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The most expert magic, in the wrong hands, leaves such disaster in its wake that an army of buckets and mops can’t clean it up. Bad magic wielded by callous hands and described by someone with no mojo is just offal. The latter is the recipe that brings us David Brooks’ Liberal Suicide March.
Bobo is Professor Snape without the diction or the inner conflicts that keep him from melting into the dark side. As a dues paying member of the MSM, he routinely equates Republican malfeasance and self-destruction with invented similar behavior by Democrats. Here is a partial translation of today’s installment of Bobo’s special form of wand-wringing:
It’s not that interesting to watch the Democrats lose touch with America. That’s because the plotline is exactly the same. The party is led by insular liberals from big cities and the coasts, who neither understand nor sympathize with moderates. They have their own cherry-picking pollsters, their own media and activist cocoon, their own plans to lavishly spend borrowed money to buy votes.
Insular Liberals
76% of Americans want credible health care reform, including a public option. I suspect more would like to see his co-wizards on Wall Street more firmly regulated. Instead, those wizards are given a bipartisan pat on the wallet and told to go out and play more roughly this time.
Big Cities and the Coasts
If you include the North Coast – Midwestern states bordering the Great Lakes – that would include most of America’s taxpaying public. It excludes the South, where the GOP proliferates like pets let loose in the Everglades.
Their own cherry-picking pollsters, their own media and activist cocoon
Despite Rahm’s best efforts, Karl Rove is still the Man. Rahm is still no match for him or his pet media. He tries to keep Obama in a Rahm-Bubble, but Obama keeps sneaking out and delivering liberal-sounding promises that Rahm and the Blue Dogs don’t like and won’t vote for.
Lavishly spend borrowed money to buy votes
Brooks is looking through his health care industry-colored glasses again. The industry that gave him those is spending a million and a half a day to get the best legislation money can buy. As for the king of spending borrowed money, see George Bush.
Most independents now disapprove of Obama’s health care strategy.
Only if "most Americans" means "David Brooks". Americans’ dissatisfaction with Obama is because he is too timid, too bound to the center line, to champion the health care reforms we desperately need.
We’re only in the early stages of the liberal suicide march
Bobo is projecting the feelings Republicans, who imagine themselves not committing suicide, but on a forced march on Bataan. The Dems would be committing suicide only if they follow David Brooks’ advice.
Every cliché Ann Coulter throws at the Democrats
Anne Coulter is a leggy blond who gave up the law to become a neocon performance artist. It pays better, but she is the cliche.
Machiavelli said a leader should be feared as well as loved.
George Bush was neither. He was disdained. People feared Dick Cheney. He stole Bush’s job and Bush thanked him for it. Soundbites from fifteenth century Italian bureaucrats that come without context, meaning or effective argument are still soundbites.
Lastly, Bobo tells us who the real heroes are in Congress:
That leaves matters in the hands of the Blue Dog Democrats. These brave moderates are trying to restrain the fiscal explosion.
Wrong solution, wrong party, wrong team. Progressives are working hard to pepper the noses of Blue Dogs who are ignoring the needs of their constituents and all Americans in order to line their pockets with industry cash.
I enjoy this gig, but will someone please buy David Brooks a better primer on speaking English as a Second Language.
17 Comments
You’ve got more stamina than I, debunking all the Broder bullshit. Not a job I could keep up with, that’s for sure.
What does “76% of Americans want credible health care reform, including a public option.” actually mean and how does it have anything to do with the point that health-care reform that results in higher cost is a poor idea?
Debunking Broder would be a lot more work. He’s smarmier and more self-satisfied, but less obviously neoconish than Bobo.
Recent polls indicate that 76% of Americans support health care reform that includes a viable public insurance option. One that has fewer procedural roadblocks, one that covers preventive care and pre-existing conditions and which can’t be canceled because the patient uses it.
Mr. Brooks’ makes the hoary claims that costs will go up, though he does not break down where or why. As does the CBO, he overstates certain costs and exclude savings, such as the cost we’re all paying when hospitals recover costs for treating the uninsured. That list of potential savings should include many items traditionally excluded. It should include everything from saving money by paying for fewer debt collectors for hospitals to fewer health care cost-related bankruptcies. In the end, it should include productivity gains from healthier parents and children.
Brooks also excludes savings, such as lowered payments to insurers who are forced to compete and who respond by lowering their prices for what they sell now, or by offering more inclusive, less restrictive products.
Mr. Brooks is correct in that we won’t save money simply by funding a public insurer who operates the same way as the current private insurers do. No one wants that; it’s a straw man argument. Brooks is correct that the delivery of health care needs reform, to focus on patient outcomes rather than on what services the insurer will pay for. One place we could save is on home health care, be it end of life care or care for chronic, partially debilitating illnesses. Why pay for hospital care – and lose more time at work – when visiting nurses can maintain patient health or quality of life for less.
Mr. Brooks is less concerned with effective reform than he is with derailing it. He is a financial scold who has come out of the woodwork; he uses “cost” as a generic weapon of delay and fear.
