Right Wing Nut House

My latest at Pajamas Media is up, and its about the “doc fix” that failed in the senate.

A sample:

There are times when politics approaches the sublime level of art, where the sheer audaciousness and breathtaking arrogance of the players, along with the elegance of their schemes, achieves the same effect that one gets while gazing on the Pietà or watching Pulp Fiction. The shortening of breath, the quickening of the heartbeat — responses to the joy in recognizing the awesome majesty in the clever ways the greatest politicians can separate the taxpayer from his hard earned coin or simply pull the wool over his eyes while he is being fleeced.

Is this a great country, or what?

That’s the feeling I got while observing Harry Reid and the Democrats as they attempted the most brazen and shameless legislative switcheroo in quite some time.

Yes, it’s the “doc fix” or, more prosaically, the “big ugly bribe” that the American Medical Association eagerly grasped with both gloved hands and sold their principles for a little more cash when treating Medicare patients.

The story, as it broke in The Hill, is that a secret meeting took place last week between Reid, Max Baucus, Chris Dodd, a couple of White House aides (including Rahm Emanuel), and representatives of the AMA and other doctors groups. At the meeting, the majority leader offered to restore cuts in Medicare payments to doctors that were mandated by a 1997 law that was supposed to reform Medicare. Never mind that Medicare is going to go broke and that those cuts were designed to help forestall that unhappy happenstance.

Problem: Those cuts were already figured in to the health care reform bills moving their way through Congress with the lightening speed of a three-toed sloth making its way to the ground for breakfast only to alight around dinner time. The cuts were counted as “savings” in order to fulfill the president’s pledge not to add “one dime” to the deficit when passing health care reform.

No worries, says Fast Harry. And he proceeded to make an offer to the docs that they simply couldn’t refuse.

Read the whole thing.

I support health care reform. Not most of what the Democrats have been pushing as “reform,” but I agree that the system needs serious overhauling.

We need to insure those who want insurance but can’t afford it. We need to insure those who can’t get insurance, who need insurance, but are denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition. We desperately need to put downward pressure on the cost curve for health care, not only for those with private insurance but for those who are in government programs.

And we need to reform Medicare and Medicaid or we will go bankrupt.

The question is, to my mind, how much “reform” should we be attempting at one time, and whether the process we are witnessing now will make things better or make them worse.

It is things like this that have convinced me that we are legislatively overreaching on reform and that it is an impossibility that this process will produce a bill that will make things better:

Democrats on the Finance Committee, citing a Committee precedent, argued that the Baucus bill was more understandable in conceptual language than in legislative language, and pointed out that the Baucus bill was never more than one of two bills informing the final product in the Senate – that new bill, which merges the Finance bill with the more liberal HELP Committee bill, is being written behind closed doors.

Baucus, lead HELP Democrat Chris Dodd and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are set to meet this evening with representatives from the White House to chart their progress.

In other words – the Finance Committee worked for months to create a bill, which was then set aside as Democratic leaders went about writing it all over again.

The fact that the Baucus bill has been shelved as Democrats go about the bill merger process did not keep some poor soul at the Committee office from having to take the Baucus bill’s conceptual language and turn it into legislative language.

The result, with larger font and margins and double spacing, swells the product from 262 pages to 1,502.

As the article points out, the Baucus bill is deader than a mackerel, although I have no doubt some compromises worked out with moderates will survive - at least until conference committee.

But seriously, what can you say about a process that produces such a behemoth? I do not hold out much hope that the final product produced in conference will be much shorter. In fact, I think there’s a great chance that it will be even longer, even more complicated.

The reason for the bill’s length is that so many compromises had to be made and tidbits added to accommodate individual member’s concerns on the committee. What do you think a final bill will look like that will have to accommodate the many factions in the Democratic caucus? Some of the issues will have to be finessed in order to cobble together a majority. The potential for confusion and even contradiction is self evident in this process which leads me to the thrust of my objection.

The Congress is abdicating its legislative responsibility by overreaching on health care reform. There is no possible way that any member will be able to know what exactly is in the final bill, nor can we expect any member to be able to intelligently examine the legislation in order to come to a rational decision on whether they should vote for it or not.

Essentially, the Congress is throwing up its hands and tossing the health care reform bill into the laps of bureaucrats. It is they who will have to take this monstrosity and write the regulations that will govern 1/6 of our economy - all the players, the companies, the boards, agencies, departments, programs, and people who will have to deal in the real world with what Congress has wrought.

Now, to give bureaucrats their due, I’m sure they will do the best job they can, according to their lights, in interpreting whatever mess the Congress throws at them. I have no doubt that most are public spirited folk, patriotic and hard working, and very good at what they do.

But that’s beside the point. We didn’t elect bureaucrats to make law, we elected our representatives to do that. And the process we are witnessing on health care reform is not lawmaking, it is horse trading. The concepts, and mandates, and radical changes being proposed in the insurance industry are absolutely unprecedented and nobody - repeat, nobody - knows how any of it will play out in real life. Nobody knows how these changes will affect individuals. Nobody knows if the bill, in its totality, will help bring down costs or send them skyward.

Given the intimate, vital nature of reforming a system that is responsible for the life and death of 300 million people, don’t we owe it to ourselves to be as careful, and as thoughtful as possible? I challenge anyone to prove that the process we are witnessing now is “careful and thoughtful.” It has become a process not to reform health care as much as it has morphed into a process to get something - anything - passed.

As an historical example, take Reagan’s massive tax bill. That bill also ran over a thousand pages. That bill also became an exercise in vote trolling as member after member put in their little goodies, payoffs to get their votes. “A Christmas tree” was the way it was described. Budget Director David Stockman remarked “the hogs were really feeding.” All that extra horse trading resulted in a massive increase in the budget deficit and a tripling of the federal debt when both Reagan and the Congress refused to make the budget cuts necessary to get spending under control.

But that was just money. Now we’re talking about the quality of ordinary citizen’s lives not to mention actual life and death decisions. This is why the best possible outcome of all this would be failure.

Scrap comprehensive reform and rework a bill that would address some Medicare cost issues as well as perhaps opening insurance exchanges at the state level where risk could be pooled and policies sold at reasonable prices to those who want and need insurance. This could be done by offering everyone the opportunity to purchase bare bones plans that would protect them from catastrophic illness, while also selling more comprehensive plans tailored to specific needs. Perhaps these plans could be subsidized so that their cost was reasonable. Also, the idea of using Medicaid to insure some of the uninsured should be seriously examined - as long as states weren’t left holding the bag on costs.

