The Republican health care plan

They finally offered one. But it seems they did this precisely so they could say they offered one — and not with any intent of actually trying to reduce the ranks of the uninsured. How do I know this? Because the GOP health reform plan doesn’t actually reduce the ranks of the uninsured:

The different goals and effects of the GOP bill are reflected in a preliminary analysis released Wednesday evening by the Congressional Budget Office, which put the bill’s 10-year price tag at $61 billion. That is far less than the $1 trillion estimate for the Democratic bill that House leaders plan to bring to the floor as soon as this weekend.

But the CBO analysis also concluded that under the GOP plan, 52 million nonelderly Americans would have no insurance in 2019 — even more than the 50 million in 2010. By comparison, the House Democratic bill would reduce the number of nonelderly Americans without coverage to around 18 million over the next decade.

So of course it costs less. It doesn’t actually do anything.

Al Schmidt never had a chance

Not even the combined weight of Philly’s media establishment could save him: The Republican candidate for controller only collected 28 percent of the vote.

Schmidt carried the hopes and dreams of a lot of folks who would like to see a genuine opposition party rise up in Philadelphia in order to give the fat, lazy and complacent Democrats a little bit of a spark to try to run City Hall honestly and effectively.

After last night, there’s two options:

• Treat Schmidt like Barry Goldwater: Not as a devastating loss for his party and movement, but as a necessary first (painful) step to rebuilding the Philly GOP to provide the competition.

• Look elsewhere.

I’m not always sympathetic to Republican candidates, but Schmidt deserved better support than he got. His head might be hanging low this morning, but hopefully he and his pals see the first option as a real opportunity, instead of deciding to let the city’s hidebound GOP establishment go back to collecting patronage crumbs.

The Philadelphia media establishment really wishes the GOP would get its act together

If three makes a trend, then we’ve quickly arrived there:

•PhillyMag:

But the perennial weakness of the Philly GOP isn’t just a Republican problem. It’s a problem for Democrats and Independents, too — for anyone who cares about the city and wants it to be better. Politics is supposed to be adversarial. In America’s two-party system, the assumption is that both parties try to win. If that assumption breaks down — if one party unilaterally disarms, as it has in Philadelphia — strange things start to happen. You end up with a Jurassic power structure, populated by large, lazy creatures incapable of adapting to new climates, like diseased stegosauruses whaling at each other in the hot sun. You end up with a broken city. A broke city. And if things get bad enough, like they’ve gotten in Philadelphia in 2009, you end up rooting for some very strange heroes. Heroes who, in any other time, you’d probably walk away from, backward, slowly.

• Stu Bykofsky in the Daily News:

Under Democratic monopoly, Philly residents have: the highest city tax rate in the nation, craven Council members cashing in on DROP, an incompetent Board of Revision of Taxes, a 25 percent city poverty rate, a pinball pay-to-play system, a Department of Human Services that kills kids, a school district with a near-50-percent dropout rate and city workers who don’t pay their taxes.

As a wholly owned subsidiary of the over-promising and underperforming Democratic Party, Philadelphia is failing.

• Kevin Ferris in the Inquirer:

Rob Gleason, the state party chairman, says, “I expect a person who’s the leader of a party to conduct a vigorous operation, raise money, have staff and committee people, and win elections. . . . I just haven’t seen that in Philadelphia since I’ve been state chairman.”

That doesn’t hurt just Republicans, Gleason says.

“Not having a viable operation allows the Democrats to run wild . . . and not be accountable,” Gleason says. “So you wind up with a dysfunctional school system and city government, and the city becomes a giant stone dragging Pennsylvania down into the Delaware River.”

It’s kind of hard to argue these points: One-party dominance will always lead to calcification and corruption. That’s not good for the city.

Here’s the problem: The modern GOP — increasingly rural, always anti-safety net, occasionally race-baiting, more willing to tax non-profit theaters than smokeless tobacco — isn’t really a good fit for Philly. There was a Philadelphia Republican who was pretty decent at collecting votes: His name is Arlen Specter, and he was chased out of the party. And do I have to remind anybody how the GOP-controlled General Assembly let Philly twist in the budget wind for the entire summer?

There might be individual Republican candidates — like Al Schmidt, who is running for city controller — who might do a fine job. But Republican winners in Democratic big cities — think Michael Bloomberg in New York — tend to be considerably more liberal than the parties they represent. In Pennsylvania and elsewhere, there’s simply less room than ever for that kind of ideological diversity within the GOP.

So, yeah, theoretically it would be good if Democrats had a little competition to run the city. But today’s real-world Republican Party doesn’t really like Philly; how could it possibly compete for votes here?

The Death of Conservatism

Three thoughts about The Death of Conservatism by Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review.

• The title promises more than the book really delivers (the “death” of conservatism is relegated to the last few pages) but it’s still worth a read. That’s because Tanenhaus’ real purpose is to offer the reader a primer on the history of modern conservatism – doing in 118 pages what Rick Perlstein has needed a couple of thousand (so far) in Before the Storm and Nixonland. (And don’t get me wrong: I love Rick Perlstein.) Call it Conservatism for Dummies.

Conservatism, Tanenhaus suggests, has been split between two impulses: One is dedicated to actual conservation, safeguarding societal order and stability; it even accepts when liberals and the left have created new institutions that have become part of the social order – and thus adapts with the times. (Think George H.W. Bush and all the other Episcopalian-Republicans who seem to have disappeared.) The other Tanenhaus calls “revanchist,” but which we might call simple right-wingery: it hews to an unchanging small-government orthodoxy and contains a revolutionary desire to unmake societal institutions it considers illegitimate, like Medicare and Social Security, that the rest of the nation has long accepted. (Think tea partiers, Rush Limbaugh, etc.) Tanenhaus, it seems, throws his lot in with the conservators instead of the revolutionaries.

