The Mistake of Assuming the Existence of GOP Core Principles

In setting the stage for the current health care reform debate, the Obama administration made a significant (and in retrospect questionable) strategic decision; instead of following the typical Democratic playbook and framing the debate around covering the uninsured, they instead chose to frame the debate around the need to contain costs. At the time, this seemed like a brilliant idea. After all, it is universally acknowledged that the cost of health care is out of control and that something must be done to "bend the curve." By framing the debate in this way, you build momentum for change by emphasizing the unsustainability of the status quo. Moreover, containing the costs of programs like Medicare had long been a staple of GOP politics. By marrying health care reform to the goal of cutting costs, the Obama administration figured it could blunt many of the most likely criticisms from the GOP (e.g. that the Democrats were proposing some expensive new entitlement program).

But as the "death panel" discussion of the last few weeks has illustrated, the Obama administration appears to have committed the classic political error of underestimating the shamelessness of the GOP. The Obama administration assumed (incorrectly) that the GOP has core principles that it will not sacrifice for the sake of political expediency. They were wrong. The party that has spent the four decades attacking Medicare and trying to cut its expenditures is now openly accusing the Democrats of trying to kill senior citizens by taking away their Medicare coverage. Republican-affiliated groups are running ads warning seniors that the Democrats want to take away their health care and euthanize them. The party that has literally spent decades complaining about Medicare demagoguery on the part of Democrats is now itself engaged in Medicare demagoguery to a degree that would make even the most shameless Democratic politician feel uncomfortable.

There is a moral to this story. You can't outflank a party that doesn't feel tied to any particular policy position. The GOP will oppose the Democratic agenda using whatever means and whatever arguments it thinks will be effective, regardless of whether they contradict everything the party supposedly stands for. The sooner that Democrats understand this, the better able they'll be to deal with it.

UPDATE: To get a sense of the current state of our political discourse, check out this post at the National Review by Andy McCarthy (who, by the way, is now completely barking mad). McCarthy is angry at his own publication, the National Review, for publishing an editorial that ever so mildly admonishes Sarah Palin for her "death panel" remarks (while implicitly defending them). McCarthy writes:

I don't see any wisdom in taking a shot at Governor Palin at this moment when, finding themselves unable to defend the plan against her indictment, Democrats have backed down and withdrawn their "end-of-life counseling" boards. Palin did a tremendous service here. Opinion elites didn't like what the editors imply is the "hysteria" of her "death panels" charge. Many of those same elites didn't like Ronald Reagan's jarring "evil empire" rhetoric. But "death panels" caught on with the public just like "evil empire" did because, for all their "heat rather than light" tut-tutting, critics could never quite discredit it. ("BusHitler," by contrast, did not catch on with the public because it was so easily refuted.)

First, as is his wont, McCarthy lies pretty badly about what was actually being proposed. He characterizes a completely sensible and non-controversial provision (which was, until a few weeks ago, championed by key Republicans)--a provision that would have reimbursed doctors for voluntary counseling about living wills and health care directives--as creating "end-of-life counseling boards."

But then he goes truly off the deep end and compares this completely innocuous provision to an enemy state with thousands of nuclear missiles aimed at us. But that's not all, a little further down in the post he takes issue with the Editors grudging acknowledgment that Obama doesn't actually want to kill old people:

I happen to think that something like death panels is exactly what is desired by Obama — who is an abortion extremist, who supported a form of infanticide when he was an Illinois state legislator, and who has wondered aloud about the value of end-of-life care provided for his own grandmother.

He goes on to explain:

The whole point of health-care "reform" is to enable something other than the combination of individual liberty and market forces — namely, government bureaucrats — to do the inevitable rationing.

Of course, if we were to let "liberty and market forces" do the rationing when it comes to health care for the elderly, the result would be no health care for most elderly Americans. That's because elderly people consume a lot of health care and therefore it makes no economic sense for private insurers to cover them (at least at affordable rates). That's why we have Medicare in the first place. That's the problem Medicare was designed to solve. It is thanks to the "government bureaucrats" that grandma gets to go to the doctor at all.

So to sum up, McCarthy is livid about the (imaginary) evil death panels that Sarah Palin managed to save us from and believes that Obama wants to create such panels in order to cut off care for the elderly, thereby allowing them to "wither away prematurely" (which, apparently, Obama wanted to happen to his own grandmother). McCarthy, on the other hand, believes we should let "liberty and the market" take care of our elderly people, a suggestion that would demonstrably result in most elderly people not having access to health care.

This man--this lunatic--is writing for THE flagship conservative publication in this country.