Since Obamacare sets such a low benchmark for success (CBO says the HELP plan would still see 17 million without insurance in 10 years), such a series of small, but significant reforms would address two vital aspects of the problem while getting the ball rolling on comprehensive Medicare reform.

The state exchanges would not be easy to set up, but much easier than the public option. Medicare reform will be politically tough but its got to be done anyway. Perhaps incremental reform is the answer there as well.

I just can’t see any bill emerging from this process being anything except a real world nightmare for our health care system. That’s why I think it time to…

Stop. Think. Go back. Won’t happen, but it should.

This is the second in a series of 5 articles on the state of intellectual conservatism. Part I can be found here.

Should conservatives pay any attention to liberals who attempt to critique us?

I actually sympathize with those conservatives who reject out of hand any effort by a liberal to tell us what’s wrong with us. Sympathize - but neither do I brush off such criticism without reading and digesting it for myself.

There are a few liberals who actually make a living looking seriously at the intersection of politics, philosophy, and ideology and, through rigorous examination, while using logically sound arguments, have something important to say that I believe conservatives should take very seriously.

I should note that I don’t necessarily believe it when a liberal says they are offering their critiques because they believe it important that their philosophical opponents get back on their feet intellectually or politically so they can “challenge” liberalism. That’s stretching things a bit, boys. Let’s just leave it at acknowledging a sincere attempt by reasonable people to honestly look at history and conservative philosophy, and, in an academic sense, offer reality based criticism from their point of view.

I am in the process of writing a long, hopefully readable review of Sam Tannenhaus’s Death of Conservatism. I wish I could have done it sooner but I am a slave to time, and such an interesting, thoughtful, although ultimately flawed book deserves a serious effort. Besides, I get to crib from best conservative reviews of the book since I am so late to the party, thus making my job a little easier.

But today’s lesson comes to us via Jacob Weisberg, editor in chief of the Slate Group, former editor of Slate Magazine, and author of the book In Defense of Government. His liberal credentials impeccable, Weisberg wrote a piece a few days ago in Slate that mourned the loss of Neocon Irving Kristol and the fact that the intellectual conservatism he represented died off decades ago:

In the heyday of Kristol’s influence in the 1980s, Republicans styled themselves the party of ideas. Whatever you thought of those ideas—challenging Soviet power, cutting taxes, passing power back to the states, ending affirmative action, cutting off welfare benefits to the undeserving poor—they represented a genuine attempt to remodel government around a coherent vision. Today, as during the pre-conservative stage of Kristol’s career in the 1950s, the Republican Party takes itself much more lightly. It has fallen back upon what Lionel Trilling once called “irritable mental gestures”—crankily rejecting liberal attempts to come to grips with the country’s problems without offering any plausible alternatives. Since the last election, it has been the brain-dead home of tea parties, pro-life amendments, and climate-change denial.

Are tea parties any more “brain dead” than anti-war protests? I had my doubts that any kind of mass protest movement at the grass roots could ever arise among the highly individualistic conservatives. At this point, I have been proved wrong although I am waiting for the inevitable absorption of the tea party movement into the Republican party. All that energy has to be channeled somewhere. And since a 3rd party would be futile, there’s really only one place for the movement to go; a de facto alliance with the GOP in 2010.

Already there are signs that tea partiers are endorsing candidates for office, raising money, and will no doubt supply volunteers to some of these candidates.

I doubt there will be many Democrats on the list of tea party endorsed candidates.

I have written often of what I believe the tea party groups are really all about. It’s not really about taxes, or even gargantuan deficit spending. It is something that few liberals can grasp, although I have seen some analysis on the left come close. The kind of “change” that Obama seeks to bring to America may seem overdue to many on the left but is seen by most conservatives as an attempt to replace an America they know with an another America, one that rejects the values of their ancestors and substitutes what appears to them to be an alien vision of what America should be.

I disagree with conservatives who say the president’s race doesn’t play a role with a small, but significant minority. But those who issue blanket condemnations using that meme are clueless about what is driving this protest; it is the abandonment - or seeming abandonment - of what conservatives see as “First Principles” that includes a basic outline of the Constitution.

It can be argued that fear of change is a fact of life for conservatives but I reject that as a primary motivation because what the president has done is, in fact, revolutionary. Perhaps not to the educated and urbane who believe us far behind the social democracies of Europe in creating a welfare state. But to millions of patriotic, god fearing Americans, they feel they are losing their country and will fight to keep it.

Is this brain dead? No more so than anti-war protestors who believed that Bush was in league with big business to bring perpetual war to our shores. Or that Bush went to war in Iraq to enrich his friends and cronies. Or that the Terrorist Surveillance Program was riotously abused and that the government was spying on Bush opponents wholesale. Excessive ideology leads to excessive paranoia on both right and left. That is the lesson of America in the modern age.

In fact, Weisberg acknowledges this - at least on the right:

How did this prudent outlook devolve into the spectacle of ostensibly intelligent people cheering on Sarah Palin? Through the 1980s, the neoconservatives became more focused on political power and less interested in policy. They developed their own corrupting welfare state, doling out sinecures and patronage subsidized by the Olin, Scaife, and Bradley foundations. Alliances with the religious right skewed their perspective on a range of topics. They went a little crazy hating on liberals.

Over time, the two best qualities of the early neocons—their skepticism about government’s ability to transform societies and their rigorous empiricism—fell by the wayside. In later years, you might say Kristol and the neoconservatives got mugged by ideology. Actually, they were the muggers. “It becomes clear that, in our time, a non-ideological politics cannot survive the relentless onslaught of ideological politics,” Kristol wrote in 1980. “For better or for worse, ideology is now the vital element of organized political action.”

Reformists - and I include intellectual conservatives in that mix - have, as neoconservatives have done, accepted the New Deal and many elements of the Great Society. But their overall critique of both lies not in a rejection of the role the state must play in a modern industrialized society as so many movement conservatives do, but in the belief that value based reforms as well as more efficient allocation of resources can be achieved without destroying the “safety net” while promoting virtues such as self reliance and independence. In short, conservative reformists want to alter the liberal culture in the bureaucracy that seeks to expand their clientele rather than reduce it.

Is this a “liberal lite” approach to government? Is there enough contrast with Democrats to parlay these ideas into a successful political platform? Movement conservatives do not think so. But I believe they are viewing those toward the center through a darkened prism where attempting to address the many serious problems in our country by working with the opposition is tantamount to a betrayal. How can the application of conservative principles to the serious business of government be a betrayal - unless you believe either there are no problems to solve or the solution is to be found in dismantling government hell bent for leather.

