Romney’s campaign to change our hearts

Through the 50s and 60s, Republicans paraded their fear of communism and eventually scared off hundreds of thousands of mainstream American voters. Today, they’re terrified by entitlement-driven federal deficits—the Medicare your mother loves, they say, is going broke. 

Washington, they argue, needs a new team, new leaders who didn’t see action in foreign wars but can keep their heads in bankruptcy proceedings.

Amazingly, bland Mitt Romney and his green idealist Paul Ryan may be positioning their presidential campaign to scare off the same set of voters that Goldwater did: voters who just don’t have confidence in another Republican crusade.

Is talking about vouchers, bankruptcy, and 10-year breathing spaces good politics in swing states? Can a business reputation and a superior advertising budget turn voters inside out on whom to trust on social services?

The latest poll of swing states by Quinnipiac/University/New York Times/CBS News hints that that will be extremely difficult.

By roughly 10 points, voters worry more about Medicare than the federal deficit; and, on health care, they trust Obama over Romney by a similar margin.

Can Republicans, in just over two months of campaigning, turn the Democratic Party—the mother, guardian, steady friend, and now reluctant reformer of Medicare—into a negligent parent? Will humble middle-class voters send their loved ones off to live with those stern winners on the hill?

Do people without means on the South Side of Chicago look for a new friend on the North Side when they need help? 

Would they rather shop for a friendlier insurance provider or go to their government representative, or even to another young community organizer?

Any day now, we’ll probably be bombarded by a more traditional Republican message: the services we cherish as a caring society demand economic growth and American business smarts.

Mainstream Republicans have more than entitlements to worry about.

An insurgency that wins elections and Republican primaries has to be motivated by more than anger and alienation. Protest movements grab hold of extreme ideas, not for the aesthetics of simple thinking, but because they want to fix big problems. That’s what makes the Tea Party relevant and dangerous; they haven’t rejected America’s cocky optimism. They want to put it back to work.

Conservative thinkers do want to reform Medicare and do want Americans to practice more rigorously their love of liberty and consumer choice. That’s fine with the Tea Party, but that’s not what gets their legions out to campaign and vote. They don’t trust modern government and its allies because they don’t like the results—an America not growing fast enough to give every able American a chance to have decent job and raise a proud happy family.

The special election in New York State’s 26th Congressional district confirmed that Medicare is a full-fledged American institution. The extraordinary election of a Democrat in this district signaled clearly that voters are not prepared to turn Medicare into a consumer voucher. Middle aged voters are not eager to spend their golden years shopping for adequate or ideal private health insurance. While Democrats and Rep. Paul Ryan might like to make Paul Ryan the ballot issue, NY-26 settled the issue.

However, this one special election does not mean that the center, the status quo, is safe. The Tea Party’s candidate Jack Davis not only captured 9 per cent of the vote. He took those votes from Democrats as well as Republicans, and campaigned on a larger, even more intractable issue: America’s ability to defend and restore its economy—an economy that once generously underwrote their participation in the American dream. That issue is being forced to the surface, not by political miscalculation in Washington but by harsh circumstances across the country. It will be the ballot issue next year not Paul Ryan’s or Timothy Geithner’s fiscal plan.

Tea Party candidate Jack Davis made it clear that Obama’s vision of collective social responsibility will not be the only proposition up for review in 2012. America’s economic contract—free markets and shared prosperity—will also be challenged. Davis campaigned as classic can-do protectionist:

“‘We have to grow, dig or manufacture to produce wealth,’ Davis said. ‘Unless you do that, you’re just growing your debt. We have to make everything we use or consume.’

‘Cities and communities that have lost the jobs are a lot more receptive to my message of saving jobs and getting out of those free trade agreements,’ he added.

Davis isn't against all trade with foreign countries. He just thinks it should be fair trade. If we trade with another country, he said, that country should buy as much product from the U.S. as we buy from them. If not, they get slapped with a tariff on the difference.”

Click on: http://thebatavian.com/howard-owens/jack-davis-its-all-about-saving-american-jobs/26115

Moderates and their exceedingly comfortable allies in American centers of global capitalism must appreciate that if they don’t soon put the mixed economy—a financially stable public sector and an investing private sector—back to work radicals will make constructive market-based reform much more difficult.

In politics, as in industry, if you’re not going to bother to maintain your machinery you had better figure out how to live without it?

Obama’s partisan hammer

Barack Obama’s speech yesterday outlining a $4 trillion framework for restoring America’s fiscal health introduced a brutal new argument to his plea for bipartisan decision-making: if you don’t compromise with me now, I’ll campaign against your biggest ideas in next year’s presidential election.

