With the news that Harry Reid is scheduling a vote on ObamaCare in the Senate this Saturday it looks like the battle is being joined.
The question is this. If you believe that universal government health care is a terrible idea, is it best to pass this bill now or defeat it now?
Some commentators suggest that Bill Clinton's presidency was saved because Congress failed to pass HillaryCare. The argument is that, after the 1994 election, there was nothing left for conservatives to fight for. So Clinton got re-elected proposing S-CHIP and midnight basketball for the Soccer Moms.
If we want to reverse the life-by-government-bureaucracy model we have to have, in my view, a decisive battle as envisaged by Clausewitz.
I think we need to look at the question of the welfare state as a war. The only way to turn the tide, and start moving western civilization away from the bureaucracy model towards a civil society model is with a demonstration of political power, so that liberals receive such a shock that they will be afraid to propose their government takeover ever again.
To get that effect we need a two to three election cycles where Democrats get defeated in droves. I'd say that it would take a 2010 election with 50-60 losses in the House of Representatives and a 2012 election with 35-40 losses. You want a 55-45 GOP Senate in January 2013. You need to have President Obama defeated in 2012 by 55%-45% or better. You need every Democratic incumbent running for reelection besieged by angry protestors all the time, waving signs reading "Unjust!" "Cruel!" "Corrupt!" on and on, day after day, week after week.
The point is that you don't get that kind of energy and rage unless ObamaCare goes into law and the tax increases start in 2011 (and don't forget the Bush tax cuts that are scheduled to expire Jan 1, 2011).
There's no escaping the conflict. We have to decide this once and for all. This is the question:
Shall the United States become just another social democracy with a vast liberal-run administrative bureaucracy calling all the shots, or shall Americans live as free citizens making the key decisions about they lives without the constant supervision of liberal government officials and activists?
You can't decide that without a political donnybrook ending in a decisive outcome: clear victory or decisive defeat.
Win or lose, let's get it on!
I would suggest that winning elections as you describe is akin to establishing the beach head after the Normandy invasion. It is the end of the beginning. To truly defeat the ideological aristocracy that we call "liberalism", we must dismantle the machinery of coercion & shore up the structures of liberty.
ReplyDeleteGerrymandering must be undone & political districts defined independently of the effect on political prospects; stealth taxation must be undone & replaced with fair & explict taxes; centralization of power must be undone & the Founders' checkes & balances restored. And so on.
The goal is to create a political ecosystem in which the control freak politician will become extinct. Perhaps there could be a museum with a wax figure of N. Pelosi & a plaque, "politicus controlus maximus". Nearby could be a display for its symbiotic partner, "gerrymanderius twisticus", also extinct.