I Feel Like I Win When You Lose

There’s a lot to love in David Frum’s take on the success of health care reform in the US House. For starters, the title: WATERLOO. Hee! (For the kids out there, that’s OMG! LOL!!!) Even though Frum’s not someone I much agree with, it’s refreshing to read a thoughtful assessment of the GOP’s performance. He thinks it was as pathetic as I do.

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994. …

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the ‘doughnut hole’ and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

Italics mine own.

Frum goes on about how the allegedly conservative media (let’s face it, there’s nothing conservative about those people) kept leaders who knew better from making a deal, but that’s not really servin’ it up good. There are Republicans in the House and Senate who know, as I know, that something had to be done about health care, they were just too afraid to do it. So what if it meant losing a seat? If you’re not there to provide real, lasting help to your constituents, why are you there at all? They weren’t “trapped” as Frum has it, they chose to throw in their lot with those who scream racial and other vile epithets, who denigrate science and knowledge in favor of disinformation and propaganda, and who would do nothing rather than solve very real problems. That’s the reality, but otherwise Frum’s not far off.