House of Eratosthenes

Hopefully, the Republicans have already won the 2006 elections. Those won’t be happening for another eight months, but there is good reason to hope this. Powerful Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton, looking around for some reasons people might possibly have to vote for Democrats this year, has settled on bitching about our healthcare system.

She’s right to bitch, because our healthcare system certainly needs work. But two years ago Democrats learned that when you bitch, the bitching isn’t enough, and voters — damn those voters! — actually want to see a plan before you’ll get enough votes to put you over the top.

Maybe that will come later. For now, it’s just the bitching. It’s all pissing and moaning. It’s…

But she added, “Today, we’re making things worse with deliberate neglect and flawed policies that are diminishing the coverage that Americans have.”
:
Clinton’s comments on health care were the latest in a series of sharp criticisms of the White House. Last week, she took aim at the administration’s handling of the nuclear standoff in Iran, just two days after saying it would go down as “one of the worst” presidencies in U.S. history.

There are some awfully smart people who know more about politics than I do, and make good money managing campaigns, who obviously disagree with me with what I’m about to say — but history backs me up. If you want to take down the status quo and replace it with something else, badmouthing the status quo won’t get you there. In fact, you’re better off saying good things about the status quo you want to displace. It’s called “The Kiss of Death,” and Democrats, for whatever reason, can’t use it. George Bush wouldn’t even be President right now if Democrats had what it takes to say “the guy you got now is doing an okay job, heck, he’s better than okay, but I think we can do better.”

There is a movement afoot in the Democratic party to use the last four words of what I just wrote, “we can do better”. This is not new. “We can do better” has always been a powerful statement, because it appeals to instincts hard-wired into us: After we finish what seems to be a herculean effort today, we should refine things so that tomorrow the same work is second-nature, and the results much more assuredly positive. And, of course, once that is done, tomorrow we should find ways to do what seems impossible today.

Hillary obviously thinks we can do better, but a central theme going through all her speeches now is that this is the only direction where we can go, because things are so bad. Flawed policies. Deliberate neglect. One of the worst administrations in history.

It wasn’t always done this way. Take a look at how Hillary’s husband used “we can do better,” during, for example, his State of the Union addresses. You’ll notice he didn’t use “we can do better” in quite the same context that Democrats use the same phraseology today.

2000: We also can’t reward work and family unless men and women get equal pay for equal work. Today the female unemployment rate is the lowest it has been in 46 years. Yet, women still only earn about 75 cents for every dollar men earn. We must do better, by providing the resources to enforce present equal pay laws, training more women for high-paying, high-tech jobs, and passing the “Paycheck Fairness Act.”

1999: SAT scores are up. Math scores have risen in nearly all grades. But there’s a problem: While our fourth-graders outperform their peers in other countries in math and science, our eighth-graders are around average, and our 12th-graders rank near the bottom. We must do better.

1996: As workers increase their hours and their productivity, employers should make sure they get the skills they need and share the benefits of the good years, as well as the burdens of the bad ones. When companies and workers work as a team they do better, and so does America.

1995: We need to help move programs down to the point where States and communities and private citizens in the private sector can do a better job. If they can do it, we ought to let them do it. We should get out of the way and let them do what they can do better. Taking power away from Federal bureaucracies and giving it back to communities and individuals is something everyone should be able to be for.

1994: Every plan before the Congress proposes to slow the growth of Medicare. The difference is this: We believe those savings should be used to improve health care for senior citizens. Medicare must be protected, and it should cover prescription drugs, and we should take the first steps in covering long- term care. To those who would cut Medicare without protecting seniors, I say the solution to today’s squeeze on middle-class working people’s health care is not to put the squeeze on middle-class retired people’s health care. We can do better than that.

1993: Two decades of low productivity and stagnant wages; persistent unemployment and underemployment; years of huge government deficits and declining investment in our future; exploding health care costs, and lack of coverage; legions of poor children; educational and job training opportunities inadequate to the demands of a high wage, high growth economy. For too long we drifted without a strong sense of purpose, responsibility or community, and our political system too often was paralyzed by special interest groups, partisan bickering and the sheer complexity of our problems. I know we can do better, because ours remains the greatest nation on earth, the world’s strongest economy, and the world’s only military superpower.

