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David Brooks wants us all to be afraid – again – of improving our public health and our privates lives. He laments the creation of legislative monsters – "bills that can pass" – rather than viable forms of life – "programs that can work". But he lays the blame on Congress rather than the Just Say No Republicans and a handful of Democrats they’ve targeted to get them to go along with "No".
As a matter of faith, Mr. Brooks wants us to tough it out with private insurers because only capitalism produces results capitalists find productive, not government programs. It doesn’t seem relevant to him that Medicare and Social Security work astoundingly well, while private health insurance is a shambles for the insured. That condition would lead capitalists and socialists alike to find a different purveyor of insurance. Accepting that that different, new insurer could be the government, for Mr. Brooks, is like asking the pope to let priests marry.
Consequently, in his first paragraph, Brooks trots out a fifteen year-old Democratic defeat, Clinton Care, in which he waxes about the Democrats’ scars and their purported lessons:
Even as you watch the leading Democrats today in their moment of glory, you can still see wounds caused by the defeat of the Clinton health care initiative. You see the psychic reactions and the scars and the lessons they have taken away so that sort of debacle never happens again.
His takeaway is that Mr. Obama, unlike Mr. Clinton, will let Congress mold the bill rather than issue it fully formed from the White House. Nice idea, if Congress were a responsible body. He claims "it" is not, carefully avoiding why, the Party of No and their "centrist" Democratic colleagues.
The great paradox of the age is that Barack Obama, the most riveting of recent presidents, is leading us into an era of Congressional dominance. And Congressional governance is a haven for special interest pleading and venal logrolling.
For Mr. Brooks, the lament is adequate: he wants to take the wind out of the sails of citizen-promoted reforms because they threaten private enterprise’s pockets. Sustainable reform of energy, health care or environmental laws isn’t possible, he implies. Possibly correct. But tell us why, David, and what Americans should do to correct the problem. That might help us obtain the reforms we badly need, and which would cost less, properly calculated, than making no reforms at all.
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Brooks always has this way of shedding crocodile tears as he is slipping the shiv in between the ribs. I agree this is all about distraction. Talk about Obama, talk about Congress, but don’t mention how the Republicans have been veering between mulish stubbornness and psychosis on this and every other issue, or how we need healthcare reform because of the complete and massive failure of private enterprise to deliver adequate healthcare to all Americans at a price that won’t bankrupt the country.
Calling Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard.
I think Dr. Fine is funnier.
This is another expression of the establishment’s fight to neuter progressive causes and the people who benefit from them. It’s about those with status fighting to maintain the quo.
Jane’s sad diary post about Donna Edwards demonstrates it. Edwards’ office waffles over whether she will hold firm and demand a public health option, using the standard “progressive” Democrat meme that it is unlikely that there will be support for a bill lacking it. Really?
Translating Edwards’ frail use of Congresscritter speak, beloved of the staffs who invented and master it, she is admitting she won’t hold firm. She is not, as she claims, merely failing to respond to an unlikely “hypothetical”. Jane mentions Nancy Pelosi’s recent brutalizing of her progressive caucus to pass the war funding and energy bills and tells us to expect the same regarding health care “reform” legislation. Nancy wants legislative victories, not, as David Brooks gleefully tells us, “programs that work” for those who desperately need them.
Those who ought to be most loyal to progressive causes crumble in the face of fear and ambition. Fear for their own political futures and the jobs of their immediate circle. And ambition, all too easily directed to causes not under direct attack. That allows them to rationalize their caving in on the establishment issue of the day while claiming still to be progressive.
This is a fight over who gets the pie. Always has been. Sitting back and waiting for your slice will be as productive as it was for the puppy who waited in line for momma’s milk.
My point is that I think, because of their outlook, progressives view the world sometimes like altar boys and Eagle Scouts. They trust their priest and Scoutmaster to do the right thing because that’s how their catechism explained the world. Joan of Arc, American Indians and generations of altar boys learned the hard way that’s not how the world of political ambition, greed and perverted passions works.
That’s not news to Jane and the community here, and it’s why Jane is working so hard to name and reward or shame those who claimed support from the progressive community and who threaten to leave it behind for “bigger rewards”. To riff off the now almost comical securities warning – past reward is no guarantee of future performance.
Brooks will never be impressed. ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge and you did not mourn.’
Oama as totalitarian socialist did not work, so now why not try out incoherent and pointless Congressional mish-mash.
There is a genuine point underneath the empty propagandistic posturing of Brooks. Krugman made it a few days ago -if compromise produces policies that do not deliver, that is bad policy that will have bad political consequences.
Brooks removes that facts, reasoning and argument to produce more general pissing on any kind of progressive change. Brooks is opinion journalism as elevator music, but with a subliminal message. Really tiresome. Even less content that Thomas Friedman, and I think Friedman is about as far as you can push it, before you fall over the edge into not worth the time to read.
But, need to diagnose and document Brooks bag of tricks, since Brooks is everywhere, it seems. He would be a good pairing with Milbank.
He could teach Milbank how to be even more vacuous.
Brooks is right that we’ve learned from many bitter experiences. Is this not good?
I think his view that gov’t doesn’t work IS the Republican view. We Dems disagree and are acting on that belief.
His view that trusting legislating to Congress is foolhardy IS the Republican view, and more, that all new legislation must be handed down from Daddy. We Dems don’t super-impose that same world view on the gov’t processes. Instead we prefer that everyone do their jobs as the Constitution defines them.