The Blue Dogs' Final Dilemma
Originally Posted At The Wall Street Journal
By Daniel Henninger
July 31, 2009
With the health-care bill faltering in Congress, the ritual weeping has begun over the death, once again, of “bipartisanship.”
The belief that the answer to any problem lies with “the center” may be the greatest superstition in the ever-magical world of American politics.
Mostly it is journalists and pundits who propagate the notion that crazies on the left and right have neutered the problem-solving center, the moderates, the pragmatists.
In fact, the bipartisan center has been dying every year since Congress passed the Medicare and Medicaid bill of 1965. The people who back then were staffers to the politicians and agencies of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society graduated into the offices they now hold in Congress, the Beltway, many state capitals and academia, taking a second generation into their belief system. That included Barack Obama.
With President Obama’s health-care bill, the forces that across 40 years grew into unbridgeable opposition to each other could not be more plain to see. American politics has arrived at a crossroads.
This struggle over health-care legislation isn’t just another battle between the Democratic and Republican parties. It’s about which force is going to take the United States forward for the next generation: the public sector or the private sector. If by now you haven’t figured out which sector you are in, then you’re a Blue Dog Democrat.
The Blue Dogs and other moderates have been sliding to this final dilemma for years. The issue is not whether one is for or against “government.” The issue is: Do they work for us, or do we work for them?
Mr. Obama has defined the stakes succinctly. The centerpiece of his health-care proposal is the Public Option, a program of federally supplied and administered health insurance. As he has repeatedly stated, anyone is free to remain inside the private health-insurance system. He said yesterday, “Nobody is talking about some government takeover of health care” and to disagree is “scaring everybody.” He is underselling the power of his own idea. That public option is potent competition, a winner-sweep-the-table proposition between the public sector and the private sector.
The clarifying moment in the health-care debate arrived when the Congressional Budget Office said that the legislation lacked adequate financing. After this, the bill’s backers began a search for tax revenue that borders on parody—taxes on soda pop, surtaxes unto eternity on “millionaires,” as if this might actually command the tides to recede of another permanent Medicare/Medicaid-sized entitlement and its flotsam of advisers, measurers and lobbyists.
Washington and the states are now fighting each other to drain revenue out of the same private sector. Back in March, New York’s legislature, amid a deep recession, enacted its own income tax surcharge. These governments are becoming like people from dying planets in “Star Trek,” foraging the galaxy for new sources of whatever life force keeps them alive. A surtax is the ultimate act of public-sector panic.
I don’t think the White House or the Democratic leadership understands the level of despondency in the country now among people who add new wealth—business owners, entrepreneurs or those who invest in new ideas that don’t depend wholly on subsidized choices made by the public sector.
This is all many people in the most dynamic corners of the private sector talk about now. Their beef is not with recession but the feeling that this presidency and Congress have no interest in them. If we get another jobless recovery, we’ll need the job-creating impulses of these people. The do-good but not-for-profit mentality of the current government looks either hostile to or oblivious of these private-sector fast runners.
The Obama approval rating is falling toward 50% and below that for his handling of the economy and even lower on health care. He will be told, probably this weekend by pundits from planet public sector, that this is due to “lies” from the right. But I think this president needs to find a concrete way fast to show he has a real sense of the private sector’s importance. That promise of “green jobs” isn’t it. His line about “sacrifice” is a euphemism for high tax levels to the horizon. Where’s the upside for new, private entrants?
The problem is that in Washington and many states the public sector’s revenue needs have arrived at a point where space for the private economy is more or less beside the point. That is the clear message of the California and New York budget crises and the difficulties of financing the Obama health-care plan.
For centrists in both parties the moment has come to decide which side of the public-private divide they want the U.S. and its future workers to be on. Trying to live in both has brought us, inevitably, to that decision.
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