Robert Reich Doesn’t Get It
Robert Reich doesn’t get it in saying why Republicans are winning the health care debate. Here’s what Reich recently wrote:
What we learned in August is something we’ve long known but keep forgetting: The most important difference between America’s Democratic left and Republican right is that the left has ideas and the right has discipline. Obama and progressive supporters of health care were outmaneuvered in August, not because the right had any better idea for solving the health care mess but because the rights’ attack on the Democrats’ idea was far more disciplined than was the Democrats’ ability to sell it.
Reich’s arrogance is galling to thinking people. What ‘the left’ has going for it is a goal that’s older Obama. That isn’t an idea. That’s my definition of an antique.
I also take offense at Reich’s assertion that the right didn’t have better ideas than the Democrats. That’s insulting to people like Paul Ryan and Tom Coburn. Ryan, Coburn, Nunes and Burr put together legislation that’s easy to read, that doesn’t cost trillions of dollars to implement and that doesn’t artificially lower costs with price controls or rationing.
It’s foolish to think that ‘the right’ won this fight alone. Joining in the fight were healthy numbers of independents and some conservative Democrats. Reich would know that if he looked at President Obama’s plummetting approval ratings. You don’t get to 45 percent without a steep erosion of support from independents.
I say the Democrats’ “idea” but in fact there was no single idea. Obama never sent any detailed plan to Congress. Meanwhile, congressional Dems were so creative and undisciplined before the August recess they came up with a kaleidoscope of health-care plans. The resulting incoherence served as an open invitation to the Republican right to focus with great precision on convincing the public of their own demonic version of what the Democrats were up to, that it would take away their Medicare, require “death panels,” raise their taxes, and lead to a government takeover of medicine, and so on. The Obama White House, a veritable idea factory brimming with ingenuity, thereafter proved unable to come up with a single, convincing narrative to counteract this right-wing hokum. Whatever discipline Obama had mustered during the campaign somehow disappeared.
The fact that the Democrats offered “a kaleidoscope of health-care plans” speaks loudly that the Democrats don’t have a set of guiding principles apart from universal health care coverage. The American people won’t sanction the government takeover of our health care system if it isn’t thought through more clearly than that.
The last thing the American people will respond to positively is the Obama admininstration and Speaker Pelosi saying “Trust us.” We’ve seen how badly their projections are with regard to economic growth and job creation coming from the stimulus. We’ve seen their deficit projections be off by $2,000,000,000,000. We’ve heard President Obama say that the Democrats’ health care plan will save money only to have Doug Elmendorf’s CBO say that the Democrats’ health care plans would bend the curve UPWARD, not downward.
In short, Democrats shouldn’t attempt to radically change our health care system until they’ve thought this through. This is far too important an issue to take on in such a haphazard way.
Here’s the bottom line to this: We’ll reject any congressman or senator who can’t explain in detail what the bills do.
Technorati Tags: Reform, Robert Reich, Health Care, Democrats, Paul Ryan, Tom Coburn, Devin Nunes, Richard Burr, Patients’ Choice Act, Republicans
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
September 2nd, 2009 at 11:52 am
In his very first sentence he was wrong on two counts: first, the last time a Democrat had a real idea about beneficial legislation that would truly help the country was sometime back in the early 60s or late 50s; second, given their drive to become just like the Democrats in the first six years of this century, and the disarray this has caused in the party, I hardly think the Republicans can be called “disciplined”.
Now, we out here in the bushes (that’s anywhere outside of D.C.) have enough discipline to target snake oil salespeople and have been doing so without the help of the President or his slick-looking, mass-produced signs, but that’s (at this point) quite different from saying the party has discipline.
And as soon as they (the party) give us a conservative (no, Mitt is not a conservative) then maybe we can get organized and get some real discipline, too. In the meantime, the discipline of the donks is all that’s holding their failure known as “health care reform” together.
September 3rd, 2009 at 6:39 am
Robert Reich never got it, archtypical academic liberal wingnut.
Great on theory, but a few rails missing on the main line.