I have been asked several times if I understand the 10th amendment or whether I believe in federalism. Sure I do - and a realistic application of the 10th as well as a healthy federalism when it comes to dealing with our nation’s problems can go a long way toward easing the crushing presence of the federal government in our lives.

But you’re kidding yourselves if you believe it will result in lower taxes or even less government. The more responsibility you pile on the states, the higher the taxes go. It would not be logical to expect as the federal tax burden is reduced, the state tax burden wouldn’t increase.

We all believe that there are many programs at the federal level that could easily be transferred to our state legislatures. Just don’t expect taxes to go down because most of those programs have constituencies of ordinary Americans that depend on them. Weaning people “for their own good” from government would be received contemptuously - and well it should be - from those who benefit directly from federal programs some would wish to do away with.

Sorry for the digression but I think part of the problem with movement conservatives and their attitude toward reformists is that they misunderstand motives and intent. The widespread belief that reformists have no principles is laughable - and fighting words if you try and accuse me of such a ridiculous notion. Applying conservative principles to the operation of government is a worthy and - dare I say - principled goal. The confusion comes in identifying “issues” as principles - a trap ideologues fall into regularly. Substituting dogma, which by its nature can be transient responses to momentary openings offered by the opposition, for immutable principles which, by definition, are unchanging, is what ideologues in the movement are all about.

In short, it is not I who lack principles, my ideological friends.

Weisberg correctly, I believe, diagnoses the switch from intellectual principles to ideological dogma and gives us a turning point of sorts while incorrectly observing the reason why a principled conservative could never support Obamacare:

There was no clearer sign of that shift than the effort by Kristol’s son, William, to prevent any health care reform legislation from passing in 1993—on the theory that the political benefit would accrue to the Democrats. Today, that sort of Carthaginian politics has infected the entire congressional wing of the GOP, which equates problem-solving with treasonous collaboration. Though the president has tried to compromise with them in crafting the last missing piece of the social insurance puzzle, even allegedly moderate Republicans are not interested in making legislation more effective, less expensive, or in other ways more conservative. They are interested only in handing Obama a political defeat.

That’s a pretty shallow, partisan analysis of why Obamacare is being opposed. I agree there is that partisan element to the opposition, but it is obvious Mr. Weisberg lives a sheltered life. Otherwise, he would have noticed that health care reform town hall meetings held by Congressmen were just chock full of people who could care less about Obama being defeated, and cared a great deal more about liberals fiddling with the most intimate, and personal part of their lives; their own health.

I have argued that there was much fear mongering on the right (and some on the left as we have seen with Mr. Grayson and several liberal ideologues) that contributed to the anger. But Weisberg is only fooling himself if he didn’t recognize the underlying reason why people who had never taken a stand on anything in their lives showed up at these meetings and howled bloody murder. If it comforts Weisberg and other liberals to believe it was all astroturfed mobs of rabid, enraged, fearful conservatives - fine. Fooling oneself is not a fault confined to the right.

But Weisberg has a point about how political opposition has deteriorated into a mindless nihilism that offers little in the way of alternatives (although the GOP health care reform plan was both substantive and ignored by the media and Democrats) on issues that need to be addressed.

For health care, as long as Democrats insist on offering a “solution” that will ultimately result in a single payer system of insurance and decisions made by government that are better left to a patient and his doctor, conservatives will oppose them with every fiber of their being. We do not see national health care as the “the last missing piece of the social insurance puzzle” but rather as an insidious attempt by government to control the personal lives of citizens - as fundamentally against conservative principles and our concept of individual liberty as anything that has ever been proposed by an American congress.

I agree with much of what Weisberg has written about intellectual conservatives and their failure to either fight the ideologues politically or challenge their dogmatism. Richard Posner saw this months ago:

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.

Nor, I trust, will they have one anytime soon.

I penned a special column for PJ Media on the 9/12 protests yesterday, pointing out the historical significance of the event; that it represents the first truly mass movement of conservatives in American history.

A sample that will no doubt bring the wrath of the right down on my head:

It is definitely an opposition movement, however. Certainly there is mass unhappiness with President Obama and his policies. And there is opposition to the Democrats in Congress. But does this really translate into electoral strength for Republicans? I am going to go out on a limb and say no. The anger here is a reaction (reactionary?) against a growing government, higher taxes, and the sense that the country that they grew up in is slipping away right before their eyes.

This is all fed, of course, by the pop conservatives on talk radio who have ginned up outrage against Obama and the Democrats. I say “ginned up” because what the president and his party have already done doesn’t need the added fear mongering being promoted by Beck, Hannity, Rush, and Savage in order for conservatives to rally. Raised taxes, cap and trade, health care reform, bailouts and takeovers, and other liberal agenda items should be sufficient to outrage anyone on the right and motivate them to protest these horrific policies. It is unnecessary to brand Obama a “communist” or even a “socialist” to realize that his policies spell disaster for individual liberty and the free market economy.

Getting caught up trying to guess the number of attendees at Saturday’s protests (as I and many others are doing today and will continue to do) is irrelevant. This is history in the making, something the United States has never seen: a genuine grass-roots conservative mass movement, activated by the new technologies, communicating effectively using the new software and hardware — and it is growing.

I received an email from a long time reader yesterday who was concerned I couldn’t see that the protests were, at bottom, “anti-American, racist, and dangerous…” There’s nothing “anti-American” about protesting anything. We are, after all, a nation born out of protest, nurtured in the bosom of contrarianism, and defining progress by going against the grain in order to right significant wrongs in our society. This is not “dangerous” by any stretch of the imagination - except to the comfort of the elites who always believe it dangerous when the hoi polloi become restless and disagree that only they in their superior wisdom are fit to tell the rest of us what to do.

As for the charge of the protest being “racist,” well, that’s nonsense. If you’re going to tar an entire movement with that epitaph based on the beliefs of a tiny fraction, then you should have no trouble referring to the civil rights movement of the 1960’s as a “Communist” movement since the CPUSA played a prominent role in the SCLC and other civil rights organizations. The same holds true for the anti-war movement where you couldn’t attend a protest without tripping over a Communist or two.

This protest movement encompasses the right in all its contradictions, it’s factions, and its various conceits. From far right nullification supporters to Rand Objectivists, conservatism in all its glory was on display. The dominant theme as it appeared to me was “Don’t Tread on Me” - the words emblazoned on the iconic Gaddsen Flag. This is both a warning and a statement of fact. The truth is, whether due to agitation by talk radio hosts or the very real belief held by millions that President Obama is going too far, too fast, in his quest to “remake” America, there is a sizable segment of the population who has stood up and said “enough.”

