…of Queen Nancy. She seems determined to drive her party over a cliff. OK by me.
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.”
You don’t get it, Congressman. She doesn’t care about your seats, as long as she doesn’t lose her majority. She can do without you knuckle-dragging southerners.
And this is simply stupid, but explains why the Dems are screwing up so badly — they complete misread history:
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.”
They lost the House in 1994 because (among several other things) a) they attempted to pass a similar bill and b) they passed the “assault weapons” ban and c) they had established a reputation for corruption, with Rostenkowski and others. Not to mention d) Newt came up with an appealing campaign strategy. All that’s missing for a similar earthquake next year is a Republican Party that isn’t brain dead — all the other ingredients in terms of corruption and overreach are already there, and if they ram this through the House, it will just add fuel to the fire, even if it dies in the Senate. Unfortunately, a smart Republican Party is often too much to ask for.
Both the AARP and the American Medical Association have endorsed the current House bill.
Demographics have changed between 1994 and now as well.
I predict a significant drop in membership of both organizations as a result.
That shall be an easily tested prediction.
If they pass some kind of bill, we’re stuck with the results out of conference _no matter what happens in ’10 or ’12_. With any attempt at reversing the dirty work, as long as Obama is in office you’d need a huge enough win to do a Presidential override.
You’re not going to get that. And even if he’s out by early ’13, the program with all attendant bureaucracies and voters dependent on them will be in effect, making it irreversable.
We’re about to be swallowed by something that will make the British NHS look wonderful. It’s too late for the American electorate to reverse their tone-deaf votes of ’08. It’s just like Radio Moscow used to say about Communism in the USSR, “The Soviet people made their choice in 1918.[End of discussion.]”
Sorry to be so pessimistic but that’s how it looks to me at this point.
@ Bill & Rand: The AARP is already bleeding members. Since August! http://bit.ly/4lkPF9 (fox news)
The Democrats are not the only things that will go off the cliff if this bill passes. (hint: it starts and ends with an “A” and rhymes with harmonica).
@Darnell
Yes, 60,000 resigned from AARP in August however as many as 400,000 new members signed up in during that same time.
AARP also has over 35 million current members.
But how many of those members even know what the AARP does? Remember to “sign up” for the AARP, you just need to be a certain age. It’s not clear to me that you need to do anything else, like “sign up”, to be a member.
Considering assault weapons aren’t being discussed, there is no current corruption scandal, Newt can’t even get his candidate for a Republican district elected, and 60% of Americans seem to want a public option in their health care, I wouldn’t be counting on a Republican takeover just yet.
Charles, the whole thing has to explode before we can rebuild from the ashes. Nancy and the rest of the current Nomenklatura will be gone by then. Save for a rainy day because a storm’s coming.
I have an AARP card — they sent it to me out of the blue even though I’m decades too young for it. Are they counting that, too?
Full disclosure: I have used it for discounts — cashiers are an uncritical bunch.
there is no current corruption scandal
Nope, no Charlie Rangel, William Jefferson, Chris Dodd, Jack Murtha, Alan Mollohan… No corruption scandals at all.
In 1994 the GOP hadn’t controlled the House in decades; that’s one reason the House GOP had an approval rating in the 50s. Voters may have short memories, but they still remember the last time the GOP was in charge on Capitol Hill, and today the congressional GOP polls in the 20s, lower than the Democrats.
As for corruption scandals, how about the handling over of two car companies to the UAW? That’s bigger and far more blatant than the usual corruption scandal.
“60% of Americans seem to want a public option in their health care”
Uh, you might want to get yourself checked for dyslexia, Chris. Nearly 54% oppose the latest Pelosi version of the healthcare reform and only only 42% now favor the current version of health care reform.
And as far as specifically the public option no majority of people have been in support of a public option since like August. Of course its not you’ve been known to quote statistics from like 5 years ago before or anything.
Josh – as of October 25, 2009, this poll found that 45% of people thought a public option was extremely important and another 27% thought it was very important.
So, since 45 + 27 = 72, I was wrong. It’s actually 72% of Americans want a public option.
AARP also has over 35 million current members.
I’m 52. The AARP sends crap to my wife and I all of the time including membership cards. They probably count us as members. I hate the AARP and will never join that organization. How many of those 35 million people they claim as members actually joined?
As for the AMA, I’ve read that less than 20% of practicing doctors belong. I wonder how many of the AMA members are academics as opposed to practicing doctors.
Chris, the question was
So that 72% is people who thought it was to some degree important to have both public and private health insurance options. That little distinction is quite important since it doesn’t indicate support for health care plans that neuter private insurance options, which incidentally is the prime source of opposition to current health care plans proposed by the Obama administration.
Depending on the wording of the question, the support for a public option seems to range from 40% to 60%. That implies to me that a lot of people don’t understand what’s going on and that there’s two firm groups of about 40% each that strongly support or oppose the public health care/insurance option. Yet another example of the infamous Chris Gerrib bias rearing its ugly head.
Some weakened versions have pretty strong support. For example, there’s 76% support for a government-sponsored program run by the states to provide health insurance to people who can’t otherwise afford health insurance. A similar margin of agreement exists for public health care for people at or below the median income bracket (roughly $40k per year for a single person, $88k for a family of four).
This indicates to me that there’d be a lot more support for many such programs, if they were at least somewhat needs-based. An obvious way to do this is simply make the public option needs based and limited in coverage so that it isn’t competitive with most private health care options. Somewhat better than emergency room health care, but not as good as health insurance that people pay money for.
” Bill White Says:
November 5th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
@Darnell
Yes, 60,000 resigned from AARP in August however as many as 400,000 new members signed up in during that same time.”
And 400,000 likely died of old age during that time.
“In 1994 the GOP hadn’t controlled the House in decades; that’s one reason the House GOP had an approval rating in the 50s. Voters may have short memories, but they still remember the last time the GOP was in charge on Capitol Hill, and today the congressional GOP polls in the 20s, lower than the Democrats.”
……and yet the documented most accurate pollster has the Republicans consistantly leading the Generic Congressional Ballot, this week by four points.
Click my name for more info.
The Left is fighting back against the moderate Dems:
The Left is fighting back against the moderate Dems:
Sounds a lot like what’s going on the Republican party.