The post election
focus may be on Iraq and oversight of the billions spent and misspent in this
ill-conceived misadventure, but domestic issues will generate plenty of
attention and division. That’s often referred to in political circles as opportunity.
Which will it be: People
or Big Pharma profits? The Bush administration [says]
it will strenuously oppose one of the Democrats’
top priorities for the new Congress: legislation authorizing the government to
negotiate with drug companies to secure lower drug prices for Medicare
beneficiaries. In an interview, Michael O. Leavitt, Sec. of Health
and Human Services, said he saw no prospect of compromise on the issue.
“In politics,” Mr.
Leavitt said, “most specific issues like this are a disguise for a larger
difference. Government
negotiation of drug prices does not work unless you have a program completely
run by the government. Democrats say they want the government to negotiate
prices. What they really want is government-run health care.” Federal price negotiations would unravel the whole
structure of the Medicare drug benefit, which relies on competing private
plans, Mr. Leavitt said. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/13/washington/13medicare.html
Below, the
conservative historian/columnist Niall Ferguson interprets the midterm election
was a victory for conservative thinking, just wearing different colors. As a
proponent of moderation, I share the principle that a ‘centrist’ position is
healthy, but this post election conclusion may be wishful thinking for conservatives.
If you don’t believe in government, how can you expect to govern well? What
good is it if Wall Street profits while Main Street falters?
The premise
for small government conservativism is flawed, a product of decades of opposition,
now with 12 years of painful and costly implementation. It will be challenged
from within, just as the GOP party is now. The Reagan Democrats have disbanded,
whether the Dixiecrats still rule is to be determined. As you would expect, both
parties will undergo transition as the keys are exchanged after 12 years. Democrats
must change gears, too.
Given many
past discussions, I thought this OpEd might be worth your attention today, as
the lame duck 109th GOP Congress reconvenes, Pres. Bush’s White
House spends all day with the members of the Iraq Study Group in small group counseling
sessions, and several critical issues loom on the near horizon. The forces of political yin and yang
must be expected, and to some, immediate intervention is required – by popular
demand. KwC
Borat, Blue Dogs And The GOP Joke
Sacha Baron Cohen's
movie lampoons red-state conservatives, serving as a harbinger of last week's
elections. But who will get the last laugh?
OpEd by Niall
Ferguson, LA Times, Monday, November 13, 2006
IN ADDITION TO being a brilliant satirist, Sacha Baron Cohen was once a rather
good historian. In fact, he is by far my most successful former student. I can
still remember how well he used to play the part of a studious Cambridge
undergraduate, taking me in completely. With the character of Borat, however,
he has gone one better. He has taken in America.
For the amazing thing about his new film is how brutally it ridicules the
United States. Borat's victims are all hapless Americans, mugged by Oxbridge
irony. The rodeo crowd who howl down his rendition of a spoof Kazakh national
anthem, sung to the tune of "The Star Spangled Banner"; the Southern
architect and preacher who invite him to dinner only to have him vilify their
wives; the Pentecostal worshippers whom he mocks by pretending to shake and
speak in tongues; the politically incorrect frat boys who give him a lift in
their van and, in their cups, expose their own sad misogyny — all of them
trustingly welcomed a man whom they took to be a genuine Central Asian
journalist, and all of them ended up abjectly humiliated. And yet American
audiences roar with laughter. The film is a hit, topping the box office again
this weekend and generating close to $68 million so far.
The explanation is, of course, that nearly all Borat's victims are Republicans.
God-fearing, often Southern and just a little unused to tricky foreigners, such
people were supposed to be the Republican Party's core support. Suddenly the
rest of the nation is laughing at them — and outvoting them. It's as if blue
America is in on the joke being played on red America by Sacha. And that's why
the popularity of his movie — which I saw with my family in San Francisco on
the eve of the election — was a harbinger of the drubbing red-state America was
going to suffer at the polls.
Of course we shouldn't get too carried away. There's an argument that last
week's vote marks the turning of a tide that began to run the Republicans' way
back in the days of Richard Nixon. The Nixonian trick, honed to perfection by
Ronald Reagan, was to build a Republican coalition that included Southern
Democrats as well as blue-collar workers who felt disillusioned with the
liberal reforms of the 1960s. Under Karl Rove's direction, this strategy seemed
to reach its zenith, as some conservative-minded Latinos and blacks were also
persuaded to vote GOP. According to Rove's critics, all this has now unraveled,
leaving the Grand Old Party with nothing but the South. Rove's "base"
has become a mere rump. The moral majority has been reduced, definitively, to a
minority. This goes too far, because the law of unintended consequences is at
work here.
The relatively decent turnout last Tuesday (for a midterm at least) suggests
that many disillusioned Republican and independent voters actually voted
Democrat in reaction to the Bush administration's blunders. But the Dems they
backed were often so-called Blue Dogs, such as newly elected North Carolina
Rep. Heath Shuler, the former pro football player who opposes abortion and gun
control. In other words, conservative Dems.
Ironically, however, the losers included some relatively liberal Republicans,
while the big winners in Washington will be the old-style Democrats from the
Northeast and California who are still the party's leaders. In the House, Henry
Waxman, for example, can be expected to go after the big oil companies when he
takes charge of the Government Reform Committee, and Barney Frank will have the
hedge funds in his sights as chairman of the Financial Services Committee. A
crucial role will be played by Charles Rangel, likely chairman of the Ways and
Means Committee, a fierce critic of the Bush administration's tax cuts and
stalled Social Security reform. Other key Dems — John Dingell, the autoworkers'
friend, and Collin Peterson, a staunch defender of farm subsidies — are likely
to make the president's life difficult on the issue of free trade, hammering
the final nails in the coffin of the moribund Doha Round of talks to liberalize
global trade.
Whatever anyone says today about the joys of bipartisanship, and even if the
Democrats resist the temptation to launch muck-raking congressional inquiries,
the result is bound to be more, not less, political polarization. President
Bush will never be able to "reach out" to a House speaker like Nancy
Pelosi, least of all over Iraq. He'd rather see his father's realist pals,
James A. Baker III and Robert Gates, reach out to Iran and Syria.
Yet for precisely these reasons, the Democrats could quite quickly alienate the
voters they managed to win over last week — or rather the voters the
Republicans managed to drive away. And two years of deadlock between an
unpopular president and an unreconstructed Democratic Party establishment could
provide the perfect backdrop for John McCain's presidential campaign in 2008. After
all, McCain has repeatedly criticized the Bush administration's handling of the
Iraq war without doing anything on domestic politics that a Blue Dog would so
much as growl at.
The French have an _expression_ for it: reculer
pour mieux sauter (take a step back so you can take a big leap
forward). If it turns out that Republicans merely took a step back in '06, the
better to jump ahead in '08, then the joke will be on Borat.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ferguson13nov13,0,4538247.column?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
