Posted on 03/22/2010 1:28:19 AM PDT by iowamark
Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.
It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster. Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But:
(1) It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November – by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs.
(2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.
So far, I think a lot of conservatives will agree with me. Now comes the hard lesson:
A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.
At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.
Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.
This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.
Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.
Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.
No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?
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. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?
I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination. When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.
So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.
That's why you fought.
I truly believe that's why the immigrants are coming here today. We may need their blood, sweat and tears some time in the future.
If we conservatives push them away, surely the Left will open their arms and welcome them. It will be for their enslavement, but they won't realize that for a long while.
I say we conservatives should figure out a way to work with immigrants who are here legally to establish procedures for their families who may not be so legal to merge and adapt into our society and begin the contributions that they can make.
“It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November – by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs”
Wrong on both counts...but, hey, don’t let facts get in your way.
Note to Mr Frum: You do not compromise when it comes to socialist, freed-robbing, entitlement programs. Why? Because they are wrong. Period.
The people who immigrated here long ago didn’t come here for the handouts. The ones who are coming here now don’t care about America. They are here for the freebies and easy life. They have no intentions of becoming real Americans. Whats in it for me. Thats what they are all about.
Look on the bright side: It just gets worse from here.
The left has all they need to crush this Republic—and they will.
Checkmate.
Thanks to all of those brave Republican “leaders” for “risking all” to fight the un-American/anti-American left. You’ll be glad to know that the fat sheep, aka Americans, will run to the polls to vote lots of you cowards into office this November—a dab of salve for our gaping, septic wound.
Thing is, you all serve the left, whether you like it or not. This is now a leftist country. (If you haven’t figured that one out yet, you will.)
You can wave your flags, watch your fireworks on the fourth, and reminisce about the good ‘ol days, but they are indeed behind us.
The optimists can polish this turd all they want. This will be marked as the beginning of the end of very short-lived human freedom on this planet.
David Frum, what in the hell did you do to stop this travesty?
Frum’s liberal tendencies are showing.....gotta “blame” somebody.
Our ancestors came here for a "better life." That's why today's immigrants are coming too.
The Left will offer handouts. We should offer opportunity.
“compromise” with the socialist has only brought us even more loses in the past.
David Frum has lost his mind, we can’t win this fight at all if we fight it his way, we just loses it at a slower rate.
and to be quite honest at this point we would be better off helping the liberals collapse the United States financially.
So that from the ashes of the dead government freedom may be able to bloom again.
There is really no more practical way to end theses socialist programs then to help accelerate their default.
That means if we cant end them directly, we would be better off helping the liberals bring down the United States Federal government. We will start by crippling the military enforcement mechanism so that the advantage will be held more locally by the men still armed.
Then when the federal reserve banknotes are worthless we make our move to free ourselves formally.
Until that happens nothing but compete victory is going to be helpful.
Days like these are the reason the founders set up a system where this type of Government intervention was not possible. That has been corrupted and we no longer have a Representative republic, but a democracy. (Sad to say Ben Franklin, despite your warning, we were unable to keep our Republic.)There are bastions of dependency and perversion where democrats are safe until the end of time, but less and less reliable bastions of liberty. Even the safe Republican districts are heavily dependent on Social Security and Medicare, so they are only only reliable as long as the gravy flows, otherwise they will all turn Democrat overnight if Republicans came out for real Liberty and curtailing the role of the Feds in any meaningful way.
IMHO, it's over folks. "Tax cuts" aren't going to cut it this time and people are not willing to give up their benefits, real or perceived. The ONLY opportunity we will have is the coming Bankruptcy, but the Democrats and the media will be there to shepard in communism at that time, so we may not have a prayer.
Frum:
served on the Giuliani campaign in 2008 and voted for John McCain in November. I supported the Iraq War and (although I feel kind of silly about it in retrospect) the impeachment of Bill Clinton
******
On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of “responsibility,” and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.
And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence—exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word—we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.
Canadian-born writer David Frum:
In late 2008, Frum began to distance himself from some conservative factions, expressing dissatisfaction and disappointment in the U.S. right wing and worrying that the “collapsed intellectual state of the [Republican] party” would hamper its recovery from electoral loses.[3] He reassessed his ideological position, writing, “My fundamental political principles remain the same as ever: free markets, American leadership in the world, and intense attachment to inherited moral and cultural traditions. Yet I cannot be blind to the evidence that we have seen free markets produce some damaging and dangerous results in recent years. Or that the foreign policy I supported has not yielded the success I would have wished to see. Or that traditions must evolve if they are to endure. There are new principes [sic] too that must be included in a majority conservatism: environmental protection as a core value and an unwavering insistence upon competence and integrity in government.”
