There are, to be sure, a lot of balls in the air right now. For Dems hoping to highlight the president’s foibles, it’s a challenge to narrow the list down. Too many outrages, too little time.
But Jonathan Chait makes a very compelling case that the administration’s handling of the expanded Medicare program has to be near the top of the list. He calls it the “Hurricane Katrina of entitlement programs.”
It’s the corruption! It’s the Medicare drug plan! Wait a second — is it me, or did the answer to the Democrats’ dilemma just fall right into their lap?
The Medicare drug plan is the perfect issue for Democrats to run on. It perfectly encapsulates the corruption of Republican Washington, and it’s a concrete thing that voters can relate to. Running on this issue makes so much sense that naturally the Democrats won’t do it. But let’s go ahead and indulge our imaginations anyway.
The sheer number of devious acts packed into one legislative act boggles the mind.
Chait’s right, this has been a debacle wrapped in a fiasco wrapped in a disaster. It costs too much and delivers too little. The administration lied about the price tag, then lied again to cover up the first lie. The darn thing wouldn’t have even become law if Republican lawmakers didn’t resort to underhanded tactics and literal bribery on the House floor.
The end result is a “massive special-interest giveaway” with billions for the GOP’s corporate donors. Yale political scientists Theodore Marmor and Jacob Hacker estimated that a better bill could have offered the same benefit for half the cost.
The policy is a frustrating farce for seniors, pharmacists, and the states, but from a purely political perspective, it’s something else: the quintessential Bush program. It’s the one story that offers the incompetence of the Katrina response (with Mark McClellan playing the role of Mike Brown), the corruption of Abramoff (the bill was written by lobbyists for lobbyists), and the abuse of intelligence of Iraq (experts told the administration what would happen; the Bush gang ignored them, moving forward under the assumption that everything would turn out perfectly. Seniors everywhere were supposed to greet the program as a liberator…).
Politically, Republicans are starting to panic a bit. This entire boondoggle was a scheme to help get seniors to back the GOP. Now, everything’s backfiring — Medicare recipients hate the expansion, governors from both parties are livid, Dems on the Hill are hitting this like a pinata, and conservatives refuse to defend it.
“The fallout is likely to be huge,” said an aide to a prominent conservative member of Congress who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for his boss. “It’s likely to anger seniors, while reminding the conservative base about the big government approach that Republicans took to healthcare.”
Good. You’ve heard the phrase “good policy is good politics”? The inverse is true once in a while too.