Liberals are having a splendid time telling the Republican Party what it ought to be. But the spider does not design the fly, and the general does not get to plan his enemy’s attack.
There is something amusing in the lament among liberal intellectuals that conservatives have turned into what faux centrist Sam Tanenhaus calls “radicals who deplore the very possibility of a virtuous government.”
American conservatives have never thought government virtuous. That’s why they want so little of it.
The Republican Party has been through dozens of iterations in the past 153 years: abolitionism, pro-plutocracy, progressivism, steady hands, radical lurches, and on and on. Conservatives, though, have consistently seen government as a necessary evil that keeps the nation safe and protects individual rights even as it consumes its citizens’ wealth and treads on their liberties.
No doubt, Tanenhaus and others would thrill to see less of the American brand of conservative. Something more European would do nicely: a stingier custodian of the welfare state that can push back against the good-natured excesses of liberals. Sort of a sympathetic chief financial officer for Government Inc. who lets the liberal boss make all the decisions and then finds a way to pay for them.
We see in the Obama administration’s pallid version of bipartisanship the liberal ideal for conservatism.
The White House has been pushing forward a ragtag band of Republicans in support of health care reform. And you can expect that as the president lays out his compromise plan on Afghanistan, you will see a few once or former Republicans sign off. Chuck Hagel should get a haircut and a shoeshine, because it’s almost show time.
The administration is looking to repeat the Colin Powell moment of the 2008 campaign in order to win back some of the independents who continue to go AWOL from Obama’s Army.
Powell may have never drawn much water with Republicans and almost none with conservatives, but moderates listened a year ago when the former general and secretary of state to Republican presidents said that Obama was a good risk. Powell did the same thing for George W. Bush.
One suspects independents are getting rather suspicious about the general’s judgment.
On health care, the president has summoned former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a surgeon and heir to a hospital fortune; New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Democrat before he became a Republican and now an independent; Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, an Obamaphile since the federal government started handing out free money to cash-strapped states; and former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, who now is a consultant to health care companies.
Credulous reporters, like Michael Shear and Ceci Connolly at The Washington Post, passed along the good news of the emergence of this bipartisan coalition without noting any of the conflicts or hedging involved.
What the bipartisan backers said about health care was really “Yes, but …”
If Thompson’s clients would make a bundle, he would no doubt support the plan. Schwarzenegger said he supported Obama’s goals, which is always easy to do because the president always leaves out the hard parts. Bloomberg was the most robust in his praise. But in exchange, Obama’s liaison to the hard Left, John Podesta, is endorsing the mayors’ re-election bid.
Most interesting is Frist, who made his remarks in the process of a book tour in support of the self-congratulatory volume “A Heart to Serve.” Frist’s initial suggestion was that if he were still in the Senate, he would end up voting for the plan. But what Frist really meant was that if he were still in the Senate, he would have transformed the bill into something any Republican could have supported.
The Frist-engineered Medicare prescription drug benefit of 2005 accounts for about $1 trillion of the $9 trillion in federal deficit spending over the next decade.
Thanks, doc.
The benefits of the administration’s rollout of weak bipartisanship may be realized with some Left-leaning independents on the subject of health care. And as Democrats look likely to drive a jalopy off the legislative showroom floor, they are going to need all that cover and more.
But as the White House and the intellectual Left consider what kind of Republican Party they want, rank-and-file Democrats are given reason for concern.
Frist was one of the great villains of the Bush era, who was regularly and nonchalantly accused by the likes of Michael Moore of massive corruption on behalf of the hospital industry. Does it give liberals pause that he and other corporate-approved Republicans are on board with Obama?
It should.
Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
