Oh my: Kill the bill, says … Howard Dean

From Robert Tracinski’s TIA:

TIA Daily • December 13, 2009

COMMENTARY

The Pledge

The biggest mystery about the health-care bill is why we’re still debating it. By any normal political calculation, it should have been dead months ago. No piece of legislation on this scale, a reform that affects every American, has ever been passed by Congress without public opinion behind it and significant bipartisan support. Yet this bill is now unpopular by a very wide margin—61-36 in the latest poll—and it has not attracted any significant backing from Republicans.

All it would take would be for one Democratic senator to come out and say that it’s over, that he won’t vote for the bill and it won’t pass. So why hasn’t anyone done that yet?

The answer is that the Democrats sitting on the fence are not just afraid of the small-government “tea party” types on the right, or the independent voters who have swung decisively against the bill. They are afraid of the Democratic “base” on the left. No one wants to be singled out as the senator who killed the most cherished item on the left’s agenda. No one wants to be the first Democratic senator to come out against the bill, for fear that he or she will then be targeted by the far-left fanatics from the MoveOn.org-Huffington Post-Daily Kos faction.

As a matter of practical politics, this is a rational fear, so to counteract it I have a modest proposal. Those of us who oppose the bill have tried threatening Democratic senators with a negative incentive: the withdrawal of our votes and our active support for their opponents. How about enticing them with a positive incentive? Let’s pledge to give our support to the re-election campaign of the first Democratic senator to come out against the health-care bill. If enough of us make that pledge, it would counteract the political threat from the far left.

The deal is this: come out against the health-care bill, and we will pledge to donate time or money to your next re-election campaign, and those of us who live in your state will give you our votes. We will do it because of your stand on this one bill, regardless of any disagreement we may have with your other policies.

But here’s the catch: we’ll only do it for the first Democratic senator to declare clear and unequivocal opposition to the whole bill. You can’t earn it by opposing one provision but implying that you would support the bill with minor amendments. And you can’t earn it by jumping on the bandwagon after another Democrat takes the heat by being the first to oppose the bill. No, our support goes only to the Democrat who sticks his or her neck out to kill this bill.

And there’s a catch for us, too. We have to actually mean it, and we have to follow through. We have to be willing to support a Democrat we may not like, out of gratitude for this one political act. But I think the senator who steps up to kill this bill will deserve our support. He or she will have taken a significant political risk to stop a threat to our liberty. And it has been a long time—far too long—since any of our political leaders took a risk for the cause of liberty.

Here’s what you can do: send this e-mail to all of your like-minded friends to get the maximum possible exposure for this idea. Get as many people as possible to take this pledge of support and—here is the crucial part—to send it to as many senators as possible. (Remember, to support a senator’s campaign, you don’t have to live in the same state.) The pledge won’t work unless we get a lot of people to sign it, and unless they let the senators who are on the edge about this bill know about it. The senators who are persuadable on this issue need to know that they have something to gain, and not just something to fear, from blocking the bill.

Take the following message, which I have also put up at TIA’s Health Care Guide (www.TIADaily.com/healthcare), and send it by e-mail, fax, or snail mail to the senators whose votes it is most likely to sway. (I’ve given a list below of some of the top candidates.) Or even phone it in to the senators’ office.

Dear Senator,

I think you know that the health care bill handed down to you by the Democratic leadership is a disaster and that it does not deserve your support. But I understand why you might be reticent about being the first Democrat in the Senate to go on record opposing the bill. You are afraid that the far left wing within your own party will blame you, and not Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama, for the failure of the bill. You are afraid that they could target you for defeat in the next election, either by backing a challenger in the primary or by convincing your Democratic “base” to sit home in the general election.

To compensate, I pledge that I will offer you my support in your next election. I will make a significant contribution of time or money, and I will give you my vote—if you take the lead as the first Democratic senator to declare unequivocal opposition to the whole health care bill.

I am not someone who would normally support you, but I am willing to do so because the health care issue is so important to me, and the bill being debated in the Senate is so bad, that it overrides any disagreement I have with you on other issues. If you are willing to stick your neck out to preserve my health-care freedom, you will have earned my enthusiastic support.

So that you know this pledge of support is serious, I give you my contact information below and encourage you to remind me when the time comes to make good on my promise of support.

Be sure when you send this to include your contact information, as proof that you are serious enough about this pledge to, in effect, put yourself on the senator’s fundraising mailing list.

JDPerren on December 15, 2009 at 6:39 PM