Dems face day of reckoning
www.politico.com
By: Donald T. Critchlow
October 1, 2010 04:42 AM EDT Americans, in large numbers, cast their ballots in 2008 for a noble dream of post-partisan, post-racial politics. Democrats gained control of both houses of Congress and the White House for the first time since 1994. They picked up 21 seats in the House and eight in the Senate in addition to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
The Democrats were giddy with victory. They had arrived in the Promised Land! This, as their new president declared, was a moment of transformative change.
Convinced of its mandate, the Democratic Congress undertook a legislative agenda that has left the nation as polarized as ever, burdened with budgetary deficits and a national debt that threatens to transform America into a second-class country. Congressional Democrats profoundly misread the 2008 election results and have been left with a reputation as a party of grandiose ideas — with little financial sense or ability to govern sensibly.
The Democrats went shopping without looking at their checkbook balance or caring how to pay for their purchases. Whether the purchases were necessary may be debated — but everyone can agree that a buyer needs to figure out how to pay the bill.
Closer observers might have been more circumspect about the meaning of the 2008 mandate. While sick of the Bush administration, congressional corruption and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and frightened by the financial meltdown on Wall Street, Americans had not turned to the left in 2008. Exit polls showed that 22 percent of voters called themselves liberals; 34 percent described themselves as conservatives; the remaining 44 percent were moderates. These numbers were not that different from every presidential election in the past 20 years. The United States remained a center-right country.
With the sheer power of majority control, Democrats pushed through historic legislation: a massive economic stimulus program, health care reform, financial regulation, a takeover of General Motors and American International Group, and an array of other measures. Such a legislative record should have left them triumphant.
Instead, as the economy limped along with unemployment at nearly 10 percent, Democrats experienced a grass-roots backlash not seen by their party since 1854, when they passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act and reopened the slavery question. So severe was the reaction that President Franklin Pierce is still the only sitting elected president to lose his party’s renomination.
As legislative successes multiplied, political polarization intensified. Conservatives accused Democrats of leading the nation to socialism. Democrats countered that their opponents were extremists. They labeled Republicans “the party of no” — though congressional leaders such as Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) had issued “A Road Map for America’s Future,” in 2007. That plan offered detailed legislative alternatives in health care, Social Security reform and debt reduction, with many proposals scored by the Congressional Budget Office.
Instead of rehashing these ideological debates, let’s look at the Democrats’ crowning achievement: health care reform.
Aware that President Bill Clinton’s health care plan had crashed and burned, congressional Democrats and President Barack Obama crafted a plan to win over the health care industry. They assured physicians that the new plan would reimburse them, just as current private or government plans do. They told hospitals that they would no longer have to overcharge patients to cover the uninsured. Big Pharma would be allowed to charge high prices for patented drugs so the United States could maintain global drug leadership. The key to cost control was to be the public option — which would provide cheap insurance.
But once the public option ran into opposition, out of fear it would lead to nationalized health insurance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) dropped it. With that, the Affordable Health Care Act of 2010 became seriously underfunded.
The plan included no effective taxation to support the new health care costs, for fear it would be attacked as a tax-raising proposal. Claims that savings would be achieved by cutting Medicare funding down the road had no political credibility. No one believed that fees on health care equipment and testing could make up the costs. Even tort reform was rejected, so as not to alienate one of the Democratic Party’s largest contributors trial lawyers.
Instead, Democrats accepted a plan that seemed to assume that funding would magically appear. Democrats said the cost was $60 billion per year, but subsequent Medicare actuarial estimates placed the costs at $180 billion per year. Spending on health care in America is expected to rise to 24 percent of gross domestic product from 16 percent — already the world’s highest level of health expenditure, because most industrialized nations pay 9 percent to 12 percent.
The Democratic Congress’s fiscal irresponsibility was apparent in other measures as well. Take the pork-laden stimulus act. Reid’s plan to build a railroad to nowhere in Nevada might win him votes among Vegas’s big contractors and unions, but it is a waste of $8 billion.
Incredibly, Obama’s deficits after less than two years have already exceeded President George W. Bush’s deficits after eight years. To make matters worse, the Democratic Congress, for the first time in modern budget history, will not have passed out of committee any part of the proposed budget by October, when the fiscal year begins.
In the end, Americans are still searching for political leaders willing to confront this impending disaster. Polling in advance of the November elections indicates that voters think Democrats, with their visions of transformative change, are committing fiscal malpractice.
A new kind of transformative change appears to be in the air.
Donald T. Critchlow, who holds the Goldwater Chair of American Institutions at Arizona State University, is the author of “The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History.” He is completing a book about the radicalization of liberalism in the past 50 years.
© 2010 Capitol News Company, LLC
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great article and he did not evenmention AZ, KSM, the mosque, etc etc.