In their struggle to define what it is they don’t like about the direction Obama and the Democrats are taking the country, I believe they mis-identify their concerns as fighting “socialism” or “Communism.” But at bottom, I believe above all else, that they wish to “conserve” their own vision of what America is and what it should aspire to be. This vision is no more invalid than that of the presidents’ despite attempts on the left to delegitimize it. It is Burkean in its roots, and has to do with classic conservative values that have been at the root of conservative thought for as long as the republic has endured.

Change is coming to America. Change always comes to America because we are a dynamic society that stands still for no one. But the value of conservatism has always been that, in Bill Buckley’s words, conservatives “stand athwart history yelling Stop!” It is always better to manage change, to channel the revolutionary nature of our society into acceptable, and accepted paths that lead to consensual change. Any other path leads to blood and revolution. Just ask the French.

President Obama and the Democrats are moving too far, too fast. They have exceeded the comfort level for change that many Americans - perhaps most - believe is right and proper. You can argue the merits of the president’s agenda. That’s politics. But the pace of change is structural in our society. We aren’t set up for the kind of rapid, dizzying alterations that Obama and the Democrats are proposing. This is especially true because some of what the president advocates would change the fundamental relationship citizens have with the government.

“Small moves, Ellie. Small moves…” was the advice that Elenore Arroway’s dad gave to the youngster as she fiddled with the dial of her ham radio in the film Contact. By moving the dial in small increments, she was much more likely to be rewarded by making contact with another ham radio enthusiast.

Hundreds of thousands of people at the Capitol yesterday gave President Obama the same message.

The president went before Congress last night with an almost impossible job facing him; 1) calm the public’s fears and anxieties; 2) try and get some GOP cover for his fellow Democrats; and 3) move the ball forward on reform.

First, looking at the speech from the standpoint of political theater and speechcraft, it was as good as he’s ever been. James Fallows:

- Conciliatory: You Republicans want to talk about tort reform? Let’s hear your ideas.
- Tough: When you tell lies, we will call you out.
- Clarifying: For the first time ever, I felt as if I glimpsed a “larger idea” behind the Obama plan.
- Big picture: The role-of-government soliloquy at the end, including the connection to the moral and social-contract histories of Social Security and Medicare.
- Emotional, sans schmaltz: As he got ready for the end, I feared that he would tell the story of all the Lenny Skutnik figures in the First Lady’s box. Instead, he told Ted Kennedy’s story, with allusions only to Kennedy’s Republican friends.
- Simple performance dynamics: Well delivered, including at crucial points talking over the applause to keep the rhythm going.
- Manners: Will it pay off for the Republicans to have booed him and, in the case of Rep. “Gentleman Joe” Wilson of South Carolina, to have yelled “you lie!” at the President? We’ll see.

I would agree with most of that analysis. Obama implanted his vision of government’s role in society in the public mind - something he didn’t dare do during the campaign for obvious reasons. I disagree with that vision, but it has its roots in neo-liberal thought and modern social democratic philosophy. I can see Nicolas Sarkozy nodding his head in agreement through much of it. It is clear he had thought deeply on the subject and it was also clear that his experience as a community organizer informed at least some of his thinking.

I don’t think either Bush (father or son), or Clinton, had such a well developed political philosophy. Got to go back to Reagan to find someone who had given even more thought to the role of government in a free society. Reagan was older so no criticism of Obama is intended by that. Both men used their experience interacting with ordinary Americans to reach their almost opposite beliefs.

(Note: Critics of Reagan tend to forget that he spent nearly two decades on the “rubber chicken” circuit as both a conservative speaker and, more importantly, a spokesman for GE. Morris believes more than anything, this rubbing elbows with ordinary Americans helped change Reagan from an FDR Democrat to a Goldwater conservative.)

I must say, however, that his calls for “civility” and his outreach to Republicans rang a little hollow. I didn’t hear much criticism coming from the White House at the time as Congressional dems savaged Republicans for their opposition. Evidently, the president agreed with all the talk of “angry mobs,” and “racists,” and “fascists.” But going on national TV, he extends his hand in hopes that he can get cooperation from the other side?

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. It is unrealistic for the president to ask the GOP to support him on issues like the public option, or a “trigger” for the public option (if you believe the triggers will be designed to do anything except lead to an eventual public option, I got some swampland in Florida you can buy). Either provision is a deal killer. It would be political suicide in the party not to mention that it violates fundamental principles of conservatism. You wouldn’t expect Democrats to support and entirely free market approach to reform. Neither should the president expect the GOP to support the public option.

Co-ops are a little different story but I don’t think we need worry about them being in any final bill passed by the Democrats. My personal belief is that eventually, most of the co-ops would fail and necessitate a takeover by the Feds thus bringing us single payer insurance by default.

But it is the “If you tell lies, we will call you out” statement that I have the most trouble with.

Regular readers know that I have taken a dim view toward most of the slippery slope arguments advanced by Republicans and the right. But in the history of government entitlements, if anyone can show me where the law of unintended consequences didn’t emerge - and rather quickly - following their enactment, I would be most appreciative.

Obama is saying that if it’s not written into the bill that a public option will lead eventually to a single payer system, then you cannot draw logical conclusions that such would be the case. I totally reject that idea, based not only on the way the system is set up but also because several liberals have made absolutely no bones about the fact that this is exactly what the public option is for. When your opponent admits that your slippery slope argument is true, why would it be a lie?

The same holds true for the few other slippery slope arguments I believe are legitimate. For instance, is it possible for a bill (HR3200) that contains provisions to create 53 new panels, committees, and boards with regulatory or statutory authority over health care in America really, really lead to more “efficient” and “cheaper” health care?

Not in this universe. And the logical result of reducing Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals means one of two things; either those health care entities will stop or reduce the number of Medicare patients they take on or they will reduce services - i.e., “ration” care. If there is another conclusion that can be drawn from that, I am willing to hear it.

Again, there will be nothing in any reform bill that will mandate that behavior by doctors or hospitals, but the results are inescapable - unless you believe that they are stupid and will perform the same work for less money. Would you? Why should they?

But President Obama says that if anyone makes that argument, the White House will “call them out” for their lies. This is unreasonable and bad government to boot. The reason for Congressional hearings on such important matters is to flesh out these slippery slopes and write legislation that minimizes the chance they will be realized or eliminate them entirely.

Of course, we haven’t had any hearings on the most important social legislation in nearly 50 years so why bother now? These bills - including the president’s version - have been written in secrecy, negotiated behind closed doors. How much input have lobbyists had? How much has the opposition contributed? Who is for what? Who is opposed to which?

