Have Republicans met their Waterloo? A Republican speech writer thinks so.

Mr. Frum, george II speech writer and conservative thinks Republicans have over played their hand. And he makes some very astute observations. Earlier this year I posted my predictions for this year, and one of those predictions was that Republicans are going to get their tails whipped again in the fall elections. Until now, the weight of the news and opinion was running against those predictions. Time will ultimately tell what happens this fall. But I think Mr. Frum is right on the mark with his comments.

http://www.frumforum.com/waterloo


And the thing is Republicans appear tone deaf. They are not going to listen to Frum or anyone else but the shrill voices in the extremist part of the party...those folks lead by limbaugh, hannity, levin, beck, et al. And those folks do not have an interest in governing the country but in keeping people mad so the continue to listen to their programs...so they can sell more beds, drugs, and all other sorts of materials.

 

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The Republicans can't do anything to avoid winning in the next elections. The Democrats just voted themselves out of office with this healthcare bill. Their only hope is to give amnesty to the illegal immigrants to get more democrat voters.

 

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Nope, the opposite is true. They will be seen as winners, as reformers, as fighting for the common person rather than the rich.

 

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The poor already have welfare so they don't really care about this. The middle class are the ones who will be hit with this and they don't want it. The rich are rich and they always vote Republican anyways. Just check out the CNN approval polls on Obama and Congress, the common man is not happy with them over this. What makes you think that will change?

 

Approval polls on the congress are always low. What have the Republicans accomplished besides obstructionism?

 

They will be seen as fascist/socialists. They went against what a majority of Americans wanted.

 

Minor detail, but it is the middle class that will be benefited by this bill not "hit" as you claim. As you pointed out, the poor have medicaid. The middle class have nothing if not provided by an employer. Now the middle class have healthcare insurance if they want it and will be required to have it by 2014.

Below is a timeline:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/03/23/health.care.timeline/?hpt=Sbin#2011

I think the Republican author has some good points. The economy will be hiring more people. And people will see that healthcare reform is not the apocolypse as many a Republican leader has said it is....the truth will start to come out and that will hurt Republicans and benefit Democrats. Republicans by taking the arguement to extremes and spread a lot of lies have put their brand on the line. And when the truth becomes known, that brand is going to be damaged.

 

Yes.

The GOP intended to use this as a wedge issue in the November elections. They will be less able to do so now that it has been passed and signed.

Furthermore, this should improve the self-efficacy of the Democrats. The Democrats will act with much more unity as a party having passed such a landmark bill.

I do not think that the passage of this legislation has done the GOP's November prospects any good. In fact, they may have even been better off if they had left the issue alone.

 

Haven't we been over this?

There is a moral imperative to obstruct evil if you can.

 

This seems to be a common viewpoint held by Republicans. But I would beg to differ, I think if they continue on their present course, they are going to be very suprised this fall.

 

I'm sure. The voters will just change their minds about how they feel as they cast their votes.

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CNN is no Republican bastion so its not like they are fudging the numbers to make the President and Congress look bad. Face it, this was not popular and its likely to create a backlash.

 

I'm so glad people are around that think someone should be voted for because they're a winner. F**K principles. F**K actual issues!
He/she looks like a Hollywood somebody! Let's hope they win again!

As for fighting for the common person? I have my doubts about that. This bill is not nearly as simple as "Oh, yeah! Now poor people get healthcare, too!" But that's exactly what it's been portrayed as by its supporters.

 

I wouldn't trust either side to accomplish that obstruction.

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So "the ends justify the means," right? You follow a kind of situational form of morality? To me, that sounds artless and crass.

 

evil? you mean like letting people die so you can make a couple more dollars like you wish?

 

You have the causality backwards. We should make our party look like winners because we want people to vote for them.

It sounds like you are trying to demonize the Democrats for observing sound political strategy.

Actually, I see this bill as "supporting the common person." The idea of "class conflict" was imported from Europe, and it was never particularly relevant to the US.

You have it backwards; that's how you portrayed it. Our main concern was doing away with preexisting conditions.

 

You are very misinformed. Poor people always had heatlhcare through programs like Medicaid. Who gets the ABILITY to buy healthcare insurance now is the middle classs.

But the question is are the Republicans over playing their hand? The right (Republicans) have made a lot of false claims. As the bill comes to be known over time, those falsehoods are going to become public knowledge. Republicans say they want to repeal the bill. And my question to them is and do what? As the facts of this bill become known, people are going to like it. They are going to discover they have been lied too.

What does that do to Republican credibility. Already the political dynamics have changed. President Obama's approval ratings are now over 51 percent. Public support of the bill is now 49 percent for it and only 40 percent against it. If Republicans want to repeal the bill as they do and if they want healthcare reform as they have stated, what are they going to deliver that is better than the present plan? And if they have something that is better than the present plan, why have they not surfaced it before now?

