Did the midterms vindicate liberal Democrats, or the paleoCons? In his election post-mortem, paleoCon icon George Will likens the neoCon Republicans' Iraq debacle to the Clinton Democrats' universal healthcare initiative. Roughly, just as popular realism has rightly rejected nation-building over there, it will--again--rightly reject universal healthcare as a federally mandated right over here. Both initiatives were cases of "irrational exuberance," and both may (normatively) and will (politically) be rejected, and on similar grounds.
The analogy fails. Universal "semi-socialized"--or even fully socialized--healthcare has not proved ruinous to the industrialized democracies that have embraced it. Nor has it proved politically ruinous to the parties that have initiated and maintained it.
True, those democracies have not allowed pharmaceutical lobbies and medical associations to dictate policy. But--post-Abramoff--is an "irrational protuberance" of special interests going always to be the salient feature of America's political physiognomy? Powerful deciders can cut Gordian knots--why not unsightly warts? Maybe the legacy-obsessed Bush XLIII would let universal healthcare go with a mere signing statement, if the Democrats insist on it (as they know they ought). But with a burgeoning national debt and deficit, the lobbies and the Cons--neo- and paleo- alike--can be counted on to raise the hue and cry against taxing and spending--especially spending to meet legitimate public needs. But straightening out the 2003 prescription drug law, which prevents our government from negotiating lower drug prices, won't cost the taxpayers a dime. The dilemma for XLIII (and his heirs-aspirant) could be: try to beat the Democrats over the head with the 1994 debacle, or preempt the healthcare issue by doing the right thing? Presumably, Nixon's ghost is happy to have signed the Clean Air Act (no slouch of a legacy, that).
Of course, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and so forth were--from the paleoCon perspective--"confidently comprehensive, continent-wide attempts to reform complex social systems"--attempts that are just too hubristically naive for serious discussion. (You know, like social security, child-labor laws and the minimum wage.) But hubristic naivete has been XLIII's stock-in-trade, and he hasn't vetoed anything Congress has sent him, yet. [Ed.-- well, only one thing: Mike Bishop reminds me that the stem cell bill was vetoed in September. But would negotiating prices with drug companies cross a similar moral boundary, in XLIII's view?]
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