Letter 2 America for April 4, 2014

Dear America,

So here we are just seven months or so from the next election and the Republicans are still banking on the strategy that they have pursued for the past six years: undermine the opposition but undertake no new initiatives.  Even relatively civil Republicans like Senator Lyndsey Graham of South Carolina persist, Graham just this week again calling for the complete repeal of the ACA (Affordable Care Act) because it is a "monstrosity" that must be torn down completely.  And on the minimum wage, a conservative congressman was heard to say that it was "never meant to be a living wage." The minimum wage was meant just to be a start so that "we" can bring the worker along and increase his wage as he evolves into a better worker.  Of course, he never mentioned how that would happen or when for the average minimum wage earner, nor did he address the question of why even those who are just starting out in the workforce aren't entitled to a wage that allows them to shelter themselves and enjoy adequate nutrition and healthcare.  And while all this is being said by conservative Republicans, even conservative media commentators like Jenna Lee of Fox News are pressing them for better answers.  When Graham appeared on her show, Lee asked Graham why the Republicans haven't advanced a preferable alternative to Obamacare, and Graham dodged the question rather than answering it.  When she persisted, intimating that perhaps the continuing opposition to the ACA was just a political strategy aimed at the November elections, he expressed the hope that the Republicans would come up with something...that it would be good for the party to do so...then reiterating his mantra about tearing it down to start all over again.  In fact, there is nothing new about the conservative press expressing doubt about the Republican strategy.  During the 2012 election cycle, when Chris Wallace, the erstwhile mainstream television journalist who made the move to Fox like several of his formerly credible colleagues have, confronted a Tea Party candidate for congress when he claimed that he and his Tea Party comrades were going to repeal the ACA.  Wallace flatly confronted the candidate by saying, "You know that's not going to happen."

I remember saying a couple of years ago what I said on Tuesday about the risk involved in harping on a program that had the prospect of providing to the American people something that has been in the political offing since Teddy Roosevelt was president...a thing that the majority of Americans have always wanted.  Now that the Democratic plan seems to be enjoying at least a modicum of success in for providing it, you would think that conservatives, Republicans in particular but Democratic "Blue Dogs" as well, might consider taking credit; after all, health insurance reform was their preferred alternative when the Clinton administration was investigating the possibilities for health care reform focusing on a single payer system.  Or they could take the tack that the Democratic mainstream seems to be taking.  Their rational approach to dealing with their apprehension about the popular concerns regarding the ACA is to say it is a start, but we need to fix it, and we will.  The Republicans could join in that effort and largely undermine it as a Democratic strategy, showing themselves to be not only responsible but non-partisan when the welfare of the American people is at stake, but there isn't much chance of that.  It has always been the Republican preference to discredit the opposition, in other words to take the ad hominem approach by criticizing the opposition for being the opposition rather than offering the voters a critical counter-argument and an alternative position.  And negative campaigning has been rather successful despite the general revulsion for it expressed by American voters, and maybe the Republicans are still right about the effectuality of their preferred political technique.  Maybe the American people say they don't like negative campaigning but they are swayed by it none-the-less.  And I must admit, the continuous Republican repetition of their anti-ACA polemics has produced its desired effect.  People have largely acceded to the conservative exhortation to despise the ACA, even if they don't have either a reason or evidence to justify doing so, but now, there are about 18 million people who are covered either by insurance of Medicaid because of the ACA, and it will be difficult to keep them in the fold.  The success of the federal website in meeting administration goals is an open gate, and the sheep are bound to wander off now.  And 18 million is a lot of votes to lose when you are trying to take over the government.

No matter how staunch conservatives like Graham, Boehner and House Majority Leader Cantor are in their defending the conservative orthodoxy on Obamacare, as they like to call it, the ACA seems to be here to stay, at least until there is enough popular pressure for a single payer system like that extant in the rest of the thirty most industrialized, modern countries in the world...and the American people both know it and want it that way.   Changes in the law are the way to go, and it isn't just liberal talk show hosts and President Obama who are saying so.  So, it will be interesting to see if the conservative contingent in our government find a way to sidle over to the ever more approved proposition that improvement of the law is the course to take, not its repeal.  But if they wait too long, it will look like sheepishness, and by that time, I think the American people will have had enough of sheep...both being them and following them.

Your friend,

Mike