This is “good government?”

It’s not that there aren’t some good ideas being put forward, as I made clear in my post yesterday on the Baucus bill. But both sides have certain red lines that cannot be crossed, and for either side to insist that it’s their way or the highway on these deal breakers is unreasonable.

Obama might uncouple some Republicans with the co-op option if certain provisions relating to how they must operate are included while also incorporating some kind of tort reform in the final bill. He will lose liberal support, but probably gain a good 12-18 Republicans in the House and 6-8 GOP senators in the bargain. Not impressive, but considering the partisan nature of our politics today, it would be a significant achievement.

I would look very closely at such a bill if it included a more carefully crafted co-op provision, and meaningful tort reform, along with some of the measures in the Baucus bill I outlined previously. There is a need for health care reform - not a crisis by any means and certainly, not because Obama’s nauseating demagoguery from the speech that made passage a matter of life and death. But somebody somewhere has got to get a handle on skyrocketing costs. And I agree with the president that this is the moment for it.

A bill that may help cut the rate of growth in health care spending while doing minimal damage to the private sector, and improving the quality of care is a bill that I and many Republicans who want to see action on this might be inclined to support. But the chances of that happening are just about nil. The gargantuan mess that the Democrats have created of reform will now be bludgeoned to fruition by the president with several provisions that will be included that are bad for health care, bad for the people, and bad for the country.

Senate Finance chairman Max Baucus has labored long, hard - and in secret - to produce an 18 page summary of what Ezra Klein refers to as a “Not that bad health care bill.” The fact that I agree with Klein shouldn’t worry you. The irony is that he sees fault where I see merit and vice versa.

That should make both liberals and conservative heads explode.

In truth, there are reforms being proposed by Baucus that would do some real good as far as reducing health care costs, getting people who don’t have insurance now covered, and some long overdue Medicare reforms that would improve the quality of care.

There are also health insurance co-ops that will be so complex to set up, the chances of failure are great; expanded Medicaid coverage that will cost too much; and fees on insurance companies that don’t make any sense.

As far as mandates, no employer requirement to offer insurance but a “fee” will be assessed if an employee gets his own coverage equal to the premium and the subsidy offered by government. An individual mandate would be triggered in 2013 - everyone must have insurance either individually or through your employer.

I oppose mandates of any kind based on the notion that it is a violation of one’s individual liberty to have the government force anyone to part with their property (money) without their consent to be given to another entity or government itself. Even - or especially - if it is argued that such mandates are for the “good of all,” a government that can order you to buy insurance against your will can, and probably will, make other mischief as well.

Be that as it may, there is a serious attempt in the Baucus outline to address some fundamental problems with the health care industry. And although it doesn’t go near far enough in attempting to get a handle on Medicare costs, nor does it offer many solutions on the supply side of the health care equation, I consider it a good starting point for discussions on reform.

Ezra Klein mentions what he likes about the proposal:

The legislation really would protect millions of Americans from medical bankruptcy. It really would insure tens of millions of people. It really will curb the worst practices of the private insurance industry. It really will expand Medicaid and transform it from a mish-mash of state regulation into a dependable benefit. It really will lay down out-of-pocket caps which are a lot better than anything people have today. It really will help primary care providers, and it really will make hospitals more transparent, and it really will be a step towards paying for quality rather than volume.

Good summary of what’s good about the bill. I would quibble that the Medicaid expansion into a “dependable benefit” is a dubious idea, but Klein sums up most of what’s acceptable in a reform bill - something that those Republicans so inclined may wish to seriously examine.

But back to the irony part of our piece, here’s Klein on what’s wrong with it from his liberal perspective - most of these “problems” being something to cheer about if you’re a conservative:

The main disappointment is that insofar as you see the bill as a vehicle for moving us towards a better, more efficient, less costly system, there are some problems. In particular, this bill seems to block off a lot of its own possible points of expansion. The health insurance exchanges are limited to the state level, and appear to split the individual and small-group markets apart from each other. There’s no mention of a possible expansion toward larger employers, either. Similarly, the co-op plan is an interesting policy proposal, but unlike a public insurance option, it’s difficult to imagine it growing into anything significantly stronger than what’s outlined in the paper.

A government program with a built in brake on expansion? Be still my heart! That’s just what the doctor ordered. The two tiered employer market is also a good idea considering that for very small businesses, tax subsidies to help them cover full time employees should be generous while larger companies will obviously pay more.

I agree with Ezra that the co-op idea will probably not be as successful as Baucus would hope. This would be a massive undertaking - as big a job as setting up a public option. In the end, I don’t think enough people will participate in all 50 co-ops to give the program enough cash to do things like cover those with pre-existing conditions or who are denied coverage for other reasons. In short, an eventual government take over of the whole co-op system and what amounts to a single payer government run boondoggle would emerge. (For me, this is a deal breaker - a “no go” if it is included).

But there are bound to be things in any reform package that different people will find objectionable. There are a couple of proposals that are especially noteworthy and should be included in any reform measure.

1. Subsidies for those who earn up to 300% rather than 400% of the poverty line. This is fairer to the taxpayer. No one would have to pay more than 10% of their income out of pocket for health insurance.

2.Starting in 2015, states may form “health care choice compacts” that will allow companies to sell insurance across state lines.

3. The aptly described “young invincible” policy:

A separate “young invincible” policy would be available in addition to these benefit options. This policy would be targeted to young adults who desire a less expensive catastrophic coverage plan but with a requirement that preventive services be covered below the catastrophic amount. Cost-sharing for preventive benefits would be allowed.

Last night on my radio show, Rich Baehr, American Thinker Political Correspondent and a health insurance consultant for 25 years, wondered why the “young invincible” policy would be limited to those 25 years old and younger. Why not offer it to everyone, Rich asked?

The point is this; using the analogy of auto insurance, no company covers oil changes, pressurizing tires, or other routine services. This is one way premiums are kept down. And if only major medical problems would be covered, people would be less apt to incur health care costs for minor, non life threatening treatments.

Baehr uses his own analogy involving shoes. If government were to pay for shoes, everyone would have a closet full. Forcing almost everyone to buy “comprehensive” insurance only encourages people to load up on shoes even though they don’t need them.

4. Physician and hospital “value based” purchasing. The proposal would reward hospitals for the quality of their care for high cost services and reward doctors for not ordering unnecessary tests in some cases.

This is a step in the right direction although it doesn’t go far enough. We must change the supply culture in health care so that quality of care is paramount and quantity is discouraged.

