Last week, I wrote about the Randian philosophical roots of Paul Ryan's budget roadmap. The fiscal question interests me as well. The rationale for Ryan's rapid elevation to the pantheon of great conservative heroes is that his plan, unlike Obama's, can bring fiscal solvency.
Matthew Continetti has an editorial in the Weekly Standard:
John McCormack at the Weekly Standard has a splashy headline today: "Obama Now Selling Judgeships For Health Care Votes?" The story turns out to be that Obama is nominating Scott Matheson, Jr. to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
P.R. flack Michael Goldfarb, writing in the Weekly Standard, has an item entitled "Israel to J Street: We Know You're Not Pro-Israel." The basis for this turns out to be a comment from Danny Ayalon, to wit: "The thing that troubles me is that they don't present themselves as to what they really are. They should not call themselves pro-Israeli."
If you're logging in for the first time in a few days and catching up on health care reform, you've probably read a few articles about how the issue will play in the 2010 midterm elections, assuming Congress passes a bill sometime early in the new year.
Some people think the issue will help the Democrats, because it's a huge, historic accomplishment that will (eventually) address economic insecurity. Others think it will hurt the Democrats, since it's a big government program and won't do anything to boost jobs in the next few months. Also, polls suggest that health care reform is not particularly popular right now, although that could simply reflect predictable (and fleeting) ambivalence about the legislation process.
I really don't know who is right. But I do have some ideas about how health care reform will play out in the long term. And for that I have to thank Bill Kristol, of all people.
In a blog item posted back on December 16, Kristol wrote an item for the Weekly Standard blasting the Senate Democrats' bill and urging Republicans to hang tough in opposition:
Republicans should say: No, No, a thousand times No.
And if the legislation passes, the GOP should immediately begin trying to repeal key parts of it. The moment it passes, Mitch McConnell might introduce free-standing legislation repealing the Medicare cuts. Republicans could highlight their opposition to Big Pharma and Big Insurance by trying to force votes--in 2010--on drug re-importation and more insurance competition, measures that could go into effect right away so as to be of immediate benefit to the American people. And of course they should promise to relieve the American people of the prospect of living under the Democrats' health bureaucracy regime by promising repeal of the whole thing in 2011.
Republicans invoked the same refrain during the final days of the Senate debate. And, at a time when voters were pretty clearly disenchanted with the legislative process, I'm sure it didn't help the Democrats in the polls. But did it help the Republicans? Will it help them in the future?
I can't imagine how.
Those of us who follow the career of Weekly Standard writer and ex-journalist Matthew Continetti have noticed that he enjoys parroting the line taken by his boss, Bill Kristol. For example, Kristol will go on television and mouth some Republican talking point, and then a couple of days later, Continetti will echo the sentiment. (An alternate theory is that they receive talking points from the same source).
Will health care reform help slow down rising costs? The Congressional Budget Office, even while totally discounting the slew of new cost-containment methods in the Senate bill, says yes. Conservative skeptics say no, arguing that Americans won't tolerate cuts to even totally ineffective spending on medical care.
Conservatives have been quick to blame the administration for the slow delivery of H1N1 vaccine. Not long after Obama declared the swine flu pandemic a national emergency last month--a measure that cleared the way for hospitals to make special preparations for infected patients--Missouri Representative Roy Blunt pounced on the administration’s “onerous regulatory and legal environment” as a cause for the vaccine delays. In the Weekly Standard last week, Bill Kristol held up the swine flu response as an example of the coming “big government health care” boondoggle. “Surely this spectacle, happening in real time before us, will give even more Democrats pause. Do they really want to be known as the Swine Flu Democrats?” Earlier this month, Rush Limbaugh declared that the problem was on par with the Bush administration’s disastrous federal response to Hurricane Katrina.
But how much blame should the government really get for the shortage? Late last month, Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported on the administration’s efforts to respond to the threat of a pandemic. From the start, she reported, Obama seemed determined to put forth a coordinated plan for dealing with the outbreak, studying past government responses to flu epidemics with the help of former administration officials and adding swine flu updates to his regular intelligence briefings. The administration created a government website and public service campaign to inform the public of precautionary measures they could take to avoid the flu. And, most importantly, they moved swiftly to contract with a roster of vaccine manufacturers and got the first doses out to high-risk patients earlier than every country but Australia and China. “[T]he Obama administration left little to chance,” she notes.
