Republican Death Trip
By PAUL KRUGMAN
I am in this race because I dont want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I dont want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America. So declared Barack Obama in November 2007, making the case that Democrats should nominate him, rather than one of his rivals, because he could free the nation from the bitter partisanship of the past.
Some of us were skeptical. A couple of months after Mr. Obama gave that speech, I warned that his vision of a different kind of politics was a vain hope, that any Democrat who made it to the White House would face an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow cant bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false.
So, hows it going?
Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.
This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.
Right now, the charge thats gaining the most traction is the claim that health care reform will create death panels (in Sarah Palins words) that will shuffle the elderly and others off to an early grave. Its a complete fabrication, of course. The provision requiring that Medicare pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling was introduced by Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican yes, Republican of Georgia, who says that its nuts to claim that it has anything to do with euthanasia.
And not long ago, some of the most enthusiastic peddlers of the euthanasia smear, including Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, and Mrs. Palin herself, were all for advance directives for medical care in the event that you are incapacitated or comatose. Thats exactly what was being proposed and has now, in the face of all the hysteria, been dropped from the bill.
Yet the smear continues to spread. And as the example of Mr. Gingrich shows, its not a fringe phenomenon: Senior G.O.P. figures, including so-called moderates, have endorsed the lie.
Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is one of these supposed moderates. Im not sure where his centrist reputation comes from he did, after all, compare critics of the Bush tax cuts to Hitler. But in any case, his role in the health care debate has been flat-out despicable.
Last week, Mr. Grassley claimed that his colleague Ted Kennedys brain tumor wouldnt have been treated properly in other countries because they prefer to spend money on people who can contribute more to the economy. This week, he told an audience that you have every right to fear, that we should not have a government-run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.
Again, thats what a supposedly centrist Republican, a member of the Gang of Six trying to devise a bipartisan health plan, sounds like.
So much, then, for Mr. Obamas dream of moving beyond divisive politics. The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the G.O.P. with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh.
The question now is how Mr. Obama will deal with the death of his postpartisan dream.
So far, at least, the Obama administrations response to the outpouring of hate on the right has had a deer-in-the-headlights quality. Its as if officials still cant wrap their minds around the fact that things like this can happen to people who arent named Clinton, as if they keep expecting the nonsense to just go away.
What, then, should Mr. Obama do? It would certainly help if he gave clearer and more concise explanations of his health care plan. To be fair, hes gotten much better at that over the past couple of weeks.
Whats still missing, however, is a sense of passion and outrage passion for the goal of ensuring that every American gets the health care he or she needs, outrage at the lies and fear-mongering that are being used to block that goal.
So can Mr. Obama, who can be so eloquent when delivering a message of uplift, rise to the challenge of unreasoning, unappeasable opposition? Only time will tell.
Which is all mildly entertaining in a black kind of way but most Australians, including everyone in the major parties, refuse to confront its implications.
Our Great and Powerful Friend, our ally and protector, has become a fractured and dysfunctional society that increasingly tries to promote and protect its self-identified global interests by the use of crude force. On any objective analysis it is a deeply disturbing situation that can only get worse. Yet hardly anybody wants to talk about it or even admit there is a problem.
Maybe like climate change, the enormity of the potential calamity we are facing is so great that it’s better just to ignore it. Trying to confront it would be too depressing.
I agree it’s a very serious situation – when a great and powerful ally seems to be going psychotic. Not sure why you think it can only get worse. I don’t think that’s clear. The Republicans may just play themselves out of the game until they become a little more moderate. (Note: I said ‘may’. I’m not sure I believe it will happen, but it seems quite possible to me.)
Well the best we can do is engage in speculation informed by past tendencies, and the evidence is not encouraging. The people involved in US public policy seem to be split into two antagonistic groups who are incapable of agreeing about anything apart from how much each one loathes the other, while the bulk of the citizenry is uninterested and uninformed. Meanwhile foreign policy lacks any coherent strategy or indeed objectives and often involves the use of force and coercion for ideological or emotional reasons that lack any rational basis.
I can’t see any counter-influences developing that might reverse these tendencies. Meanwhile the issues that have proved beyond the capacity of the US to cope with, such as inevitable decline as a world power, massive illegal immigration, chronic government deficits and above all global warming, are unlikely to go away.
Strictly speaking it’s nobody’s business but theirs of course but the implications for Australia are profound and few people in positions of power and influence seem inclined to analyse them.
Healthcare is a diabolical problem for American public policy. It is more expensive per capita than ours but their life expectancy is less. But I am more optimistic than the doomsayers. The conspiracy theories of the feral right (now) are fairly typical of the way the fringes of the US political system works (and always has). Clinton had a mini industry going while Harpers ran a long article attacking Bush Senior’s war record. And Reagan, Nixon and Johnson all had mini co ops churning out the attack ads etc..(sometimes with reason). Even saintly FDR was public enemy number one for the Hearst papers. Jackson, Johnson and Lincoln in the 19th century were all vilified in ways that make today’s offerings fairly mild. Despite the pomp and ceremony politics US style is not for the faint hearted
The American system can be very flexible when it needs to be. Especially when the economy is under threat. Clinton pushed through major welfare reform & Teddy Roosevelt busted the trusts in the face of opposition of their parties and constituencies. It helps having less party discipline. The successful presidents are those who build coalitions in both Houses (esp the Senate), like Johnson (for all his other failings), Reagan and FDR. I think Obama is like Kennedy whose legislative achievements were modest. Charisma doesn’t rate compared to hard nosed dealmaking. When the crunch seems inevitable I think workable reform will happen over the shrieks of the now very powerful special interests.
The pity of it is the seemingly absolute inability of Americans to ‘learn’ or be influenced by other countries’ health care systems. The UK NHS is consigned to some socialistic wasteland. France, considered to have the best current healthcare wouldn’t get a look in. Can you imagine the Australian participants in a current US-Australian dialogue putting the hard word on their allies to follow our lead, not that it would have any influence on the rabid right.
Having spent some time in the US and been exposed to the partisans I’m as fearful as Krugman. Obama can’t afford to lose this one.
On a slightly tangential note, is there any sign of Missing Link returning? It seems an article like this would appear in it.
I’m sure I read recently that US life expectancy is skewed by greater early death of young men and that late-life expectancy is higher in the US than in most of the Euro countries. So that might be the base for a criticism of the US, but not of the healthcare system.
I’ve seen sensible people argue that the introduction of a system like ours in the US will lead to a substantial drop in R&D for drugs, so we have a stake in the outcome as well.
“Ive seen sensible people argue that the introduction of a system like ours in the US will lead to a substantial drop in R&D for drugs, so we have a stake in the outcome as well.”
I somehow doubt that.
“From this new estimate, it appears that pharmaceutical companies spend almost twice as much on promotion as they do on R&D. These numbers clearly show how promotion predominates over R&D in the pharmaceutical industry, contrary to the industry’s claim.” http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050001
Moreover a large chunk of R&D is done in the Govt sector is is done by the private sector with Govt money.
Not a problem, Pedro. Big Pharma in America spends twice as much on marketing as it does on R&D. Restricting spending on marketing and providing incentives for R&D would take care for your (real or imagined) problem.