Look at what you’ve got going on here. Bill Clinton, the guy who actually won a couple of times, almost never said “it is a neverending morass of muck and mire and surrounded by the putrid stench of failure and when one wades into it his eardrums swell with the sound of weeping, wailing and the gnashing of teeth and I know we can do better.” President Clinton nearly always found a little bit of sugar in the status quo. We had the world’s best military, our fourth graders were already outperforming other fourth graders in other countries, and the female unemployment rate was at a record low. (Look over those excerpts again; where Clinton says “do better” without commenting on the status quo, he’s commenting on the concept of doing better, which resonates with people just as well.)

I’m feeling much more optimistic now than I did after the special elections in California a couple of months ago, at least when it comes to my hopes and dreams of Democrats continually losing until they go away. Part of the reason for my optimism is that while Republicans remain disorganized and while the electorate nurtures an embryonic apetite for “a little bit of hammer-and-sickle redistributionism,” no Democrat who is big enough to get his name in the limelight seems capable of doing what Bill Clinton did. They can’t say “there is a lot that’s good about the status quo but there are shortfalls too, and we can do better.” If they said that, they’d do what Bill Clinton did: Win. This is such an intoxicating elixir, when you say “you done good — let’s see if we can improve some more.” People can’t get enough of that.

Hillary and crew simply cannot do this. When they use the word “flaw” in describing status quo, they aren’t talking about subtle defects that force that status quo to fall short of perfection; they’re talking about something that plunges that status quo into the depths of untreated human waste. What they don’t realize, or don’t care to respond to, is that this moves their criticism into an entirely different realm. If they can’t say anything nice about things the way they are, that means when they talk of “doing better” all they’re talking about is retreat.

People need to satisfy a much higher burden of proof before they support a strategy of retreat. Even in their depths of their subconsciousness, people realize when you talk about retreat, you’re talking about three big up-front costs: 1) stopping, which means whatever momentum you’ve built up, must be surrendered; 2) identifying a new course, which must mean identifying whatever factors led to the old, wrong course, and getting rid of them before a new bearing can be identified; 3) spending time and effort building momentum again, which otherwise would have been used on things you can do once the momentum is built up.

Result: When your clarion call is a strategy that involves retreat, you can prove to me beyond any doubt that a cul de sac is ahead and retreat is the only option — and I still might not be convinced of your strategy. Selling such a strategy is a real uphill battle. That’s why President Clinton almost never did it.

But the Bill Clinton way of organizing the Democratic party seems to be over. Anyone who finds a silver lining in the status quo will be fired! Look at what they have going on here: George W. Bush can’t do anything right, and everything is his fault. George W. Bush is a big stupid doo-doo-head who is too much of an imbecile to tie his own shoes. And yet, George W. Bush is an evil genius who has taken over the world by fooling us all.

Have they given any thought to what this would say about us? That we can be fooled so easily by a man too stupid to tie his own shoes?

Hillary, then, is gearing up to sell a healthcare plan, which is an echo from the past, in which her healthcare plan cost her husband a friendly Congress. Being “co-President” with a man who was smart enough to talk about “doing better” at least in somewhat glowing terms before describing his reforms, she talked healthcare, and gave her husband his one big black eye from all those years.

And now, she’s doing the same thing, except without talking about the status quo in glowing terms. It’s like someone on her staff decided it would be a great idea to take everything from the past that didn’t work, and carefully strip it from all the stuff that did work. This is insane. It’s like throwing out the baby and keeping all the dirty diapers.

Blame it on knuckleheaded advisors, or blame it on groups that weren’t around twelve years ago like Moveon.org. It’s clear that Democrats need maneuvering room in order to succeed, and they just don’t have it. Whether they know what they’re doing or not, their plan is to keep what doesn’t work, get rid of what does, and hope to do better than last time.

We want these guys to run our country?

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Healthcare ReduxTuesday, January 24th, 2006

Healthcare Redux
Tuesday, January 24th, 2006