One thing they didn’t fully appreciate, however, was the inherent unpredictability of the vaccine manufacturing process. Flu vaccines are typically prepared by injecting the virus into fertilized chicken eggs and incubating them until they become infected. The egg fluid is then harvested and mixed with an embalming fluid, which prevents the virus from causing illness but triggers a response from the immune system that will prevent a future infection. As Allison Bond explained in Discover, there is ample opportunity for the process to become complicated if the egg rots, or the virus grows slowly or produce a weak vaccine. (As Bond notes, HHS devoted $1 billion in funds to develop new vaccine-making technology in 2006, but those technologies weren’t ready for use when H1N1 started spreading earlier this year.)
I don't wish to join Isaac in piling on Matthew Continetti's love letter to Sarah Palin in the Weekly Standard. Wait. Let me re-phrase that. I do wish to join Isaac in piling on Matthew Continetti's love letter to Sarah Palin in the Weekly Standard. I know I shouldn't but I can't resist. Here's a passage that gives you an inkling of the method Continetti used to compile his argument:
From a new cover story on Sarah Palin by Weekly Standard hack Matthew Continetti:
Last week, when Joe Biden traveled to upstate New York to campaign for Democratic congressional candidate Bill Owens, the vice president took aim at Sarah Palin. "The fact of the matter is that Sarah Palin thinks the answer to energy was 'drill, baby, drill,' " Biden said. "No, it's a lot more complicated, Sarah, than 'drill, baby, drill.' "
Matthew Continetti's editorial in last week's issue of the Weekly Standard--"The Inevitability Myth: Health care reform is not a fait accompli"--makes the case that, despite all evidence, health care reform may not be enacted after all. (Continetti does concede that "the chances of some sort of health bill passing, at some point, are by no means negligible." So he's telling us there's a chance.)
This sort of argument is actually the signature style of the Standard. A magazine like National Review specializes in making the case for conservative ideas. The Standard's contribution is to assert over and over that Republicans are succeeding, or at least doing better than you think they are. The idea is to buck up your side and encourage them to keep fighting, in order to ward off the self-defeating psychology of losing.
It's unclear to me why the subscribers of that magazine pay money to be the subjects of a disinformation campaign. To be sure, like any stopped clock, sometimes the Standard gets it right. But there's a distinctly Pravda-esque feel to the political coverage that makes back reading an enjoyable experience. With help from Noah Kristula-Green, I pulled together some examples:
Is it a sign of naivete that one can still experience a bit of shock when reading things like this in one of our two most "serious" conservative magazines? It's 2009! The words of wisdom below are courtesy of someone named James Bowman, and can be found in a new Weekly Standard essay. Bowman starts off poorly by arguing as follows:
One striking thing to me is the extreme confidence conservatives have that health care reform will fail. The Weekly Standard has been at the forefront of this triumphalism. Fred Barnes, writing in the Weekly Standard, flatly declares reform won't even make it out of the House:
How far can the Weekly Standard sink? Time will tell, but the cover of its current issue gives a pretty good sense of its depth at the moment. Accompanied by the cover line "Here the People Rule," the illustration--it's a bit small here, but I'll gladly link to a larger version if I find one--is of, well, an angry white mob.
The Weekly Standard's latest editorial, by Bill Kristol:
Conservative policy wonks helped to explode the false budgetary and health-improvement claims made on behalf of Obamacare. Conservative polemicists pointed out how Obamacare--conceived in the spirit of budget chief Peter we-spend-too-much-as-a-nation-on-health-care Orszag and adviser Ezekiel we-need-to-stop-wasting-money-on-extending-low-quality-lives Emanuel--means, in effect, death panels.
What a difference a Democratic primary makes. During the 1990s, the Right treated Hillary Clinton like she was, if not the locus of all evil, something just next to it. Now that she's on track to be Obama's Secretary of State, Newt Gingrich is singing her praises and the Weekly Standard is calling her "The Great Right Hope."
TNR started off the week by trouncing The Atlantic at softball and settling in for a Sunday read of Ryan Lizza's New Yorker piece. But our peace of mind was soon disturbed.
This fall, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. launched a search for a new conservative columnist. It had been nearly three years since William Safire had retired from his weekly column in 2005, and Sulzberger’s initial replacement, libertarian John Tierney, lasted just 20 months before abandoning his column.
It's fun, if predictable, when pundits make bad analogies between current political trends and historical circumstances. But White House stenographer Fred Barnes's book review in the new Weekly Standard sets a high (low?) water mark. The book under discussion is Jennifer Weber's history of slavery-friendly Northern Democrats who opposed Lincoln's war policy, known as Copperheads. Here's Barnes:
