Over the past week, Republican White House hopeful Michele Bachmann unleashed a tidal wave of campaign promises aimed at washing away the American social contract. After pledging to get gas under $2 a gallon, Bachmann announced she would make the U.S. the "king daddy dog" of energy by shutting down the EPA. And while Rep. Bachmann suggested she'd reduce the minimum wage, she promised that President Bachmann "would turn things around within one economic quarter, in part by cutting corporate taxes and eliminating capital gains and inheritance taxes."
But Bachmann's most telling moment was her warning that failure to repeal the 2010 health care reform law would mean conservatives couldn't "ever again...elect as president a Republican." With that, Michele Bachmann became just the latest Republican to admit her party isn't afraid that health care reform will fail, but that it will succeed.
This week,
Bachmann announced "We plan to unveil a formal health care plan in the coming weeks and boasted that she was "the tip of the spear fighting against the implementation of ObamaCare in the United States Congress," As
CNN reported, Bachmann explained why at a campaign event in South Carolina (
around the 1:41:00 mark in the video):
Bachmann stressed the need to repeal President Obama's health care reform law, or so-called Obamacare, before it "metastasizes" like a cancer and "we will not be able to get rid of it."
"You can't put socialized medicine into a country and think that ever again you can elect a Republican as president - or a conservative or even a tea partier as president - and think that somehow we're going to get back to limited government," Bachmann said. "It won't happen because socialized medicine is the definition of big government."
Put another way, Michele Bachmann isn't really concerned about a "government takeover of health care", "rationing", "the doctor-patient relationship" or mythical "death panels," but that an American public grateful for access to health care could provide Democrats with an enduring majority.
As the battle over health care heated up in 2009, Utah Senator
Orrin Hatch revealed the same motivation behind his "
holy war" to stop President Obama and Congressional Democrats. Hatch, who
in 1993 co-sponsored legislation featuring an individual health insurance mandate similar to that included in the Affordable Care Act he now opposes,
told CNS in November 2009 why he launched his jihad against Democrats trying to provide coverage for millions of Americans:
HATCH: That's their goal. Move people into government that way. Do it in increments. They've actually said it. They've said it out loud.
Q: This is a step-by-step approach --
HATCH: A step-by-step approach to socialized medicine. And if they get there, of course, you're going to have a very rough time having a two-party system in this country, because almost everybody's going to say, "All we ever were, all we ever are, all we ever hope to be depends on the Democratic Party."
Q: They'll have reduced the American people to dependency on the federal government.
HATCH: Yeah, you got that right. That's their goal. That's what keeps Democrats in power.
What Hatch in his ham-handed way was saying in public, Bill Kristol for decades was telling Republicans in private.
It was, after all, the former Quayle chief of staff turned GOP strategist who mobilized total Republican opposition to the Clinton health care initiatives of 1993 and 1994.
In December 1993, Kristol galvanized Congressional Republicans with a private memo titled, "Defeating President Clinton's Health Care Proposal." As the American Prospect recalled, Kristol's war plan:
Darkly warned that a Democratic victory would save Clinton's political career, revive the politics of the welfare state, and ensure Democratic majorities far into the future. "Any Republican urge to negotiate a 'least bad' compromise with the Democrats, and thereby gain momentary public credit for helping the president 'do something' about health care, should be resisted," wrote Kristol. Republican pollster Bill McInturff advised Congressional Republicans that success in the 1994 midterm elections required "not having health care pass."
Kristol warned his GOP allies that a Clinton victory on health care would earn the thanks of a grateful American public and guarantee Democratic majorities for the foreseeable future. "The Clinton proposal is also a serious political threat to the Republican Party," Kristol wrote in his
infamous December 3, 1993 memo, adding:
"Its passage in the short run will do nothing to hurt (and everything to help) Democratic electoral prospects in 1996. But the long-term political effects of a successful Clinton health care bill will be even worse--much worse. It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for "security" on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government."
And that, for Kristol, meant it had to be stopped at all costs:
"The first step in that process must be the unqualified political defeat of the Clinton health care proposal. Its rejection by Congress and the public would be a monumental setback for the president; and an incontestable pice of evidence that Democratic welfare-state liberalism remains firmly in retreat."
Kristol's central strategy in obstructing Clinton's success in resolving the health care crisis was simply to deny its existence. Not content to offer a "simple, green-eyeshade criticism of the president's health care plan," Kristol insisted the GOP must "kill it outright." While advocating many of the same free-market reforms later peddled by George W. Bush and John McCain (tax credits, medical savings accounts, etc.), Kristol implored his allies that "passage of the Clinton health care plan in any form would be disastrous." His prescription:
"To repeat: The president's plan would have a seriously detrimental effect on the quality of medical health care. And the president's plan is unnecessary: There is no health care crisis, and the reforms suggested above show how real problems can be directly addressed."
