education reform — is the overthrow of Reaganism.
I’ve made clear what side I take in this debate. I’m encouraged that Obama has been defeated on cap-and-trade and is on the defensive on his health-care reform. I’m somewhat more sympathetic — but still uneasy — when it comes to his vision of turning college education into a federal entitlement. But for all the hand-wringing about broken government, partisanship, divisiveness, and gridlock, it’s hard to recall a more informed, more detailed, more serious, more prolonged national debate than the one we’ve heard on health-care reform.
True, the rotation of power inevitably results in stops and starts and policy zigzags. Yet for all its inefficiency, in the end it creates a near-miraculous social stability by setting down layers of legitimacy every time the opposition adopts some of its predecessor’s reforms — while at the same time allowing challenges to fundamental assumptions before they become fossilized.
So, in the middle of the current food fight, as the plates and the tarts and the sharper cutlery fly, step back for a moment. Hail the untidiness. Hail democracy. Hail the rotation of power. Yes, even when Democrats gain office.
High Marks -- By: Kevin Williamson | read this item
Through a change to House rules, Democrats in that chamber of Congress have banned earmarks that deliver funds and contracts to private, for-profit enterprises. Senate Democrats probably will ignore their colleagues’ new policy, but House Republicans have just one-upped it, voting amongst themselves to forgo all earmarks, whether to businesses, local and state governments, or nonprofit institutions. They will do so unilaterally, giving up their earmarks while challenging Democrats to do the same.
This is one sign that the GOP is getting serious about rededicating itself to the cause of fiscal restraint, and the politics are pretty good: Either the Democrats will be shamed into going along, or the Republicans will have a vital edge on a very popular issue.
And it’s worth noting which Republicans voted for the moratorium. “What’s surprising isn’t the holdouts,” said one congressional aide just before the vote. “What’s surprising is who isn’t holding out. The appropriators are usually hesitant about giving these up. But the ones you might expect to hold out, like Rep. Jerry Lewis, are on board.” Lewis is the California Republican who served as chairman of the omnipotent Appropriations Committee before the GOP lost its majority in the House. He remains the ranking Republican on the committee and on all eleven of its subcommittees. In other words, he’s a hardcore appropriator with the PIN for the national ATM card. The fact that he voted the right way, even on a largely symbolic measure such as earmarks, is a good omen for budget hawks.
Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona has been a reliable crusader against earmarks, and he’s pleased that the moratorium will give Republicans a chance to rebuild their reputation for fiscal discipline. “I’ve wanted for years just to challenge Democratic earmarks,” he says, “but I couldn’t in good conscience do that when we had 60 percent of the earmarks, and then 40 percent [after the GOP lost its majority].” And he likes the timing, too: “The Democrats are going to be under tremendous pressure to follow suit and ban all earmarks. Right now, the Democrats are in a particular pickle because of health care, where they need every vote. It’s going to be very difficult for them to make a change this unpopular with their caucus and keep the votes they need for health care.”
It’s not surprising that the Democrats targeted earmarks for businesses — under Obama and Pelosi, the party has become ever more brazen in its contempt for private enterprise, whether it’s insurance companies or defense contractors. And like the president’s anti-waste initiative, the Democrats’ anti-earmarks pledge targeted a tiny slice of the pie: Earmarks to for-profits amount to only about 10 percent of such spending. For the Democrats, it’s not the spending, but the profit: The private-sector earmark and its Siamese twin, the no-bid contract, are hate totems for the Left.
It is easy to find instances of business-related earmark abuse, but the nonprofit sector is in many ways a worse offender. That’s because the for-profit sector very often is obliged to provide some useful good or service in exchange for federal funds. There are probably better ways to get that done than no-bids and earmarks, but consider some of the things that have been funded by these measures: In Massachusetts, the Boston Globe reports, 16 contractors received just under $30 million in funds in the last defense-appropriations bill, for projects including the development of new rifle optics and high-tech ceramic body armor. Better rifle scopes and better body armor are something that our guys in Iraq and Afghanistan might be interested in.
You know what they’re probably not interested in? The Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at the City College of New York. That vanity project for the scandal-ridden Harlem boss was funded in part by a $2 million earmark secured by none other than Charles B. Rangel, who was at the time also leaning on corporate donors with business before his powerful Ways and Means Committee. Under the Democrats’ rule, those next-generation rifle scopes and body armor will be excluded from earmarks funding, but non-profit projects such as Goodtime Charlie’s monument to himself will remain fully eligible for targeted infusions of taxpayer schmundo. So will such urgent national priorities as pig-odor research projects in Iowa. That’s Nancy Pelosi’s version of clean government.
“If taking care of the for-profits took care of the so-called corrupting earmarks, that would be one thing,” Flake says. “But we have a lot of what are essentially for-profits masquerading as non-profits.” He singles out Concurrent Technologies: “Its executives make $500,000 a year and max out their political contributions. They’re just one example. We have a lot of earmark consortiums and earmark incubators that are nonprofits that distribute to for-profits. It’s more complicated than the Democrats think.”
It’s true that earmarks, like foreign aid and food stamps, carry a charge beyond their real weight: They’re an itty-bitty piece of a federal budget dominated by entitlements, defense spending, and interest on the debt. But if we’ve learned anything from the health-care debate, it’s that piecemeal reform often is preferable to game-changing, revolutionary reform. Sen. Jim DeMint is pushing an identical measure for Senate Republicans, though Flake acknowledges that he has “a steeper hill” to climb on the issue.
The House Republicans have played this one well, and the Democrats will have to either get with the program or get used to being the Party of Earmarks. – Kevin Williamson is a deputy managing editor of National Review.
