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| Politics Forum Index » Democrats (House) Politics Forum » The Madness of Queen Nancy... |
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| Leroy N. Soetoro... |
 Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 10:03 am |
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704013004574517603592213342
..html
It's one thing to be serene under fire, it's another to be delusional.
More than a few Democrats in Congress are perplexed and worried that
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is insisting on ramming through a 1,900-page
health care bill on Saturday, just days after her party took heavy
losses in Tuesday's elections. "It reminds me of Major Nicholson, the
obsessed British major in the film 'Bridge on the River Kwai,'" one
Democrat told me. "She is fixated on finishing her health care bridge
even as she's lost sight of where it's going and what damage it could
cause to her own troops."
Indeed, the Speaker's take on Tuesday's off-year elections struck some
of her own members as delusive "happy talk." "From our perspective, we
won last night," a cheerful Ms. Pelosi told reporters, citing her
party's pick-up of a single House seat in a New York special election
and retention of another strongly Democratic seat in California.
That's not how many of her own troops see it. Democratic Rep. Parker
Griffith of Alabama told Politico.com that members are "very, very
sensitive" to the fact that the agenda being pushed by party leaders has
"the potential to cost some of our front-line members their seats"
On health care, added New Jersey Democrat Bill Pascrell: "People who had
weak knees before are going to have weaker knees now."
Ms. Pelosi, however, apparently thinks the moment is ripe to use sheer
political muscle to pass legislation reordering one sixth of the
economy, with zero Republican support. The right mixture of "incentives"
and Rahm Emanuel-style pressure, she believes, will bring enough
Democrats to heel to vote for the bill.
The obsession Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have
with passing health care strikes some Democratic moderates as a
completely misplaced priority. Polls show that fewer than a fifth of
Americans rank health care reform as the most important issue. Their
biggest concern right now is jobs. Only 29% of voters in the latest Wall
Street Journal/NBC News poll believe the economy "has hit the bottom."
That's also the message from Moody's Mark Zandi, who has become the de
facto chief outside economic adviser to the Democratic Congress in
recent months and has been telling House Democrats to expect
unemployment to be "sticky and stubborn," remaining near 10% a year from
now. A similar warning comes from Christina Romer, chair of President
Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, who predicts unemployment will be
9.5% when midterm elections occur a year from now.
These considerations spook not just the 49 House Democrats who sit in
districts won by John McCain last year. Even liberals say lessons need
to be taken from Tuesday's shellacking: "What the exit polls showed was
real voter fatigue with how crowded the plate is," Rep. Gerry Connolly
of Virginia, chairman of his party's freshman class, told the New York
Times. "We need to take a deep breath, step back and clean the plate
before we add to it."
That the bill would be a job killer isn't the only concern. Democrats
worry about a backlash from the one-fourth of seniors enrolled in
Medicare Advantage -- a program that faces steep cuts in both the likely
Senate and House bills.
But Speaker Pelosi isn't about to step back. In fact, she plans to force
her troops to vote on health care just one day after Friday's jobless
numbers are due, which are likely to show unemployment still growing.
"When I take this bill to the floor, it will win," she proclaimed
earlier this year.
One Democratic House moderate says the leadership has mislearned a
lesson from the 1994 collapse of Hillary Clinton's health care bill.
"They believe they lost the elections that year because they failed to
pass anything," he says. "But they forget it might have been even worse
if they'd passed the wrong bill."
The obsession with passing a clearly flawed and overly complex health
care bill does indeed recall the classic movie in which Major Nicholson
(played memorably by Alec Guinness) convinces his fellow British POWs in
Thailand to build a railway bridge for their Japanese captors -- losing
touch with the larger reality that the bridge would be used by the enemy
against his own people.
John Feenery, who worked for then-House Minority Leader Bob Michel, sees
many similarities with Congress's ill-fated rush to pass "catastrophic"
health coverage for seniors in 1988. "Like the catastrophic bill, the
Democrats' health care bill frontloads the pain and backloads the gain,"
he told CNN last month. Because Democrats wanted to avoid a negative
deficit score from the Congressional Budget Office, taxes went up
immediately while benefits were phased in. But seniors revolted. House
Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski was famously chased down a
Chicago street by an angry mob. In November, 1989 -- almost exactly 20
years ago -- Congress took the extraordinary step of repealing the
catastrophic health care law.
Should the far more complex health care bill now being debated pass, no
one expects it could be fully repealed. But Democrats surely would pay a
political price for passing a liberal bill with no bipartisan support.
Like Major Nicholson on the River Kwai, they may wake up to find they
built a monument to a set of presumptions that were really a form of
madness.
--
Nancy Pelosi, Democrat criminal, accessory before and after the fact to
Rangel's tax evasion. |
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