• The “revanchist” element in conservatism has long been ascendant, and contains some of its major roots in — wait for it — McCarthyism. Tanenhaus:

(Joe) McCarthy was the author of what would become a staple of GOP politics over the next half century: the raid on government mounted from within government itself. Later practitioners included Richard Nixon (Watergate), Ronald Reagan (Iran-contra), New Gingrich (twice: the government shutdown of 1995 and then Bill Clinton’s impeachment), and George W. Bush (his dismissals of nine U.S. attorneys). Like McCarthy’s crusade, these later insurgencies were conceived in a spirit of hatred for a liberal elite who were perceived to be usurpers and hence subversives. For McCarthy’s followers the New Deal, with its mildly radical reforms administered by Ivy League graduates, was tantamount to treason.

That belief that liberals are somehow treasonous has, of course, survived to the modern era — with constant efforts by Republicans and the right to suggest that the presidencies of Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are somehow illegitimate. But though revanchist folks have dominated the conservative movement (and the GOP) the truth is that the politicians they put forth never deliver: Ronald Reagan, their hero, talked about government as the enemy of the people … but no major spending programs were actually cut during his presidency. George W. Bush actually expanded the Medicare entitlement. The conservative movement really does want to safeguard governmental and societal institutions, it seems — but only if they are the conservators. Otherwise, they evince a desire to (metaphorically) blow it all up.

• It’s not good for America that the right side of the ideological spectrum has come to be increasingly dominated by its demagogues and crazies. Tanenhaus again:

America needs a serious, rigorous opposition. Skeptics and outsiders perform a vital function in a democracy. It is they who ask the most uncomfortable questions, who gaze most critically at the existing arrangements of our politics and culture.

Agreed. Right now, though, the opposition is largely (though not entirely) composed of Glenn Beck acolytes who think Barack Obama is a Stalin-in-the-making because he wants people to have more and better health insurance. (Tanenhaus suggests Obama is actually quite classically conservative, because his seemingly extreme efforts, like TARP and the stimulus package, were aimed at holding society together instead of letting it fly apart.) There are some conservatives — notably David Frum at The New Majority (Tanenhaus’ example) and Conor Friederdorf at The American Scene (my example) — who are willing to call out the extremists on their side while making principled (and I’d argue wrong, but still) arguments against health reform. Their voices are too few, and too lonely, to make a difference. And that doesn’t bode well for the rest of us.

Apparently, Arlen Specter used to be a Republican or something

Even the National Republican Senatorial Committee realizes that the best way to “go negative” on Specter is to link him to George W. Bush:

The message encourages listeners to go to this website which has lots of documentation of how Republican Specter has been over the years. It’s kind of hilarious, when you think about it, but if the Republican Party is running a campaign against Specter’s Republican history, where does that leave them, exactly?

Also hilarious: Despite targeting this ad at Democratic voters, the GOP can’t help but resort to its favorite little insult — calling Specter a “Democrat Senator” instead of a “Democratic Senator.” So the GOP strategy is to insult the voters they’re appealing to AND to mock GOP stances.

Awesome.

Is the GOP getting played on the stimulus vote?

Brendan at Brendan Calling has an interesting take on the hubub over the stimulus:

I am wondering if Obama has led the Republicans into a trap.

We have seen the family planning funds get ejected, and still the GOP plans to vote en masse against the bill.

We’ve seen mortgage modifictaion get cut and still the GOP plans to vote en masse against the bill.

The bill is filled with tax cuts the GOP insisted on, and still the GOP plans to vote no en masse.

It’s beginning to look to me like the GOP opposes ANY STIMULUS AT ALL NO MATTER WHAT OBAMA GIVES THEM. And yet there is no denying that Obama went out of his way for the GOP, certainly farther than most Democrats like me would like.

I am no Obama fanboy. I’m not one of those people that comes up with excuses for politicians behaving badly. I’m not easily persuaded.

But I think this time, Obama may have led the GOP into a trap. The public overwhelmingly supports some kind of stimulus. Obama has very publicly tried to get the GOP on board, and just as publicly, the GOP has said no. It’s the standard “Lucy-pulled-the-football” play… but this time I think Obama pulled the football, because (despite my strong objections to pulling family plannign funding etc.) the Democrats can say “look at everything we did to get the GOP on board! We are trying to “change” our politics, and the GOP simply doesn’t want to cooperate! Blame them if the economy fails!”

Political cliché that now means almost nothing

I’ve heard this a lot in recent weeks, but I just ran into it again and it bears some examination. From today’s Washington Post:

“Governing is a lot more complicated than campaigning,” said Peter Wehner, a former Bush aide who is now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank. “He’s the candidate who has presented himself as moving the Earth. . . . When you set those kinds of expectations, it’s tough to pull them back.”

Strictly speaking, this is true: Governing is more complicated than campaigning. But this phrase has been popping off the keyboards of conservatives and Republicans with astonishing frequency in recent weeks, as a means of suggesting that Barack Obama is somehow already failing because he hasn’t been able to undo eight years of the Bush Administration in a single week. And that’s silly.

In his inaugural, President Obama suggested it’s time we put away childish things. But it’s in Republican interest to encourage a childish level of patience among the electorate; right now, it’s the only way the GOP can put a dent in Obama’s armor.