Michael Gerson makes the case that Obama and his party, in their great moment of political dominance, are bereft of ideas. He writes:
This failure of imagination was on full display during Barack Obama’s address to Congress. In a moment that demanded new policy to cut an ideological knot, or at least new arguments to restart the public debate, Obama saw fit to provide neither. His health speech turned out to be an environmental speech, devoted mainly to recycling. On every important element of his health proposal, he chose to double down and attack the motives of opponents. (Obama was the other public official who talked of a “lie” that evening.) Concerns about controlling health costs, the indirect promotion of abortion and the effect of a new entitlement on future deficits were dismissed but not answered. On health care, Obama takes his progressivism pure and simplistic.
Well, to be fair, nationalizing health care with a dizzying array of mandates, regulations, and taxes — like nationalizing a car company — is based on an idea; it is just a flawed and very old one, namely that government has some superior ability to make complex decisions that mere individuals cannot and should not make for themselves. So, as Gerson points out, absent a really compelling intellectual foundation for ObamaCare, the president is reduced to strong-arm procedural stunts (e.g., reconciliation), cloying pleas to “Do it for Ted!” and meanspirited attacks on citizens and political opponents.
Gerson, however, makes two errors. First, he claims that Obama will be undercut not by populist protests but by “wonks” who will “exploit his lack of policy creativity.” Well, that’d be swell; some of my best friends are wonks. But frankly, it’s not going to be the wonks but those boisterous town-hall attendees, grumpy senior citizens, and dozens of self-interested lawmakers from unsafe districts and swing states (who have been cowed by those same rabble-rousers) who ultimately will determine the contours of health-care reform. Obama will be stopped, not by CATO (or any of the equally admirable conservative think tanks), but by a popular revulsion against this big-government power grab. That’s how politics works, for better or worse.
Second, Gerson repeats the president’s slander that Republicans lack ideas on health care. Republicans have lots of policy proposals and lots of bills, most of which center on one very big idea: individual freedom. They argue that we can increase access to health care and lower costs by creating markets — that is, by empowering individuals to buy insurance and to be responsible for their own health care. It is as big and important an idea as was welfare reform (promoting work over dependency), and as far-reaching as supply-side economics (lower marginal tax rates promote wealth creation and boost revenues). It may not carry the day, because Republicans lack the votes, but it is simply wrong to say that those promoting this concept and the legislation that would put it into practice lack ideas or are part of the “party of anger.”
We therefore see the uneasy relationship between popular rough-and-tumble politics (can the public scare lawmakers and stop Obama?) and the idea factory and intellectual heft that successful political parties require. Strangely, just a year after his election, it seems that the advantage on both are not with the president and his party. But he has a lot of Democratic lawmakers on his side. And that will make for an interesting few months.
