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Townhall...
Democrats Can’t Win
2012 With a Health-Care Attack
By Donald Lambro
WASHINGTON - If the Democrats are counting on making a come back in the
2012 elections by demagoguing the Republican Medicare reforms, they’d
better think again.
The No. 1 political issue for the remainder of this year and most
likely in 2012 will be the lackluster, persistently high unemployment,
Obama economy that Republicans will nail to the Democrats hide from
Maine to California.
It remains to be seen whether the House GOP’s proposal to have the
government-subsidize private health care plans for people who turn 65
in 2022 has long term traction this year and next. But keeping that
issue alive, after it was strongly rejected in the Senate this week, is
problematic at best.
The Medicare plan -- part of a $4 trillion budget-cutting blueprint by
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin -- was killed by
Senate Democrats and a handful of Republicans. And it isn’t coming
back. A new set of proposals will be needed to fix a popular but costly
entitlement program that provides medical insurance for 48 million
elderly and disabled Americans that faces insolvency in 13 years.
Democrats haven’t offered any plan of their own to keep Medicare from
going bankrupt. They’re betting that all they need to do is attack
Republicans for attempting to kill Medicare and they will regain many
of the House and Senate seats they lost in the 2010 elections.
In other words, Democrats think they can regain the voters trust by
running on an agenda that says we prevented the Republicans from
reforming Medicare but we have no idea how to fix it ourselves, or,
indeed, don’t think it needs fixing.
That posture, a few Democrats think, is not only irresponsible, but
politically disastrous.
As the Senate was preparing to vote on the issue Wednesday, former
President Bill Clinton warned Democrats at a conference on the
government’s growing debts that they could not afford to ‘tippy-toe
around’ Medicare. He cautioned his party against thinking they can
exploit the issue solely for political gain, warning that ‘We’ve got to
deal with these things.’
But reforming Medicare to save it from bankruptcy isn’t what the
Democrats are thinking about right now. Scaring elderly Americans, and
those who will be eligible for Medicare in the next decade or so, is
the name of their game.
New York Sen. Charles Schumer is in charge of the Democrats’ issues
strategy in the Senate and he’s telling his party that the key to
winning back seats is by attacking the GOP for its budget plan to end
Medicare as we know it.
No sooner did Democrat Kathy Hochul win a special election in a
three-way race for an open Republican House seat in New York -- largely
by running against Ryan’s Medicare plan -- Schumer sent out an e-mail
touting the ‘power of Medicare’ to defeat Republicans in future
elections.
One of the chief reasons why Democrats took back a GOP district
Tuesday, Schumer wrote, ‘voters of all political persuasions clearly do
not want to destroy Medicare.’
This is the strategy throughout the party leadership. In the House, for
example, Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland, offered the party’s
perfunctory political line that Medicare ‘needs to be on the table,’
but made it clear that he and fellow Democrats have no plans to offer
any reforms to save it from financial collapse. ‘That is the same
mistake that... Ryan made,’ Hoyer told The Washington Post.
Notably, the GOP’s major presidential contenders have remained at arms
length from the Ryan Medicare plan, preparing to offer plans of their
own.
Their strategists say privately that starting a fight over how to scale
back medical benefits for the elderly is not the way to win back the
White House in 2012.
In an earlier column, I said that Medicare reform should have been
place on a separate track that assigned the issue to a special House
and Senate task force to develop a bipartisan reform plan. And that can
still be done now. One of the third rails in American politics can’t be
dealt with in the usual budgetary process, like cutting HUD grants.
Meantime, Republicans should begin escalating their firepower on the
economy, clearly the Democrats’ major weakness and President Obama’s
Achilles heel. Nearly 20 million Americans are jobless or
underemployed, most small businesses are struggling, new jobs are being
created at an anemic rate that economists say will not lower 9 percent
unemployment to normal levels over the next two years.
A string of economic reports paint a gloomy picture of the third year
of the Obama economy: Retail sales growth slowed in April, the smallest
gain since last July; $4-a-gallon gas has become a hardship for 71
percent of Americans, according to an AP poll; home construction starts
tumbled last month; and the Conference Board, an economic forecasting
group, has lowered its index of economic indicators, its first decline
since last June, saying future ‘economic activity may be choppy.’
Then there is Washington’s fiscal mess. Unless runaway federal spending
is curbed, the nation’s public debt is racing toward an unprecedented
$20 trillion before the end of this decade, further endangering our
economic future.
The White House, Charles Schumer and his fellow Democrats are
irresponsibly silent about all of this.
Read it at Townhall
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