Frum argued in a September 2008 online discussion hosted by New York magazine that he was “disturbed about the choice [of Gov. Sarah Palin] from the start.… She really could be president! And here’s where my fellow conservatives really worry me. They are so attracted by the symbolism of the selection that they show no concern—never mind for her executive competence—even for her views.”
In mid-November 2008, a few weeks after his NR colleague Christopher Buckley (son of NR founder William Buckley Jr.) announced his own departure from the magazine, Frum told the New York Times that he too was leaving on January 20, 2009. He said the split was amicable and that the differences over Palin were “symbolic of a lot of differences” between himself and the magazine. He added, “I am really and truly frightened by the collapse of support for the Republican Party by the young and the educated.”
Frum said that he was starting a new website called NewMajority.com in early 2009.
NewMajority.com will champion a responsive, responsible, inclusive, and environmentally-conscious conservatism. ‘If the public rejects your party’s message,’ Frum says, ‘it doesn’t do much good to repeat that same message — only louder.’
In early 2008, Frum published Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again. According to a blurb on the website of the American Enterprise Institute, “Too many conservatives and Republicans have shut their eyes to negative trends. David Frum offers answers. Frum says that the ideas that won elections for conservatives in the 1980s have done their job. Republicans can no longer win elections on taxes, guns, and promises to restore traditional values. It’s time now for a new approach.”
if this were a democracy we wouldn’t have gotten what we got last night. this is a thugocracy.
Only Rush wants a stop to socialism. /sarcasm
This is true, We can win but we can win thou compromise, as all that ever gets us is more government at a slower rate.
No we have but 2 options, we either go forward as fast as we can to collapse the government by forcing it to face the laws of physics.
Or we win out right with a total victory of killing theses inherently destructive and oppressive mandates and programs in nullification, courts and congress.
No its either total victory thou elections and courts, or its total victory thou total collapse and revolution.
That means if we cant end them directly, we would be better off helping the liberals bring down the United States Federal government. We will start by crippling the military enforcement mechanism so that the advantage will be held more locally by the men still armed.
Then when the federal reserve banknotes are worthless we make our move to free ourselves formally.
Until that happens nothing but compete victory is going to be helpful.
Prelude to Republican fratricide
GOP candidates in New York and New Jersey should be cruising to victory this November. But angry conservatives would rather hand power to Democrats than help moderate Republicans win.
posted on October 21, 2009, at 5:09 AM
“In October 2005, Frum founded and served as chairman of Americans for Better Justice, the lobbying group that led the opposition to the nomination of Harriet Miers to the US Supreme Court,” according to his bio on NewMajority.com. “In 2007-2008, he served as senior foreign policy adviser to the Rudy Giuliani presidential campaign. Frum is a member of the board of directors of the Republican Jewish Coalition.”
As I said it really doesn’t serve us to have “moderate” IE socialist republicans winning. We are better off helping the liberals disarm and collapse the Federal government so that we can retake our rights by force.
Maybe. After all they are definitely oppertunists.
You don't live in a border state, do you? Mexico exports its poverty to us, and our quality of life has sunk drastically because of it. They did not come here legally, after camping out in their own countries for a visa, like our grandparents did. My grandparents had to endure concentration camps while waiting for their way to get here. It is NOT the same. As soon as this bunch gets amnesty, the next bunch starts its decade or two of arriving. We should be able to keep our borders closed.
On Inauguration Day, Frum loudly quit National Review and set up a collective blog ambitiously entitled NewMajority.com, determined to take back the GOP from Sarah Palin fans.
In March, Frum publicized his new venture by penning a Newsweek cover story attack on Rush Limbaugh, Why Rush Is Wrong, [Mar 7, 2009] that gave the magazine an excuse for running an even more unflattering than normal picture of Limbaugh.
it’s worth noting that attacking a conservative in Newsweek was representative of Frum’s modus operandi going back to Yale. He consistently tries to position himself as the acceptable face of conservatism with whom liberals can deal. (For an analysis of Frum’s career, see Daniel McCarthy’s essay in The American Conservative.) Typically, he’s now a regular on CNN.com.
Frum asserts that instead of opposing the Democrats’ health care plan, Republicans should have helped Democrats make it better, which just sounds hopelessly naïve.
his 2008 New York Times Magazine call for government subsidies to make eugenics available to the poor. [The Vanishing Republican Voter, September 5, 2008
One need not live on a border state to experience the effects of our government officials extended invitation for a mass invasion. And it is the height of arrogance, ignorance or deception to read it will enhance this nation to give citizenship to law breakers so they will vote for a conservative society. These posts smell to 'high' heaven, and a plant. (And I am not talking about your posts.)
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