And so it came to pass. In the Senate, long-time health care reform supporter Bob Dole (R-KS) in early 1994 adopted Kristol's mantra:
"Our country has health care problems, but no health care crisis."
The rest, as they, is history.
This time around was little different. While conservative pollster and spinmeister Frank Luntz in May 2009 suggested masking Republican opposition ("You simply MUST be vocally and passionately on the side of REFORM"), from the moment the votes were tallied for Barack Obama in November 2008, the GOP's amen corner - including Bill Kristol - were clear that Democratic health care reform had to be stopped at all costs.
That was the word just after the 2008 election from Michael Cannon at the Cato Institute. Parroting the think-tank's claim that Obama's health care proposal is "socialized medicine," Cannon sounded Kristol's old clarion call:
"Blocking Obama's health plan is key to GOP's survival. Ditto Baucus' health plan. And Kennedy's. And Wyden's."
Approvingly citing Norman Markowitz' assertion at PoliticalAffairs.net that "national health care [and other measures] will bring reluctant voters into the Obama coalition," Cannon fretted that "making citizens dependent on the government for their medical care can change the fates of political parties." For arch conservatives, that formula spells trouble for the GOP.
Columnist James Pethokoukis also picked up Kristol's baton. Writing in US News, he recounted the dire warning from a Republican strategist who told him, "Let me tell you something, if Democrats take the White House and pass a big-government healthcare plan, that's it." Concerned that "creating the Obamacare Class would pull America to the left," Pethokoukis echoed Cannon's obstructionist line.
And in February 2009, Bill Kristol left no doubt that he believed the Republican Party should repeat the obstructionism that destroyed the Clinton health care plan in 1993 and 1994. GOP leaders in Congress, Kristol told Fox News' Neil Cavuto, should emulate the roadblock Republicans of the 1990's to block Obama's economic recovery package now and everything else - including health care reform - later:
"But the loss of credibility, even if they jam it through, really hurts them on the next, on the next piece of legislation. Clinton got through his tax increases in '93, it was such a labor and he had to twist so many arms to do it and he became so unpopular...
...That it made, that it made it so much easier to then defeat his health care initiative. So, it's very important for Republicans who think they're going to have to fight later on on health care, fight later on maybe on some of the bank bailout legislation, fight later on on all kinds of issues. It's very important for them, I think, not just to stay united at this time, though that's important, but to make the arguments."
Days before Obama's inauguration, failed would-be RNC chairman Kenneth Blackwell decried the stimulus proposal, arguing its passage would make "harder for Republicans to retake the White House." Days later, Rush Limbaugh recycled Kristol's 1990's message on health care, declaring:
"Obama's plan would buy votes for the Democrat Party, in the same way FDR's New Deal established majority power for 50 years of Democrat rule...Put simply, I believe his stimulus is aimed at re-establishing "eternal" power for the Democrat Party."
And to be sure, Congressional Republicans listened. In an almost perfect replay of the unprecedented GOP opposition to the 1993 Clinton recovery and deficit reduction bill, zero House Republicans and only three Senators backed President Obama's $787 billion stimulus package. In the final health care votes, not a single Republican in the House or Senate joined Democrats to come along for the ride.
Ultimately, Democratic health care reform passed in March 2010 didn't alter the political landscape for a generation. The watered-down legislation was not only complex and flawed, but President Obama's mishandling of its definition and marketing squandered much of the public's good will towards him and his party.
As for Republicans, they consistently made their priorities clear. The health of the GOP trumps the health of the American people. The third pillar of the Democratic social contract - Social Security, Medicare, and universal health care - simply had to be stopped. For Republicans, the collapse of the U.S. health care system - the 50 million uninsured, 25 million more uninsured, millions of medical bankruptcies, near-monopolies in most insurance markets, double-digit cost increases and self-rationing of care, all of it worst in the states they represent - is a small price to pay for preventing a lasting Democratic majority.
For her part, Michele Bachmann isn't taking any chances. As she told her audience in South Carolina:
"I have wept in Washington, D.C. watching what's happening to our country. This is real...
I think it's a last chance election if you ask me. So think about it very carefully. We need a miracle right now. I'm a praying woman, a believing woman, and I believe we need a miracle but I also believe that there's a God big enough to give us that miracle."
* Crossposted at Perrspectives *