The American Spectator

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The First Lady President

By Philip Klein on 1.11.08 @ 12:08AM

(Page 3 of 4)

While it is technically true that her proposal would not create a socialized single-payer system, it is fair to say that it is a government-managed plan that, over time, would inevitably lead to a socialized system. Not only would it impose health insurance mandates on individuals and larger employers, but it would put so many restrictions on private insurers, that it is hard to see how they would remain in business for the long haul.

The plan would require insurers to provide coverage to everybody who applies, regardless of pre-existing conditions or risk factors, at a price the government deems "affordable." But insurance companies exist to manage and price risk. If car insurers were required to provide low-cost auto coverage to motorists who have had licenses suspended multiple times for reckless driving, they would not remain in business for long. Similarly, the Clinton plan would eventually lead to the collapse of the private medical insurance market, even if she left it "intact" in the meantime for the purposes of selling the plan. Her proposal would also create a new government-run health-care program modeled after Medicare. This would set the stage for future liberal politicians to argue that with the private market in shambles, the only choice is to go to a fully socialized system.

HEALTH CARE IS JUST ONE AREA where Clinton promises to foster a maternal role for government in which the state exists to take care of its citizens. Her indictment of President Bush is centered on the idea that the Americans who are struggling in this country are "invisible" to him. "He doesn't see what I see," she brags. In her speeches, she promises to "reclaim the future for our children." She blasts the President for not taking care of the victims of Hurricane Katrina and for vetoing an expansion of S-CHIP. In a bus tour through Iowa in October, she traveled aboard "The Middle Class Express," which boasted the slogan "Rebuilding the Road to the Middle Class," a metaphor right up there with her husband's "Bridge to the 21st Century" in terms of its literary merit.

One way in which Clinton attempts to appear pro-military without alienating the antiwar left is to emphasize the need to provide proper care for soldiers returning home, a cause nobody would disagree with. In a possible preview of the general election, Clinton took out the first television ad to evoke imagery from September 11. While Rudy Giuliani won national praise for his mix of toughness, resolve, and compassion in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center, in the ad, it is Clinton portrayed in a surgical mask, along with dramatic black and white images of rescue workers, as the narrator says, "She stood by Ground Zero workers who sacrificed their health after so many sacrificed their lives."

As the campaign progresses, Clinton has been rolling out plans to expand government one program after the other: a $50 billion energy fund; $25 billion a year for a retirement savings plan; $8 billion a year for college financial aid; a $1 billion a year expansion in family leave. All of these programs are "paid for" by repealing different aspects of the Bush tax cuts, and plucking branches from the Giving Tree embodied by wealthy Americans.

LIKE HER HEALTH-CARE PROPOSAL, Clinton's other plans borrow some of the rhetoric of conservatives to make them seem less coercive. Ironically, her 401k-type retirement plan would provide up to $1,000 in matching tax credits to lower-income individuals who choose to invest, even though she still denounces the idea of voluntary Social Security personal accounts as a risky conservative scheme in which Americans would gamble their retirement on the stock market.

"That's clearly one of the more schizophrenic aspects of the Clinton campaign, " said Carrie Lukas, vice president for policy at the Independent Women's Forum, of the contradiction. "But very few people seem to connect those dots. She seems to get away with it because nobody is playing close enough attention to the policy aspects."

Despite Clinton's best attempts to disguise her lust for augmenting the role of the government, when in front of liberal audiences it is sometimes hard for her to contain herself. Speaking at the Congressional Black Caucus's Annual Legislative Conference, with Jesse Jackson in the audience, Clinton casually announced, "I like the idea of giving every baby born in America a $5,000 account that will grow over time so that when that young person turns 18, if they have finished high school they will be able to access it to go to college, or maybe they will be able to put a down payment on their first home, or go into business."

The now infamous "baby bonds" concept, which would have created a new entitlement of more than $20 billion a year, was widely mocked, and a Rasmussen poll showed that by a 60 percent to 27 percent margin, Americans opposed it. Clinton quickly backed off, saying it was never an official policy proposal. "I have a million ideas," she later told the Boston Globe. "The country can't afford them all."

In a fiery address to the Service Employees International Union last September, her collectivist impulses were on full display.

"They call their vision of government, 'The Ownership Society,'" she snarled about conservatives. "And you know what that means, don't you? They own it and everybody else works for it."

"I call it the 'You're On Your Own Society,'" she remarked, and, showing herself to be a wordsmith on par with the Bard himself, noted "Take the first letter of 'You're On Your Own' and it spells YoYo. That's how they treat us. It's like they've got the string and it's just pulling you up and down."

President Bush, she said, "turned back the clock on the entire 20th century." She explained that he wants to return to the time of the Robber Barons "when employers could do whatever they wanted with employees, no questions asked. When government wasn't even involved."

"After the excesses of 100 years ago," she said, "the modern progressive movement was born" and it "transformed our social welfare system and so much else."

Likening herself to a modern-day Teddy Roosevelt, she observed, "The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally on the welfare of all of us." And she promised, as president: "We will discard this so-called 'Ownership, Yo-Yo Society' and substitute a world made up together."

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topics:
Trade, Health Care, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Television, Business, Social Security, Law, Military, Iran, NATO, Energy, Medicare