5.Incentives to develop new patient care models. Always a good idea to incentivize innovation.

6. Payment penalty for hospital acquired infections. More of this please. Rewarding quality and penalizing poor care should be at the heart of reform.

7. Modest reforms in the Medicare Advantage (supplemental insurance) plans rather than severely curtailing the plans as the House bill would do.

8. There isn’t much to get excited about in the Medicare reform sections except the formation of a full time Medicare Commission to examine ways to reduce costs. Otherwise, there is too much emphasis on costs and not enough on the supply side of the equation.

9. A tax on gold plated plans costing more than $8,000 per year for singles and $21,000 per family. These plans are a waste that we can do without. If you can afford that kind of insurance, you can afford greater out of pocket medical care.

In summary, there is a lot to dislike in the bill. Medicaid expansion will put even more budgetary pressures on states already suffering - even with additional federal funds that would only add to the deficit. The co-op idea is a loser, the Medicare reforms only nibble around the edges of the problem (we must save trillions over the next few decades), the employer requirements are still too onerous for small businesses, and the individual mandate is an affront to liberty.

But for those conservatives serious about reforming our health care industry - and I believe good conservatives should be - then there are some things in the Baucus plan that should be given serious consideration.

Ezra Klein, blogger for the Washington Post, appears to be a conduit for the Obama administration to both Congress and the American people as he apparently has gotten information on what the White House wants us to believe they are thinking regarding how they are going to rescue health care reform.

There are wheels turning within wheels here, so it is as important to note what isn’t being said as much as what message the White House wants Klein to be sending.

According to Klein there are two camps in the White House on what kind of reform package the president will actually put down on paper and highlight in his joint session speech next Wednesday:

The first camp could be called “universal-lite.” They’re focused on preserving the basic shape of the bill. They think a universal plan is necessary for a number of reasons: For one thing, the insurance market regulations don’t work without universality, as you can’t really ask insurers to offer standard prices if the healthy and the young don’t have to enter the system. For another, it will be easier to change subsidies or improve the benefit package down the road if the initial offerings prove inadequate. New numbers are easier than new features. Creating a robust structure is the most important thing. This camp seems to be largely headed by the policy people.

The second camp is not universal at all. This camp believes the bill needs to be scaled back sharply in order to ensure passage. Covering 20 million people isn’t as good as covering 40 million people, but it’s a whole lot better than letting the bill fall apart and covering no one at all. It’s also a success of some sort, and it gives you something to build on. What that sacrifices in terms of structure it gains in terms of political appeal. This camp is largely headed by members of the political team.

Both camps accept that the administration’s proposal will be less generous than what has emerged from either the HELP or House Committees. The question, it seems, is how much less generous.

For the administration to admit that there is a split into two camps probably means that there are not only more than two but that reform is causing the Obama administration to slowly unravel. There seems to be a rift between the far left, and the practical left, with the ideologues more numerous, but lacking the clout of the Rahmbo wing in the administration.

It is also significant that the ideologues are still pushing a strong public option. I referred to the public option as a “Zombie” on my radio show because it’s still walking around, not realizing it has been killed. The numbers are just not adding up in the Senate for any kind of a public option, but it continues to be pressed because the ideological base of the Democratic party refuses to sign off on any reform that doesn’t include it.

The bottom line is that it is a very difficult uphill climb for Obama to achieve any kind of legislative success on health care reform. At the moment, he just can’t get there from here. The practical left realizes that but will have an enormously difficult time convincing the ideologues to drop the public option and go for more modest reforms.

A couple of thing are certain; Obama going before Congress means that the process will not be shut down, that there will be bills emerging from both the House and the Senate, that there will almost certainly be votes on those bills, and that passage in the House of a more liberal bill is almost assured.

The senate process apparently hinges on one lone senator - Republican liberal Olympia Snowe - who has taken it upon herself to negotiate for the entire party:

The answer appears to hinge on Sen. Olympia Snowe. “I’m a Snowe-ite,” joked one official. Her instincts on health care have proven quite a bit more liberal than those of many Democrats. In the Gang of Six meetings, she joined Sen. Jeff Bingaman in focusing on affordability and coverage - putting her, in practice, somewhat to the left of Conrad and Baucus. The problem is that Snowe is scared to be the sole Republican supporting this bill, not to mention the Republican who ensures the passage of this bill. The reprisals within her caucus could be tremendous.

If Snowe drops off the bill, using the budget reconciliation process will probably be a necessity. The bill then goes through Sen. Kent Conrad’s Budget Committee, giving him much more power over the product. The absence of any Republicans repels at least a couple of conservative Democrats. Passage becomes much less certain, which means a scaled-back bill becomes much more likely. This is the irony of the health-care endgame: The bill becomes much more conservative if it loses its final Republican.

I don’t think Snowe will still be a Republican by the end of the year - especially if she is responsible for the passage of the kind of reform being contemplated. Even on judges, she has become an unreliable vote. The question is going to be asked why she didn’t leave sooner.

At this point, it appears the senate will use reconciliation to pass their version of health care - a considerably more “conservative” version than will be passed by the House. At that point, the real headknocking will begin and we’ll see some blood on the floor in the Democratic caucus. I’d say the chances are no better than 60-40 for any kind of bill by the end of the year. I base this on the fact that the president has failed to show leadership on the issue to this point, and expecting him to suddenly acquire the skills to ram this thing through Congress when he has shown no such ability previously is taking a lot on faith.

A couple of other things.

1. Cost “savings” in any White House package will be nothing more than smoke and mirrors. They will try to sell their version of reform as almost revenue neutral through dishonest accounting, hiding some costs in out years of the budget, as well as grossly exaggerating the dollar amounts that would be saved in specific provisions. Any CBO estimates will be ignored. Even in a scaled down version of reform, it will be the only way to fulfill Obama’s promise of not signing a bill that adds to the deficit.

2. The chances of the White House and the Democratic party imploding over reform are fading as Obama becomes more engaged on the issue. Differences will be papered over to the extent that they can because all sides realize the enormous stakes involved. The president’s defenders may dismiss the idea that his administration would be castrated by a failure to vote out a reform bill, but  the rest of Obama’s agenda is in deep peril unless he can deliver. He is asking his party to go far, far out on a very thin limb. There are enough vulnerable members who would likely not forget being left to hang if the president can’t get anything done.

Liberals are licking their chops at the prospect of using the death of Ted Kennedy to unite the party and get a health care reform bill passed.