 

Yeah. Joe, would you and others please keep pounding on the fact that, in our country, we have always made sure that even the poverty-stricken had access to healthcare? I don't think the GOP supporters are really acknowledging this. They seem to be operating on the premise that, if we don't get insurance to the unemployed or the underemployed, then we won't have to pay for them.

The real case is quite the opposite: I lived for a while with a couple who were at the absolute bottom of the economic ladder, with the worst kind of credit situation that it is possible to have. They were pregnant, and they were nonetheless able to visit the hospital and receive all of the services that it had to offer. They will eventually be able to pay for these services as long as they are employed; however, if they have to declare bankruptcy over it, that is an expense for the government.

Furthermore, if a person suffering from diabetes can't get insurance but that person is broke, we have two options: either pay for the person to receive care out of our own pockets, or wait for that person to lose a limb or go into a coma or something, and end up paying millions for that person to stay in a hospital bed. Every day, people who are uninsured pass up opportunities to check themselves for cancer partially because of the fact that, if they test positive, they wouldn't have enough insurance to get themselves treated for it and would just die anyway; however, when they end up in a hospital bed because of it, a hospital bed doesn't come for free. It is incredibly costly for Uncle Sam to keep a terminal cancer patient, who was unable to receive inexpensive out-patient treatment for cancer caught in the earliest stages, in a hospital bed. I know a lot of you extremists think we just roll these people into a gutter somewhere, but the rest of the world does not act or think in the same immoral and perverted way. It is just not how things are done, in our country, to roll a sick person into a gutter and just drive past them. Maybe a lot of people in the GOP think it should be done that way, but fortunately they're not strong enough even in that tainted party to make us go that route. The poor people are more expensive uninsured than they are insured.

The idea behind giving people free preventative medicine, like vaccinations for example, is to not have to pay for the care that would be needed if they didn't get that preventative care. The idea behind getting diabetics under an insurance unbrella is to keep them from becoming a huge financial drain in the long-run.

I know a lot of the extremists on this forum think that there is some magical pot-of-gold at the end of the "screw the poor" rainbow, but it's not there. If anything, think about the fact that we are putting pressure on people to get insurance; for example, in some states you can't attend college if you don't have insurance. The uninsured are an expense, damn it.

 

Once again, if you are one of those GOP extremists who think you're going to move us in the direction of kicking poor cancer patients into a gutter or otherwise denying them access to near-end-of-life care, you have the opposition of a lot of Republicans and, if nothing else because it is in their political interests, nearly all of the Democrats. You do not have a path that leads to you not being taxed at all on behalf of people who can't afford their own healthcare.

What the Democrats just signed was the cheap way. It's the way that leaves people less likely to need extreme, emergency-level support from the government.

My point here applies especially to diabetes. Diabetes is not taken seriously enough as an illness, and it is extremely common in many parts of the American South. This disease is not a joke. If you are not treated for it, you will lose your foot, possibly your leg. It can cause all kinds of other health problems that are extremely difficult and expensive to treat when they do arise. However, if the disease is treated with the seriousness that it deserves, then you can beat back the illness to a point where it barely affects your way of life at all. Diabetics are nevertheless at far higher risk than most people of some serious diseases that put them in the hospital for long periods of time. Hypoglycemia, for example, could put a person into a coma. Getting them insured takes the burden off the state's back.

 

Frum out at AEI

Briefly—and leaving people to connect whatever dots they deem appropriate—I will simply mention that David Frum is no longer a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

The party, Mr. Frum said, put politics over policy in trying to damage Mr. Obama's agenda, and lost both the political battle and the ability to influence a key piece of legislation. In a column Mr. Frum posted at the FrumForum, he wrote that the House passage of the health care bill had become the Republicans' "Waterloo," rather than Mr. Obama's, as a leading G.O.P. senator had once warned.

As of Thursday, Mr. Frum had become a former fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Mr. Frum said he was taken out to lunch by the president of the organization, Arthur C. Brooks. He said Mr. Brooks told him the institute valued a diversity of opinion, and welcomed that one of its scholars had become such a high-profile critic of Republican legislative leaders. Mr. Frum, who has been with the institute since 2003, said that he was asked if he would considering being associated with the institute on a nonsalaried basis.

Mr. Frum declined.

"Does it have anything to do with what would be the most obvious explanation of what happened?" he said in an interview after his lunch. "I don't know. That's not what they say."

Asked if he believed that explanation, Mr. Frum responded, "I'm not going to say that they're not telling the truth."

(Nagourney)​

AEI president Arthur C. Brooks has suggested that Frum decided to up and leave of his own free will. "We are pleased," Brooks said in a statement, "to have welcomed him as a colleague for seven years, and his decision to leave in no way diminishes our respect for him."

Call it what you will. Either way, though, "surprising" is an adjective that just won't work.
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Notes:

Nagourney, Adam. "Frum Forced Out at Conservative Institute". The Caucus. March 25, 2010. NYTimes.com. March 25, 2010. http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/frum-forced-out-at-conservative-institute/