Both parties failed to find common ground in the healthcare debate and The New York Times is disappointed. President Obama ran on pledging a better environment for bipartisanship but this promise has fallen by the wayside. The Times should more carefully consider the actual history before it celebrates across the aisle exercises that result in unsustainable entitlements…
Once again, The New York Times elevates the concept of bipartisanship above the idea that principled opposition is needed to prevent the political class from overreaching. A news analysis piece that examines the political fallout of the healthcare bill the House approved on Sunday assumes that Republican lawmakers were operating on the basis of a raw political calculus as opposed to sincere convictions.
“Republicans entered this fight convinced, at least for public consumption, that they know how it will play out: with an end to Mr. Obama’s mandate and a bigger-than-normal loss for the incumbent party in the midterms,” the report claims. “In the soaring deficits that began in the Bush era and accelerated in the heat of the financial crisis, and in the argument that Mr. Obama was taking over wide swaths of the economy, an increasingly conservative Republican Party believes the health care overhaul encapsulates the argument that the president is about big government intruding into the lives of citizens.”
But the same was true as it applied to the tactics of the Obama White House. Even as successfully marshaled through his healthcare bill, the president lost something precious in the form of support from the opposing party.
“But there is no doubt that in the course of this debate, Mr. Obama has lost something — and lost it for good,” The Times laments. “Gone is the promise on which he rode to victory less than a year and a half ago — the promise of a “postpartisan” Washington in which rationality and calm discourse replaced partisan bickering.”
“Never in modern memory has a major piece of legislation passed without a single Republican vote, the report continues. “Even President Lyndon B. Johnson got just shy of half of Republicans in the House to vote for Medicare in 1965, a piece of legislation that was denounced with many of the same words used to oppose this one. That may be the true measure of how much has changed in Washington in the ensuing 45 years, and how Mr. Obama’s own strategy is changing with the discovery that the approach to governing he had in mind simply will not work.”
These observations are true as far as they go but The Times places too much stock in historical examples of bipartisan cooperation. In reality, both parties have come together to do great violence against taxpayers and the economy as a whole.
Social Security and Medicare are held up as great legislative bipartisan achievements. Yet there is not word here about the growing unfunded liabilities of both programs and long-term ramifications for Americans now coming of age.
Thus far, “no one on Capitol Hill has dared suggest eliminating” the program, the report says. But, at the same time, Tea Party activists are asking policymakers how they can rationalize the creation of another entitlement after mismanaged the existing plans.
More, despite all the posturing on behalf of bipartisanship there is not a word in favor of the 34 Democrats who joined with Republicans to vote against government intervention into the private sector. They do so running upstream against their own party leadership and probably great personal cost in deference to taxpayer interests. In what way were those House Democrats not bipartisan?
Future taxpayers may yet decide that bipartisanship is over-rated, as are entitlements that eat up a greater percentage of their paycheck while paying out paltry benefits.
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