Has Obama's Health Care Win Driven Conservatives Crazy?
David Corn
Columnist
Posted:
03/26/10
Not all progressives have been enthusiastic about President Barack Obama's health care overhaul from a policy perspective. It cedes a lot of control to private insurance companies; there is no public option. But they have at least one good reason to love the package: it has driven conservatives crazy.Case in Point No. 1: Thomas Sowell. He's a prominent conservative intellectual, with an impressive right-wing pedigree. He's currently the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He has taught at UCLA, Amherst, Brandeis, and Cornell. He's written many books. He's been a fierce opponent of affirmative action. In 2002, he won the National Humanities Medal for his prolific, scholarly writings covering the fields of economics, history, and political science. And now he's gone off the deep end.
In a column this week, he presents an tremendously alarming claim about the health care legislation -- a dire warning that was not part of the final congressional debate. The most frightening problem with the measure, he says, is not the cost of the bill or "the massive transfer of crucial decisions from millions of doctors and patients to Washington bureaucrats." It's far worse than that:
If the current legislation does not entail the transmission of all our individual medical records to Washington, it will take only an administrative regulation or, at most, an Executive Order of the President, to do that.
With politicians now having not only access to our most confidential records, and having the power of granting or withholding medical care needed to sustain ourselves or our loved ones, how many people will be bold enough to criticize our public servants, who will in fact have become our public masters?
With politicians now having not only access to our most confidential records, and having the power of granting or withholding medical care needed to sustain ourselves or our loved ones, how many people will be bold enough to criticize our public servants, who will in fact have become our public masters?
This is Sowell's nightmare: Nancy Pelosi poring over your individual medical records -- especially if you've written something critical about her in your blog. Worse, if you need an operation, she'll be able to issue an order: no treatment for you! Consequently, the entire population will turn into a mass of meek and sniveling sycophants who dare not utter a negative peep about the people in Washington, lest they receive a death warrant from those they criticize. So we're not talking merely about turning the United States into a European-type state -- the fear expressed by so many conservative opponents of the health care reform law. Sowell is predicting the complete enslavement of the American public.
Sowell is not your average Tea Partier. In his academic work, he has frequently demanded that social and economic policy be based on empirical evidence and hard-and-fast objective analysis of data. But he's hardly meeting this rigorous standard with his own fear-mongering. He does sinisterly refer to the Clinton administration's Filegate: "Does anyone still remember the hundreds of confidential FBI files that were 'accidentally' delivered to the White House during Bill Clinton's administration?" Actually, two weeks ago, a federal judge (a Ronald Reagan appointee!) ruled, "this unfortunate episode" was "nothing more than a bureaucratic snafu." Sorry, professor. No empirical evidence there for you. And by the way, plenty of conservatives have called for reforming the medical record-keeping and placing such records online. Newt Gingrich has championed this. (Hey, could he hack his way in and get a gander at my records?)
Sowell declares that the health care bill will lead to the "dismantling of America." But it seems to have dismantled his powers of analysis.
Case in Point No. 2: David Frum, the neoconservative pundit and American Enterprise Institute fellow, who was a speechwriter for George W. Bush. ("Axis of Evil"-- that was his phrase.) No, Frum hasn't gone bonkers. But he was a victim of right-wing obsession. On Sunday, he called the Republicans' defeat on health care reform the party's "Waterloo." And he named names:
We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.
There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible.
There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible.
Within a nano-second, his GOP-slamming comments were all over the cablesphere, the blogosphere, and the twittersphere. He was the kid calling out the naked emperor. And it seems as if it didn't take long for someone to shout, "Off with his head." On Thursday, AEI de-fellowed him. In what Frum described on his blog as an "unexpected conclusion" of his seven-year-long relationship with the neoconnish think tank, he was fired without notice and given two weeks to empty his office. Frum didn't say much else about this. But Bruce Bartlett, who in 2005 was fired from another conservative think tank after writing a book critical of George W. Bush, disclosed that AEI had tried to censor Frum and others:
Since, [Frum] is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI "scholars" on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do. . . . The [right-wing] donor community is only interested in financing organizations that parrot the party line."
Bartlett called this episode more evidence of the "closing of the conservative mind." He noted that this larger phenomenon could lead to, well, craziness: "Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn't already." (After Bartlett posted his article, Frum told blogger Greg Sargent that AEI assured him it was not booting him off the payroll due to his criticism of the GOP. And he told The New York Times, "I'm not going to say that they're not telling the truth.")
Has Obama and his health care plan caused some conservatives to become fearful of rational and open debate, and others to embrace paranoia? No doubt, Democrats find it rather entertaining to watch GOPers lose their bearings. They better hope this fear and paranoia don't match the sentiments of many voters come November.
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I see that Peter Wehner has responded to my column last week blasting Bush-backers who challenge the notion that W. misled the country into the Iraq war. I'm off for a few days, but I will reply soon.
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