Sitting in a campus hall crowded with the sons and daughters of America’s most fortunate, Republican lawmakers were given a 55 minute preview of what Obama could repeat to hundreds of similar audiences around the country. Referring to Representative Paul Ryan’s (and now the Republican Party’s) plan to address the fiscal crisis, the President exclaimed:

“They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that's paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs. That's not right. And it's not going to happen as long as I'm President.”

Click on:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/us/politics/14obama-text.html?pagewanted=4&_r=1

Democrat efforts to sell a selective tax increase on the top two per cent of income earners failed politically in the last two elections. The argument that Washington needed the money was disputed; nothing tangible seemed to be at stake. The issue bored young Democrats and fueled Republican claims among independents that Obama liberals were out to socialize America. Now it’s out: without new money vital federal services, not just bureaucracy will suffer.  

Yesterday, Obama put Medicaid and Medicare, along with free enterprise and rugged individualism, front and center in the American Dream. In asking for shared sacrifice and the preservation of a national safety net for seniors, the disabled and the poor, Obama offered the Republican’s a stark choice: find the center with me in Washington this summer or I’ll define it without you, with the American electorate.

Bipartisanship needn’t only appeal to a politician’s better angels. Otherwise, democratic government wouldn’t work. Republican leaders in the Sixties co-operated with Democrats on civil rights legislation and Democrat leaders in the Nineties co-operated with Republicans on welfare reform, not because they had better social skills and no radicals in their caucuses, but because they feared standing completely outside the American consensus.

When the center is undefined, it’s easy to propose big new ideas. However, when the center is given a voice, a radical idea can quickly be seen as extreme.

If Obama succeeds in securing a fiscal agreement with Republicans, in large part, it will be because they conclude that Obama’s speech yesterday is closer to where Americans want to end up than their “Path to Prosperity.” They’ll re-discover the virtue of compromise and the ancient wisdom of allowing bold new ideas a little more time to mature.

Health service charges and customer empowerment

In a rather teasing but ham-fisted attempt to make healthcare user fees respectable, Canadian economics columnist Neil Reynolds evoked the words of Tommy Douglas, certainly the political father of universal public healthcare in Canada. Douglas once advised: “I think that there is value in having every family, and every individual, make some individual contribution . . .  I think it keeps the public aware of the cost and gives people a sense of personal responsibility. Even if we could finance (medicare) without a per capita tax, I personally would advise against it.” Reynolds concluded from this, “Mr. Douglas, the pragmatic socialist, was right. Free medical care lets people remain personally indifferent to costs, discourages thrift and encourages debt. Medicare needs Tommy Douglas memorial user fees.


Click on: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/tommy-douglas-the-pragmatic-socialist/article1806775/

OK, Douglas didn’t endorse a punitive user fee and didn’t suggest that in appearing to be “free,” health services would be heedlessly abused by patients. Nevertheless, Reynolds was right to raise Douglas’s statement in considering healthcare reform. There is a connection between making an individual contribution (paying something) and individual responsibility. Let’s suggest as well: when you pay even a nominal fee for a service, you may likely experience a heightened concern for its quality.


It's easy to feel abused under a regime of taxation without representation. It’s revolting. There are risks as well, however, in an exchange in which you claim a service for free. 


In Tommy Douglas’s vision, albeit of a less atomized society, the patient is an interested shareholder in a health service he or she owns as a citizen and taxpayer. It seems possible that a shareholder’s sense of empowerment could be enlivened by introducing some form of service charge.


Taxes are high today as well; democratic socialists of the past would be impressed. However, today millions of patients pay no income taxes. And taxpayers generally have no accurate idea what share of their taxes actually goes to public healthcare services. Those jurisdictions that levy a separate healthcare tax only use the separate tax to pay a fraction of the total healthcare budget. This, in practice, may have the unfortunate affect of bolstering the impression that healthcare is affordable—indeed, a bargain.


The financial costs of rising utilization rates for health services are expected to grow almost twice as fast as the cost pressures caused by our aging populations, as noted recently by The Canadian Health Services Research Foundation. Click on: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/healthcare/stop-blaming-seniors-for-soaring-health-costs/article1793802/.


User fees to abate these costs have been widely discredited. To make a real difference, they’d end up unfairly discouraging those with lower incomes. Nevertheless, as the area of greatest growth in costs, surely, the direct relationship between the doctor/prescriber and the prospective patient/client is critical to reform. Conceptually, some form of service charge should help prod both parties to act most efficiently and empower the patient to insist on quality service.


If Tommy Douglas’ reformers could stand up to a full-fledged doctor’s strike, surely, we can consider making  changes to the healthcare system we have inherited—and which, like to one he challenged, also claims to be a seamless virtuous whole.