With Friends Like These… (Matt Parks)
In yesterday’s Washington Post, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele announced a new Republican health care initiative, the Seniors’ Health Care Bill of Rights. There seems to be something about being a state or national party chairman that leads previously sensible men to start sputtering the most embarrassingly common political clichés and the most opportunistically populist dogma. In an op-ed entitled “Protecting Our Seniors,” Mr. Steele said that “any health-care reform should be fully paid for, but not funded on the backs of our nation’s senior citizens.” That’s a hack daily double with the ubiquitous political possessive (“Our Seniors”) and an attempt to boomerang a line worn out years ago in the Clinton administration’s vituperations against the Republican congress (“funded on the backs of our nation’s senior citizens”) – with extra points for turning the merely trite into the completely inane (how do you “fund” something on someone’s back? The proper cliché is “balance…on the back”). The worst offenses in the article, however, are not rhetorical, but political.
The first “article” of the Seniors’ Bill of Rights commits the Republicans to protecting Medicare. This certainly qualifies as opportunistic populism. President Obama’s efforts to make the major healthcare “stakeholders” complicit in his plan have given the GOP the rare opportunity to get to the left of the Democrats on Medicare and Mr. Steele is determined not to miss the chance. The AARP was persuaded to swallow $500 billion in Medicare “savings” in the name of liberal solidarity. Not a few of their “retired persons” have been showing up at congressional town halls to voice their dissent and 60,000 quit the organization in July. If the Republicans can’t be the party of limited government and free markets, maybe they can gather in all the “victims” of President Obama’s cruel fiscal parsimony. After all, in the heady days of the Gingrich Revolution, the Republicans were budget-cutting little-old-lady-haters for threatening to reduce the rate of increase in Medicare spending. No doubt Mr. Steele enjoys the opportunity to turn the tables on behalf of all his demonized fellow-Republicans of the 90s. But at what price? Does the Republican Party really want to score a few momentary points with “our seniors” by tying itself to the Medicare albatross?
Politics, of course, involves politics. But it should be one of the basic rules for the leaders of political parties that their mind-numbing press release wars not undermine their party’s basic goals and principles. In his essay, Mr. Steele agrees with President Obama that “Medicare will go deep into the red in less than a decade.” His complaint: that the President and congressional Democrats are trying to “raid, not aid” Medicare. How does Mr. Steele intend for Republicans to “aid?” Before trying to figure this out, consider the commitments Mr. Steele makes on behalf of Republicans in his essay. First, once again, they must “protect” Medicare. Second, as noted above, they must reform health care without those who are the current beneficiaries of government health care programs paying the price. Third, they must especially “ensure that our greatest generation will receive access to quality health care.” Any fair-minded reader of this essay will conclude that Mr. Steele has taken every option off the table except tax increases for non-seniors – a hike in the Medicare-funding payroll tax. If he has something else in mind, the readers he is targeting – “our (high-voter-turnout) seniors” – will not appreciate his subtlety. And if he doesn’t, Republicans have further damaged their already limited post-Bush credibility as the party of low taxes and limited spending.
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