Is exploiting the death of Kennedy a rotten, shameless, despicable thing to do? In politics, nothing is rotten or shameless - unless you’re on the other side taking advantage of an obvious political gambit. The only consideration is if something works or not. And baby, the Dems are going to milk the death of Kennedy until they wring every last ounce of political capital they can manage from his rotund carcass.

They are going to bend every effort to tie the emotional attachment with the late senator sincerely felt by the vast majority of Democrats directly to the health care bill with the hope that it will give some of the Blue Dogs, and liberals the cover they need to come to an agreement. In short, using the memory of Kennedy and good feelings elicited when appealing to his ghost, the Democratic leadership hopes it makes party members more willing to compromise to achieve the goal of creating KennedyKare.

I would fully expect the Republicans to do the exact same thing in similar circumstances. Of course, that would be an impossibility at the moment since no Republican living, dead, or in between has that kind of pull with the party, nor is there an issue that Republicans could rally around even if such a mythical beast existed. The appeals to Reagan’s memory may engender fond feelings of nostalgia, but the wellspring of actual political power that the Ghost of the Gipper can wield is just about dry.

So the question isn’t should the Democrats exploit Kennedy’s death, but rather what is the best way to go about doing it to achieve success?

Renaming the bill in honor of Kennedy won’t do much. Nice symbolism but hardly enough to break, what most media reports have said, is a titanic log jam of proposals on reform where several committees and individuals are working at cross purposes. Getting a bill out of this mish mash is going to take a lot more than simply calling the monstrosity something else.

In order to rally the Congress, more substantive and public demonstrations of both real and manufactured emotionalism will have to be employed for the gambit to work. Kennedy is going to have to first be beautified, and then named as a civic saint - a party icon that can be invoked with such reverence that “What would Teddy want?” becomes a rallying cry for reform leaders.

It starts today with a “carefully orchestrated” procession from the Kennedy’s beloved Hyannis Port, through the streets of Boston where the political and emotional symbolism will fairly drip from old imitation gas streetlights in the city’s historic North End:

A procession will leave Hyannis Port at 1 p.m. today, accompanying Kennedy’s body to Boston for a final journey through a city indelibly marked by his family.

At about 2:15, the procession is expected to wind its way through downtown, first passing through the North End, where his mother was born, then crossing the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway on its way to the State House, and ultimately passing the Bowdoin Street residence of President Kennedy when he first ran for Congress and the federal building that bears his name.

Crowds are encouraged to gather on Hanover Street along the Greenway, on City Hall Plaza, and on the Boston Common in front of the State House.

The procession will end at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, where Kennedy will lie in repose and visitors will be invited to pay their respects today and tomorrow.

There will be a massive outpouring of people who will want to view the remains, reminding members of Kennedy’s enormous popularity not only in the party, but with the average working American as well. TV images of the procession passing these Democratic touchstones will also serve to connect Ted to his martyred brothers thus making a direct appeal to generations of Democrats.

This is powerful stuff, and the news nets will milk coverage was well, seeing that events such as these will bring millions of eyeballs to their broadcasts who might not normally be watching.

Same thing happened when Reagan died, and for the same reasons. National tragedy is the honey that attracts millions of extra viewers and there’s no reason to complain about it.

There will apparently be no less than 3 memorial services; an invitation only event tomorrow night at the library (no word on whether it will be televised, although I can’t imagine it not). Then, the actual funeral mass at a Basilica on Mission Hill. Here, there will be “limited press access” which is probably short hand for pool reporting.

From there, more symbolism will be used as another procession will form, taking the casket to Logan Airport for the trip to Washington and a late afternoon burial at Arlington Cemetery.

President Obama is scheduled to give the eulogy on Saturday and will no doubt give it his usual best effort. How hard will he hit the meme of passing health care reform in Kennedy’s name? Hopefully, the guy isn’t completely tone deaf and will refrain from hammering the world wide audience over the head with references to it. However, it would be perfectly legitimate for Obama to specifically tout reform since Kennedy himself is quoted as saying the issue was central to his public life. Republicans will complain no matter what but the president must still strike a solemn balance between honoring Kennedy and taking care of politics.

A couple of interesting side notes. First, why no lying in state in the rotunda of the Capitol? It could be because they would then have to move the funeral mass to Washington, D.C. as protocol would dictate that any lying in state be conducted before the funeral rites. Plus, the funeral would have to be moved to a Sunday which, while permissible, is atypical in the Catholic church.

Secondly, there has been no announced Wellstone-style Congressional memorial service. It may not have been planned yet. Or, Democrats might be a little hesitant considering the grief they got following the tribute to Wellstone after his death from a plane crash in 2002.

Surely Al Franken is being disingenuous at best when he writes in HuffPo about that Wellstone tribute:

A pained Limbaugh asked his audience the day after the memorial: “Where was the grief? Where were the tears? Where was the memorial service? There wasn’t any of this!”

This was a lie. I was there. Along with everyone else, I cried, I laughed, I cheered. It was, to my mind, a beautiful four-hour memorial.

I didn’t boo. Neither did 22,800 of the some 23,000 people there. This has been a much discussed, much lied about aspect of the memorial. A number of Republicans, like Peggy Noonan and Weekly Standard writer Chris Caldwell claimed that 20,000 people had booed Trent Lott. (Caldwell claimed that 20,000 people booed a whole litany of people who weren’t booed at all.) We’ll never get an actual count - but I’d say about two hundred people booed Trent Lott when his face came on the Jumbotron. This was about a minute after 23,000 people cheered for Bill Clinton when his face appeared on the Jumbotron.

How does that square with an account from someone a little less partisan, William Saletan of Slate?

But the solemnity of death and the grace of Midwestern humor are overshadowed tonight by the angry piety of populism. Most of the event feels like a rally. The touching recollections are followed by sharply political speeches urging Wellstone’s supporters to channel their grief into electoral victory. The crowd repeatedly stands, stomps, and whoops. The roars escalate each time Walter Mondale, the former vice president who will replace Wellstone on the ballot, appears on the giant screens suspended above the stage. “Fritz! Fritz!” the assembly chants.

“Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning,” Wellstone declares in a videotaped speech shown on the overhead screens. “Politics is about improving people’s lives.” But as the evening’s speakers proceed, it becomes clear that to them, honoring Wellstone’s legacy is all about winning the election. Repeating the words of Wellstone’s son, the assembly shouts, “We will win! We will win!” Rick Kahn, a friend of Wellstone’s, urges everyone to “set aside the partisan bickering,” but in the next breath he challenges several Republican senators in attendance to “honor your friend” by helping to “win this election for Paul Wellstone.” What can he be thinking?

