http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/president-obama/current-gop-strategy-echoes-kristols-1993-memo-urging-obstruction-of-dems/Current GOP Strategy Echoes Kristol’s 1993 Memo Urging Obstruction Of Dems
With the GOP gearing up to defeat President Obama’s big-ticket initiatives, a lot of folks have been trying to track down a copy of the full memo that Bill Kristol famously wrote in 1993 urging Republicans to block Bill Clinton’s health care reform plan at all costs. Bits and pieces of the memo are floating around but the full one has been elusive.
Well, I have obtained a PDF copy — you can read the whole thing right here. And it’s really a striking read, because
it demonstrates two things. First, how much the current GOP strategy seems to echo the strategic objectives Kristol articulated 15 years ago. And second, how much worse off the GOP is now than it was then in terms of being able to achieve those objectives. Here’s the crux:
Passage of the Clinton health care plan, in any form, would guarantee and likely make permanent an unprecedecented federal intrusion into and disruption of the American economy — and the establishment of the largest federal entitlement program since Social Security. It’s success would signal a rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment we have begun rolling back that idea in other areas…
The long term political effects of a successful Clinton health care bill will be even worse — much worse. It will relegitimize middle-class dependency for “security” on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government…
Its rejection by Congress and the public would be a monumental setback for the President, and an incontestable piece of evidence that Democratic welfare-state liberalism remains firmly in retreat.
Here’s what’s striking about this. Kristol repeatedly says defeating Clinton on health care would deal a death knell to something that at the time already appeared on its way towards extinction — the “welfare-state,” or the idea that government can improve the lives of the middle class. Kristol describes this idea as “firmly in retreat,” in the process of being “rolled back,” in need of “re-legitimizing.” At the time the defeat of health care was viewed as a potential final victory over liberalism.
Fifteen years later, of course, political conditions are dramatically different. Polls show the public broadly supports a far more activist role for government and backs Obama’s plans to expand the federal government’s role in a way not seen in decades. And it’s conservative ideas that are in retreat. Yet the GOP is pursuing roughly the same strategy today that it did then.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
