Winston Churchill – the statesman who defined champagne as “bottled sunshine” – often suffered bouts of deep depression. He called that frequent companion his “black dog.” After their drubbing in 2008 and Obama’s legislative tsunami – pausing, not ending in the enactment of the healthcare reform bill – some Republicans appear ready to settle in for a long political winter with Churchill’s black dog curled up at their feet.
Former presidential speechwriter David Frum, apparently eager to hug the black dog, wrote that the passage of Obamacare is the Republicans’ Waterloo, and that while they may retake the House or Senate this November, that wouldn’t matter because “This healthcare bill is forever.”
Frum merely gives voice to the thinking of the Old Republican Establishment. They are comfortable in the minority, smiling – as former House Minority Leader Bob Michel used to – at the inability to direct national policy, adept at getting re-elected without the burden of leadership.
Frum’s reference to Waterloo is almost apt. But the enactment of Obamacare isn’t the Republicans’ Waterloo. If Frum knew his military history, he’d see it not as Waterloo, but as Marengo: a defeat that turned what could have been a devastating defeat into a crushing victory for Napoleon in June 1800.
Having split his forces in Northern Italy, an overconfident Napoleon found himself under attack by Gen. Michael Melas’ Austrian armies in what the French emperor first thought was a feint. But as the battle grew into a meeting engagement, French forces fell back into Marengo’s vineyards, desperate for reinforcement.
As the afternoon wore on – after the Austrians fell back to regroup in the heat of the day – Napoleon’s friend and confidant Lieutenant General Louis Desaix‘s force arrived and turned the tide of the battle. Desaix is the man who famously “rode to the sound of the guns” and turned defeat into victory.
Republicans should not surrender: this healthcare bill is not forever. And the American equivalent of Desaix’s force – the vast majority of Americans who oppose nationalization of healthcare – is ready to advance against the hyperliberal congress.
But they won’t if Republicans fall into the trap they so often lay for themselves. Republicans and especially conservatives are by nature incrementalists: they take things in small digestible bites. But incrementalism is a trap: the temptation to “fix” Obamacare is a quagmire from which they will not escape.
To embrace a strategy attempting to fix Obamacare is to be hypnotized by the siren song of the New York Times and the Washington Post, to pursue – as John McCain did to his ultimate defeat – allies among those who are committed ideologues of the left. Republicans would have to invest enormous amounts of time and energy on legislation that won’t succeed any more than the good bills they introduced since June of last year to repair what ails American healthcare.
And, inevitably, they will be characterized – fairly or not, but nevertheless effectively — as embracing the major elements of Obamacare that the Democrats will never agree to change. Which means the Republicans will lose all the political momentum given them by the arrogant, corrupt enactment of Obamacare.
Republicans need to insist that there was no healthcare “crisis” before the president signed the legislation, and that the one we face now is dire: created by new taxes and big government’s intrusion on the doctor-patient relationship, Americans will find fewer doctors who can provide the medical care they want and need. They will find that the quality of the services they can get is degraded by the reduced production of high-tech medical equipment and by the bureaucrats who now stand between them and their personal physicians.
And they need to listen to the anguished words of the physicians themselves. Speaking at a conference held by the new group “Docs4PatientCare” last Thursday, I heard an outpouring of frustration and anger from doctors who came from Georgia, Oregon, Colorado and many other states. These dedicated people who only want to heal and help are crying out, and Republicans had better listen.
Their anger results from one fact: under Obamacare, government regulations will impose a new and lesser standard of care: doctors will be able to do only what the government allows insurers to pay for, not what the doctor and patient believe is best for the patient. That cannot be allowed to stand, and voters will judge Republicans who want to “fix” the healthcare legislation to be no better than the statists who imposed it.
Frum – like other Republican establishmentarians – seeks to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obamacare isn’t forever. But it is only with us unless conservatives and Republicans act with the audacity needed to regain political power and then repeal it. They cannot do either by half-measures or timid actions.
Obama and the congressional Democrats are revolutionaries. They cannot be defeated in 2010 or 2012 unless Republicans turn the political anger that surrounds Obamacare into political energy. That requires a principled audacity that avoids the trap of incrementalism.
One conservative House member called me on Thursday, worried that a few of his colleagues were walking into that trap. Some, he said, were planning legislative “fixes” to the new law. They may as well go to Frum’s house and curl up on the carpet with the black dog.
Repealing Obamacare must be, as Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) said, Job 1. He and other conservative leaders, including House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind.), are agreed on that.
As Mike Pence is fond of saying, a congressional minority plus the American people is a majority. I don’t know if Pence has studied the Napoleonic Wars. But it appears that he understands the difference between Waterloo and Marengo.
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