The brilliant Democrat policy of following Republican-style divide-and-conquer tactics in the healthcare bill is having the unsurprising and perfectly predictable effect of splitting two of the party's once stalwart base groups by forcing one to pay for the other and threatening the second's coverage.
In hundreds of meetings with millions of its members to promote a health care overhaul, AARP, the huge organization for older Americans, has often found itself forced to referee a battle between generations.
Its 40 million members are split about evenly between those who have access to Medicare, the federal government’s health program for the elderly, and those who are too young to be eligible for such benefits. The younger members, or those between the ages of 50 and 64, sometimes face terrible choices in the private insurance market, with age and declining health status making premiums high and benefits poor.
But members 65 and older get among the most secure medical benefits in the country, and many are in no mood to share.
That isn't because they watch Fox and get all unnecessarily agitated by the hours and hours of non-stop fearmongering and phony class warfare, though that doesn't help. It's because the Blue Dogs have forced the protection of insurance company profits (since they, you know, work for those same insurance companies) at the expense of everyone else.
Proposals on Capitol Hill to expand health care coverage largely rest on forcing younger and healthier people to get insurance, expanding the money available to subsidize care for the elderly. But the proposals also count on about $400 billion in savings over 10 years in the Medicare program. In effect, the young and the old are being asked to sacrifice for the middle-aged.
And the middle-aged for the elderly. It's classic wedge politics, only it isn't the GOP that's driving it - they've made themselves irrelevant. It's conservative Democrats who are abandoning their own constituencies in order to front for their corporate bosses.
Corporate interests are showering dollars on the Blue Dogs and their political action committees in record amounts. The center's analysis of the latest campaign financial data shows that well over half of the Blue Dog PAC's million-dollars-plus over the past six months came from three industries -- energy, finance and healthcare. Much the same pattern pertains to the individual PACS maintained by Ross and the other Blue Dog leaders. These pooches heel when the lobbyists whistle.
(emphasis added)
This is from a comment left on Open Salon:
The problem essentially isn't one of parties, but ideology...or lack thereof. It's not about Rs vs. Ds, it's about conservatives and liberals. Blue Dogs are simply conservatives representing conservatively dominant districts/states/constituents and it is conservatives standing in the way of reform as they have always done.
That's a standard explanation of the problem and it's good as far as it goes but there's more beneath the surface, what Tom Cordle calls "The Tyranny of the Majority".
[A] dozen Repugnuts and Blue Dogs from small conservative states with a population of about 2o million dominate the Senate Finance Committee and are obstructing what is clearly the will of of 200 million Americans...
***
How is it representatives of one-tenth of the population can subvert the apparent will of the majority?
They can do it because the other 9/10th is running like scared widdew wabbits from the awesome power of Glenn Beck's fake tears and the hundreds or even thousands of loudmouth, redneck, racist crazies who believe him because they left their brains in a jar on his back porch. They can do it because the other not-crazy 9/10ths of the Democratic party are being hamstrung by their own leadership and their forlorn fony fantasies about how their majority is razor-thin and they could lose it if they don't get at least some of the crazies on their side.
The Democrat party is locked in a vice between its corporate bosses and its fear of a distant past when conservative lies ruled and voters hadn't figured it out. That past is dead but the fear remains and the BD's use it to get what they want for their bosses. At some point the party is going to have to make a decision (if it hasn't already): Who do they really work for? Us or the corporations the BD's represent? History since the days of the Greeks shows that oligarchies invariably get thrown out once the people figure out they've been reamed. That day has come - that's why populism is back - but the Democrats act like it hasn't.
If they don't wise up, they and their oligarch masters are going to get thrown out as unceremoniously as yesterday's worthless NYT. One way or another.
EXTRA: Just because.
Comments