We spend mightily on health care but spend it badly. We don’t pay for, and therfore don’t get as much preventive care as we need to reduce lower overall health care spend per patient. Insurers exclude patients with chronic illnesses. They terminate coverage from patients who utilize health care in an effort to boost profits, not to improve care, make it more cost-effective, or to reduce overall care costs per patient life.
Insurers’ primary concern is not total patient spend. It is patient spend in the twelve month cycle of their contracts. Their job is to delay care so that it’s not spent in the current year. As with automotive maintenance, care delayed increases the cost of care. They won’t pay for your oil change today. They are betting that when you need a new engine because of it, and if you still have insurance, it won’t be from them.
earl, thank you for the long and thoughtful answer. There are one or points in it that are dubious, but mostly its fine.
However, it’s not really enlightening as to whether Brook is correct in likening this plan to the Mass plan and whether that plan has resulted in higher cost.
I don’t think Brooks cares if it does. The Mass plan is a bete noir for neocons and insurers and so he trots it out. I don’t doubt that the Mass. approach could be improved, especially in its reliance on traditional insurers providing the same destructive, self-protective, insurance offerings they sell to companies.
Mr. Brooks isn’t debating which reforms are needed to achieve Massachusetts’ goal of full coverage or to enable that coverage to be provided at less overall current or lifetime cost to patients, the government or society. He is attempting to derail it with generic claims that it’s too expensive and doesn’t work.
Bobo has no earned credibility on this issue and I’m not offering him any.
Typical Brooks BS. Democrats have lost contact but he David Brooks hasn’t. He is a moderate just like the majority of the country is. This is especially true if we ignore where most Americans live and his constant shillery for the right, neocons, and corporate America. So, of course, he can speak for ordinary Americans and he does. And guess what they agree with him –again. Somehow when Brooks is the one writing the piece Americans always agree with him. Talk about having his finger on the pulse of the country. And guess what too. Moderates also agree with the wingnut right. Now that is moderation that Brooks can believe in. Still these moderates who agree with Brooks and Republicans voted in Democrats. They did it in 2006 and again in 2008. And despite the fact that Obama’s economic plans are going nowhere, there doesn’t seem to be any stampede to the Republicans. I guess that the moderate majority in the country just hasn’t realized yet out much they are in agreement with David Brooks and the Republicans and so while deep down Americans agree with them on the surface this may look, to the undiscerning, like opposition. So just because the country keeps electing Democrats, don’t be fooled. They really are Republicans at heart. Just ask David Brooks.
Thanks to Jane and her colleagues, there may be one or two fewer Blue Dogs that refuse to hunt come November 2010. Until then, if they won’t hunt, they don’t deserve any treats or de-fleaing.
I’ve heard Brooks on television lauding health care reform, calling it necessary and desirable.
Anybody who wishes for a plan that will realize the savings available in reform to offset the cost of improvement in coverage has plenty of credibility on this issue.
Of course you have. Although not apparent from his columns, he can read and accurately interpret polls. Health care reform is popular. A lot of Republicans and Blue Dogs are for it.
The question is what kind of “reform” is he really advocating?
Comparing all Democrats with all Republicans and saying a pox on both their houses, accusing Democrats by definition of overspending (compared to what, Bush’s wars?) and of being too liberal (by whose standards, Bill Kristol’s?) is not being for health care reform. It is derailing its current promoters and grossly inadequately distinguishing among very diverse groups of Democrats. Jane Hamsher is not the same as Rahm Emanuel or Max Baucus.
When “Democrat” Dan Boren says this, he’s not advocating health care reform or anything else on the Democratic agenda. He, like Brooks, wants to derail it while appearing to be for it. It’s called politics.
Digby and dday cover this issue closely. Comparing the situation today with the “lessons” purportedly learned in 1993-94, she says:
Nobody writes about “Village conventional wisdom about the liberal boogeyman” better than the pseudo-public intellectual David Brooks.
Ack, and I’m getting my pundits confused. Boooo
After reading Douthat and Bobo, the eyes and brain do glaze over, but I think that’s intentional.
It’s not that interesting to watch the Democrats lose touch with America.
Not as interesting as the Invisible Hand on Bobo’s inner thigh. Run!
I imagine that Bobo might resemble that remark.
That his principal aim is to diss Democrats for being Democrats, and to demonize the process through which reform might be achieved is the evidence necessary to suggest that Bobo’s aim, like the Blue Dogs’, is not to promote better reform, but to derail it.
Bobo is issuing that clarion call of the right wing, that the DFH’s are not part of that community they like to call Real Merkins, or the silent majority, his favorite memory from the Civil Rights struggle, when the country was frightened by the prospect of liberal justice and equality taking over from the courthouse gang/villager. The country got over it, but the pundits are sure that they can defeat enlightenment and send us all back to the bad old days when they could issue cant and ignorant disdain, and hear no dissent. Without the internet, they might still convince some folks, but those days are long, thankfully, gone.
Blogs can sometimes substitute as virtual rails, tar and feathers. And they don’t charge much for the service. I think that’s something the MSM and politicians deeply resent. After all, having exclusive control over whether and whom to do that to was one of the things that made Rupert Murdoch a billionaire.