Franken is right. I watched the entire memorial service (I admired and liked Paul Wellstone even though I vehemently disagreed with him on almost everything he stood for.) It is true that 20,000 people did not boo Trent Lott. But unless those 200 phantom booers mentioned by Franken were right next to a microphone and had their numbers seem inflated, my guess would be more like 5,000 booed Lott, with even louder boos for Jesse Ventura, then governor. I seem to recall Denny Hastert also receiving a healthy round of boos but am not sure he was even there.

At any rate, Saletan’s description of the “Memorial Service” is spot on. Numerous speakers trashed Republicans - not just the two he mentioned. It could very well be that Franken - as rabid a partisan who has ever served in the senate - has an entirely different idea what partisan speechmaking is all about than normal people like you and me.

Whether it was planned to be a pep rally is not the point. That’s what it became and Democrats would do well to recall the reaction to press reports - including those bastions of right wing lying, the New York Times, and Time Magazine that led to at least a mini-backlash that could have cost Mondale the election.

But such an event might be a topper to what Democrats obviously hope will be an emotional outpouring in memory of Senator Kennedy which might translate into the political muscle necessary to ram through KennedyKare. In fact, one might expect the Democrats to try and stampede the issue into passing once Congress is back from their recess after Labor Day.

Would it work? The stampede, probably not. But I don’t see how the death of Ted Kennedy and the Democrat’s exploiting the emotional context of remembrance and history that will be on display, can do anything except help President Obama and the Congressional leadership realize some kind of health care bill before Thanksgiving.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, my special guests are Dr. Melissa Clouthier and Andrew Ian Dodge. We’ll look at the war that has broken out between the CIA and the White House as well as the latest on health care reform.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

I have written previously that I believed the biggest contribution Ronald Reagan made to American conservatism was that he almost singlehandedly altered the civic conversation about government spending on social programs.

Prior to Reagan’s reasoned, and impassioned dialectic against big government, the debate over government programs began and ended with the question “How much more” should we be spending,” or “How big should this government program be” to accomplish its intended objective.

Democrats monetized this debate by increasing the number of zeroes in these program’s appropriations. Granted, this is something of an oversimplification but essentially, the center of gravity in Washington tilted toward more, more, and still more in the belief that “solving” the problem being addressed, and showing “compassion” for the poor was a matter of growing the size of government to meet the challenge.

Enter Ronald Reagan who championed the idea that “throwing money” at a problem wasn’t solving anything, and was making things worse. (There were other conservatives who gave Reagan his arguments - Buckley, Hayek, Mises, etc. But none had as big a bullhorn.) Over time, the civic conversation was altered to question not only the huge appropriations, but the necessity and the viability of these programs.

At bottom, of course, was Reagan’s contention that government was mis-spending tax dollars and threatening individual liberty by growing the size and scope of the federal government. It was an argument that plowed already fertile fields because from it’s founding, Americans have fiercely resisted centrally exercised power from Washington. From Andrew Jackson’s destruction of the Bank of America to the cheers of the common man, through Abe Lincoln’s draft, which set off riots in the north, through FDR’s overreach, and Bill Clinton’s attempt at nationalized health care, Americans have been more than suspicious of big government. There seems to be a genetic predisposition for Americans to resist government that they perceive as overstepping its limits.

Granted, those limits have expanded since Andy Jackson’s time. Most Americans have accepted a government that can feed them when they’re hungry, house them when they’re homeless, and generally be there with a “safety net” if misfortune befalls them. Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlements are sacred cows because they enjoy almost universal support by voters. This may be the death of us yet unless we can find a way to get their gargantuan costs under control.

But, as President Obama is finding, there are still lines in the sand that Americans are refusing to allow their government in Washington to cross. And Matt Welch of Reason Magazine, writing in the NY Post, nails why:

While the commentariat’s condescension is almost comical, the whole evil-or-stupid explanation misses the elephant in Obama’s room: Americans of all stripes, it turns out, aren’t very keen about the government barging into their lives.

An ABC/Washington Post poll from June showed people preferred “smaller government with fewer services” over “larger government with more services” by 54% to 41%, up from 50%-45% a year earlier (independents were even more pronounced, at 61%-35%). A Rasmussen poll from April showed that 77% of Americans preferred a “free market” economy over a “government managed” economy, up seven percentage points from just last December. A July CBS poll found that 52% of Americans think that Obama is trying to do “too much.”

After 11 months of federal bailouts and freakouts, Americans have become bone tired of panicky power grabs from Washington. It’s the big government, stupid.

The message of the various Tea Party protests, which predated this summer’s ahistorical media panic over town hall “lynch mobs,” has been pretty simple, says Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, the nonprofit that has helped organize the protests, told Reason magazine this spring. “It was: stop spending so much money, stop borrowing so much money, and stop bailing out people who were irresponsible.”

I applaud the attempt by Mr. Welch to alter the narrative that begins and ends with protestors being “racist,” fascist mobs,” “un-American,” or “retarded.” It won’t matter anyway. Polls also show that a majority of Americans support the protestors which means that the Krugman’s, Rich’s, Pelosi’s, Garafolo’s, and the rest of the left aren’t getting any traction with their “evil-or-stupid” incantations.

Regardless, it’s the resistance to government overstepping what Americans sense is a proper exercise of its power that has so many, so angry. While there is much more tolerance for big government today - even government that helps the middle class with programs like S-Chip, and home mortgage bailouts - there are still boundaries (sensed more than specifically spelled out) that a majority of Americans refuse to stand for.

This is the essence of American exceptionalism. We are a different people than Europeans, and any other society in the world. We were deliberately made so at our founding and continue to be to this day. What should be self evident, is lost on many liberals who equate American exceptionalism with a rude form of nationalism. Not so - demonstrably not so. There is no other society in the world that looks upon government with such a jaundiced eye when they perceive that government to be crossing a comfort barrier relating to how much power the central authority should wield.

At heart, America is a profoundly conservative country in that First Principles, a respect for our past, and supporting change only when that change can be folded into tradition, is believed and supported by a large majority. This doesn’t mean that the out of bounds hasn’t been moving left the last 100 years. We are also, at bottom, a practical people, and see real benefit to growing government when the occasion calls for it. This too, makes us an exceptional people in that despite all, the people still have a big say in how big a government they will accept.

Perhaps one day, Americans will accept a growth in government that will result in Washington running health care. But it is not today, nor do I see such a day arriving in my lifetime. Each generation of Americans defines the parameters of their liberty differently. It is our particular genius as we constantly re-invent ourselves to meet the challenges of a changing world.

Obama and the Democrats ignore this reality at their political peril.