By Lawrence Henry on 11.14.02 @ 12:02AM
Which way will the Democrats turn now? Strategically and tactically, it's obvious. National health care will be their next big issue.
Which way will the Democrats turn now? Strategically and
tactically, it's obvious. National health care will be their next
big issue. They'll have to avoid the obvious pitfall. ("They're
ba-a-a-ack! More ruthless than ever! Determined to socialize
one-seventh of the American economy!") But two things push them
that direction. They have to hold their party together, and they
have to try to win an election again. They can't do one without the
other, and they can't do either without a unifying issue.
The internal dynamic: Democrats have to hold on to their
frustrated left wing, who have been gabbing all over the airwaves
about how Democrats failed to speak up and speak out on
sufficiently progressive issues in the last election. Katrina
vanden Heuvel was on NPR's "The Connection" the other day, spouting
a machine-gun stream of new talking points about "the demand for a
vital progressive agenda." Katrina is a Communist, of course,
though we are mostly too polite to point that out. But a whole lot
of Democrats think that way. And the devotees of The
Nation have to be kept in the tent somehow.
If the Democrats don't appeal to their left wing, they will lose
a substantial chunk of those voters, either to Green Party or
Naderite independents in local elections, or to Al Sharpton on the
national scene. Because Al is going to run, no doubt. He has
managed to spoil election results for Democrats twice in New York,
first in the mayoral race for New York City, then in the state race
for governor. It is his peculiar ambition to do it again on the
national stage.
National health care answers the need to hold the party
together. It can also be tied, as an attack, to the Republicans'
regular proposals to cut taxes. David Broder phrased it backwards
in his November 13 column in the Washington Post, but it
means the same thing:
"Taxes are likely to be the dominant economic issue in 2003,
given the president's intention to make those rate reductions
permanent. Vermont Gov. Howard Dean says in every speech that he
wants the tax cuts rescinded to finance universal health
insurance."
Tactically, individual campaign by individual campaign,
Democrats can make things hard on Republicans with an appeal for
single-payer national health care. It's easy to gin up
advertisements featuring hard-luck cripples, handicapped children,
old people eating dog food, and Christopher Reeve. It's easy to
pull the Hollywood crowd on board as endorsers. It's easy to talk
about skyrocketing costs and increased co-pays and 41 million
people uninsured. It's easy to describe America as "the only modern
industrial nation that etc., etc., etc."
By contrast, on the Republican side, it takes moxie and courage
-- and will require President Bush -- to make the case that health
care is a supply-side problem, that no matter where the money comes
from, people will pay for it -- and they are paying for it now --
and that putting government in charge of a single-payer program
will stifle the innovation, creativity, and choice that Americans
enjoy in health care today. It will take even more guts to propose
true market-based reforms to rein in the double-rate-of-inflation
cost increases in the health care arena.
Oh, it's a going issue, no doubt about it. But the Democrats
take one enormous risk, which they know: The attacks of September
11 have, as I have written before, put a heroic public face on a
voter segment which was formerly anonymous: the Reagan Democrats,
or, earlier, "the silent majority." We now know who those people
are: The policeman and firemen of New York City.
Strategically, the Republicans will pit their appeal to that
voter audience against the Democrats' appeal to their left wing.
The Democrats will try to hold the working-class swing voter with
their traditional call for union solidarity. The Republicans will
use patriotism. We have enemies, and those enemies want to kill us:
Islamofascists, Saddam Hussein, the Axis of Evil. Bad news for
Dems. When it comes down to lives versus the union, President Bush
and his team have already shown which way the working class hero
votes.
A lot depends on the next two years, on how the war goes, how
the economy goes. But the Democrats have been backed against a
wall, and they know it. Figure them to employ universal health care
as their primary weapon to escape from political oblivion. If it
doesn't work, they'll be as gone as the Whigs.
topics:
Taxes, Health Care, Islam, Hollywood, Oil
