{"id":3956,"date":"2010-03-22T19:09:50","date_gmt":"2010-03-22T23:09:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=3956"},"modified":"2010-03-22T19:09:50","modified_gmt":"2010-03-22T23:09:50","slug":"reactions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2010\/03\/22\/reactions\/","title":{"rendered":"reactions…"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Repeal What?<\/a>
Daily Kos<\/font><\/strong>
by BarbinMD
Mar 22, 2010<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

Death panels and dead grandmas didn’t work, so the Republican focus has shifted from "kill the bill" to repeal it<\/a><\/strong>:<\/div>\n
\n
… some of the GOP’s top voices are calling for a repeal of President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement. <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
And the Democrats’ response needs to be, what do you want to repeal first? Not discriminating against children with pre-existing conditions? Allowing children to stay on their parents insurance until they’re 26? Insurance companies not being allowed to drop you if you get sick or capping the amount they’ll pay if you have a catastrophic illness? Which ones are Republicans against? In other words, bring it on. <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And friends ShrinkRrap<\/font><\/strong><\/a> and Carl<\/strong><\/a> both pointed us to this wonder: <\/p>\n

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Waterloo<\/a>
Frum<\/font>Forum<\/font><\/strong>
by David Frum
March 21, 2010<\/div>\n

Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.<\/p>\n

It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster. Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But:<\/div>\n
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  1. \n
    It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November – by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
  2. \n
    So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So far, I think a lot of conservatives will agree with me. Now comes the hard lesson: A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    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.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
    Frum says something that will hold him in my highest regard forever.<\/div>\n
    \n
    So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours. <\/font><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
    BarbinMD<\/strong> is 1boringoldmanMD<\/strong>‘s kind of guy. And about David Frum<\/strong>. It’s not just that he’s chiding Republicans, or that he’s going after the MediaMonsters on the right, he sounds like a Conservative<\/font><\/strong>, a real Conservative. I thought they were all gone. I respect real Conservatives [I may even have a small inner-conservative inside of me]. They keep us honest. They keep us out of the utopianism that can infect the left. They are a powerful force for restraint in government – at least they used to be. The don’t try to block progress, or history. They help shape and contain new paradigms as they emerge. And, until I read Frum’s article today, I had even forgotten how they sound. For example:<\/div>\n
    \n
    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.<\/div>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    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.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
    He sounds like a person with a mind, a person who has principles he both believes in and understands. He sees a conservative perspective that could have nuanced the bill in the direction of those principles. Instead we hear screams of "Hell no!" and "Baby Killer!" The epithets of hatred. Swaggering, sword waving, doomsday rhetoric, contempt. I have nothing to say about Frum’s suggestions, except that they sound like something mature adults might think instead of the ravings of schoolyard bullies or ignorant Klansmen.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Repeal What? Daily Kos by BarbinMD Mar 22, 2010 Death panels and dead grandmas didn’t work, so the Republican focus has shifted from "kill the bill" to repeal it: … some of the GOP’s top voices are calling for a repeal of President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement. And the Democrats’ response needs to be, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3956\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}