IMAGINE you are an evil Republican genius, tasked with frustrating liberal goals while Karl Rove is distracted by writing his book. What would be your strategic imperative, and how would you go about effecting it?
The first part of the question is easy: You'd want to defeat the further nationalization of health care. Were a sweeping, government-heavy reform to pass, it would be an irreversible step toward a European-style social democracy.
How to beat back such reform is the harder question. Your tools are limited. The press hates you, and you have frighteningly few votes in Congress. The public scorns your party. The interest groups you usually rely on are cowed and playing ball with President Obama.
There are only two instruments at your disposal -- those age-old wreckers of human ambitions: haste and hubris.
Can your adversary be gulled into slamming through Congress a budget-busting stimulus bill within a month of taking office? A bill that will immediately reignite deficit fears and won't soon -- or ever -- produce its advertised results? And can he be persuaded to follow it up with unpopular, high-profile bailouts costing tens of billions of dollars of companies that may never wean themselves of government support?
Yes, he can -- because he doesn't want "to let a crisis go to waste." In other words, he wants to gorge on as much spending and government intervention as quickly as he can, on the arrogant assumption that everything he does, no matter how hastily conceived (stimulus legislation that barely anyone can read) or intrinsically difficult (running car companies), will work and meet the public's approval.
On the contrary, the fallout from the stimulus and auto bailouts are stoking a distaste for deficit spending and government activism that is remarkable in what is touted as a statist golden age on par with 1933 or 1965. In a Wall Street Journal poll last week, 58 percent of people said the government should keep the deficit down even if it slows economic growth. Fifty-five percent opposed the bailout of General Motors, and nearly seven in 10 expressed worry about the government interventions in the economy.
It has now become a major administration project to recover the reputation of the stimulus. Obama spinners said a month ago that the bill had already "saved or created" 150,000 jobs, a made-up number with the advantage of a rubric so loose and vague it's impossible to check. Even if it were accurate, it would only make up for one-fifth of the job loss in March alone. Everyone seems to agree that the unemployment rate will be in double digits next year, a constant reminder of the failure of the stimulus to deliver on its (over)promise of keeping unemployment beneath 10 percent.
The political impulse behind the stimulus and the auto bailouts was understandable -- congressional Democrats wanted to unleash their pent-up fiscal demands, and the United Auto Workers wanted to be rescued. But the stimulus bill is, by and large, only spending. It can be repealed or diminished over time. It isn't nearly as consequential as a major policy change affecting one-sixth of the economy, like Obamacare. Nor is the auto bailout. Health care is about the country's future, the Detroit auto companies about its past.
Compared to health care, they are both great diversions, for which Democrats are now paying the price. They strain mightily to find a way to keep their legislation under $1 trillion and to actually pay for it, because they already had one enormously expensive freebie this year.
In a more measured approach, Obama would have asked for a smaller stimulus and steered clear of the wreckage of the auto companies, saving his strength for the most important policy battle of his presidency. But that wouldn't have been very audacious, would it?
So Democrats struggle against the new headwinds to pass health-care legislation they have desperately wanted for decades, and somewhere, an evil Republican genius chuckles.