An Alternate Ending For The Health-Care Saga

posted at 12:37 pm on March 1, 2010 by Doctor Zero

ObamaCare has become a nightmare America just can’t seem to escape. Every time it seems to have been vanquished for good, and relieved voters begin discussing rational market-based approaches to health-care reform… ObamaCare surges up from its damp grave, moonlight flashing from the trillion-dollar machete gripped in its fist.

Last week, we even had one of those cheesy “stingers” during the end credits to this horror film. The Republicans nuked ObamaCare into steaming fragments during Obama’s disastrous health-care summit, but the President staggered to the nearest camera and announced his intention to stuff the hot, glowing wreckage down our throats, in a political ritual that will require the sacrifice of many senators and representatives from his increasingly unpopular party.

Opponents of the health-care takeover have always hoped there wouldn’t be enough Democrats willing to sacrifice their seats to push it through. Congressional leadership has been working to steady nervous Democrats by assuring them the long-term political gains will be worth a drubbing in the next couple of elections. Socialized medicine represents a permanent re-alignment of the relationship between American citizens and their government, which will cease to be “representative” in any meaningful sense after it gains control of health care. The voters will forever become its clients, rather than its masters, and this will deliver huge political benefits to the Party that has long worshiped and nurtured the power of the State.

It’s worth going through a couple of bad election cycles for that kind of long-term reward. It’s even worth losing the White House, as Obama has spoken openly of accepting his fate as a one-term President, if he can impose such a massive change on his unwilling countrymen. The Republicans may hold both houses of Congress and the White House by 2012, but they won’t be able to do anything except clean the carpets and re-stock the mini-bars for the permanent Democrat ruling class that will soon return. Besides, the Democrats are already taking the hit for dragging this nightmare out, alternately annoying and insulting an electorate whose demands to focus on economic growth are falling on deaf ears. They might as well push ahead and collect the prize they’ve been working for.

I’d like to give wavering Democrats another possibility to mull over. There is another way the health-care saga could end.

It could end with the complete destruction of the Democrat Party.

Consider that, as unpopular as this health-care bill is now, these are its salad days. Not only will the electorate be angry that parliamentary maneuvers were used to ram it through Congress, they’re going to hate what happens in the first couple of years after the President signs it. Remember, in order to make the Congressional Budget Office pretend ObamaCare is anything but a sizzling stick of dynamite wedged into the national debt, the bill’s authors had to front-load its tax increases, and delay its benefits. This also means voters will be slapped across the face with the worst garbage from back-room deals, such as the sweetheart deals for union health-care plans, long before they see anything resembling a benefit.

It also means the economic damage from this travesty will hit first, a fiscal tsunami rolling out from a political earthquake. If there was ever a time for Democrats to abandon their childlike faith in static analysis, this is it. Let me put this simply, for the fools who still think tax increases automatically bring more money into the Treasury: the private sector will immediately begin changing its behavior, in ways that damage small-business formation and employment. They’re doing it now, based on the mere possibility this bill will pass into law. In fact, the best hope for Democrats to avoid a historic pounding in the 2010 elections would be killing ObamaCare once and for all, then taking credit for the resulting swell of relief in the private sector.

When Democrats return to their districts for a health-care reform victory lap, they’ll find more than just angry peasants with pitchforks waiting for them. They’ll also face Republicans with lightsabers. I encouraged the Republicans to attend Obama’s summit meeting, and use the opportunity to engage him, in a forum that would resist media image control. They actually did it, and the only person more surprised than me is Barack Obama. The GOP is rolling into 2010 with Boston harbor tea pumping in its veins. Republican stars were born at that summit meeting: Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and a senator from Arizona with the same name as the guy whose tired campaign for President in 2008 helped put Barack Obama in the White House. Meanwhile, the Democrat leadership consists of a walking corpse from Nevada, and an openly delusional San Francisco leftist who talks like her own caricature in an editorial cartoon.

As low as Obama’s approval ratings have gotten, he’s still the most popular figure in his party. That’s generally true of presidents versus congressional leaders… but in this case, the difference is between profound disappointment in Obama, and growing contempt for absurd figures like Reid and Pelosi. Harry Reid is so dreadful that voters will actually remember him when he’s gone. Obama will suffer, as the director who gave such cretins starring roles in a big-budget flop. Democrat Party Studios will suffer as well. Audiences will not be eager to buy overpriced tickets to their next production.

To sum up: in 2010, an energized Republican Party will address a public charged with grassroots energy, and furious over the passage of legislation they didn’t want… forced on them in the express belief they’re too stupid to understand its magnificence, and too feeble to survive without it. The Republicans will explain the only way to roll back this legislation is to decimate the party that passed it. They might just be smart enough to demonstrate how ObamaCare is the concentrated essence of everything that has gone wrong with American government – not America – over the last half-century, and present its repeal as the beginning of a comprehensive movement to cleanse the tainted ground from which it sprang.

In other words, Democrats, ObamaCare might indeed become your ticket to perpetual influence… or it might become the centerpiece of the best argument Americans will ever hear to get rid of you. You’ll have your core supporters and a few safe seats, but that’s the formula for a rump party. Americans will always insist on a vibrant opposition party, and they are wise to do so. They tremble on the verge of becoming wise enough to realize the Democrat Party doesn’t “own” its position as one of the two major parties, any more than it owned the “Kennedy seat” in Massachusetts. When Barbara Boxer says every state is now in play, believe her. She knows what she’s talking about.

It’s been a hundred and fifty years since a major American political party was erased. I’ve often wondered what it would look like, if such a thing happened in the modern era. I imagine it would take a combination of widespread voter anger, the messy death of a failed ideology, an energized opposition, and hopelessly out-of-touch leadership. Whatever remains of the “moderate” wing of the Democrat Party should consult their own imaginations, before arrogantly passing a bill that can only be rolled back over their dead bodies.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

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