Get it while you can

The kabuki dance that was this week's health-care summit is pretty much admitted all around not to have been a true attempt at bipartisanship by President Obama. Both the president's opening and closing remarks made that clear: whether the Republicans get aboard or not, he made clear, the legislation was going to be passed, even if meant using "reconciliation," a budgetary resolution process that needs only 51 votes to pass, not the 60 votes needed to bust a Senate filibuster.

Knowing that the political consequences for the democrats could be disastrous for the Democrats this November, why are they so intent on going forward? (Let it be noted that the leadership is intent on ramming the bills through; it's not so clear that some of the rank and file members are.)

I think Will Rogers had an insight when he observed, decades ago, "The closest thing on earth to immortality is a government program." Now consider Andy McCarthy's analysis that the usual understanding of politics no longer applies:

Today's Democrats are controlled by the radical Left, and it is more important to them to execute the permanent transformation of American society than it is to win the upcoming election cycles. They have already factored in losing in November — even losing big. For them, winning big now outweighs that. I think they're right.

... The Democratic leadership has already internalized the inevitablility of taking its political lumps. That makes reconciliation truly scary. Since the Dems know they will have to ram this monstrosity through, they figure it might as well be as monstrous as they can get wavering Democrats to go along with. Clipping the leadership's statist ambitions in order to peel off a few Republicans is not going to work. ... In the Democrat leadership, we are not dealing with conventional politicians for whom the goal of being reelected is paramount and will rein in their radicalism. They want socialized medicine and all it entails about government control even more than they want to win elections. After all, if the party of government transforms the relationship between the citizen and the state, its power over our lives will be vast even in those cycles when it is not in the majority. This is about power, and there is more to power than winning elections, especially if you've calculated that your opposition does not have the gumption to dismantle your ballooning welfare state.

This ideological politics in its purest form. Remember that at the end of the summit, Obama said the Dems are going to get the legislation passed no matter what, as McCarthy emphasizes.

At the end of the summit debacle, President Obama put the best face on a bad day by indicating that he intended to push ahead with socialized medicine and face the electoral consequences ("that's what elections are for," he concluded).

Even if the Dems lose the majority in both chambers and lose the White House in 2012, America will have so substantially transformed into socialism that it will not be reversed. McCarthy is right: the Republicans will ultimately not have the will to do so.

But a real question is whether the Dems really think they are at risk in November. A refrain of the Democrat leadership, repeated during the summit, is that the American people have been wanting socialized medicine for 50 years, although the Dems are neither bold or honest enough to call it that. It's obvious that Reid, Pelosi, many other Democrat members and President Obama himself honestly think that Americans are suffering so harshly under the present system that there is a "silent majority" who truly want to government to take over. As for the polls showing the opposite, they are untruly representative of what people want because the administration has not succeeded in getting its side out: Obama said in his SOTU speech, " “I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people." And the Republicans, led by Rush Limbaugh, have been lying about the legislation anyway.

So it may be that the Dems are willing to lose this fall to get this bill passed now, thinking that once it's signed into law, the chances of substantial repeal are low. But I think it's just as likely that they don't really think they'll lose, that once the bill is passed the people will see how wonderful it is and reward the Dems at the polls - for remember, the people want the government to run their health care.