THE NELSON BLUNDER

"I don't know how this plays politically, but I know it's right."
-President Obama

There is a lot of talk about why the Democrats want to pass the Government Health Insurance Takeover act of 2010 (aka "health care reform"). There is a great deal of fear that this bill (no matter what it is) will pass and hope that it may be blocked on the right, and a lot of hopes (no matter what it is) it will pass on the left. President Obama laid out three reasons in a couple of speeches recently:

1. To protect his presidency
2. To save the Democratic party from looking incompetent (and annoy its base): "Don’t forget what failure to pass this bill would do to the party and my presidency."
3. To show that they really can govern: "At stake right now is not just our ability to solve this problem, but our ability to solve any problem."

The fact that none of those points matter in the slightest to most Americans is pretty much beside the point for President Obama. There are other reasons, though. At least some of the Democrats who'll vote for this believe that it is a good thing, desperately needed. That health care in the US, despite being the finest on earth and easily accessible to all people regardless of their wealth, is in desperate need of being fixed (by making it more socialist). Many people around the world seem to have bought into this, such as Canadians who responded to taunts about their hockey team being beat by the US in the Olympics by sneering "at least we have health care." Well, given the rhetoric from politicians and the legacy media's slanted statements on the issue, I can see why; how are they to know differently?

Yet ultimately the main reason the leadership and many Democrats really want this done is quite simple. It is a step toward fully socializing medicine in the US, despite overwhelming opposition from the public as President Obama recently mentioned to a left wing audience). By putting the entire nation under the care and guidance of the central federal government, the Democrats believe they can sway more voters to vote for them. The plan goes like this:

1. Pass health care "reform"
2. Expand to Socialized Medicine
3. Get people used to and dependent on the idea of government providing for them
4. Appeal to this dependence for reelection and portray anyone who disagrees as hateful, mean, and interested in causing death and suffering for the poor and middle class
5. Win elections forever

I bought into that notion for a while, and posted about the dangers hidden in this Trojan horse. And in the past, that probably would hold true. Presently the dinosaur leftist leadership of the Democratic Party largely holds power and wins elections through previous efforts of this type: social security, medicare, and other federal government welfare. Anyone who rightly points out that these schemes are unquestionably unconstitutional are shouted down as being mean spirited and wanting people to starve, freeze, and die.

The slightest attempt to save social security by a savings account scheme which most people - even leftist New Yorkers - supported in theory (until they were told it was the "Bush plan") was met by cries of evil Republicans trying to take away the safety net and starve old people, forcing them to eat dog food and live in a garage.

An aside here, canned dog food costs more than tuna, so why on earth would anyone buy cans of dog food to eat instead of just cans of tuna? That one never made sense to me, and they mean cans of dog food. When President Reagan pushed for cuts in various social spending programs, someone in the media produced an older person who had a room full of canned dog food, claiming that's how they survived, by eating it. That just never made sense to me.

Lyndon Johnson is infamously said to have declared "I'll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years" when he signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act (which more Democrats opposed than Republicans - including a filibuster led by the Democratic "conscience of the Senate" Robert Byrd (D-WV)). So the left which controls the Democratic Party has turned government programs into a job security system: vote for us and you get more, vote for them and they'll take it away.

As I said, in the past that's worked well. Today, I'm not so sure. Starting with 1994 it was becoming obvious that the political landscape was changing. A reversal of party control of congress that radical and sudden had happened before, but this time it was different. Like previous events, it was the culmination of years of building frustration and rage, but the rage built very suddenly and the information reached people very quickly. The difference was Rush Limbaugh.

Suddenly there was a voice out there reaching tens of millions of people with information the legacy media wasn't sharing and didn't care to mention. Suddenly there was an alternative to the official voice of the left as repeated by the nightly news broadcasts and major news outlets. And that voice shouted out the corruption of the party in charge, highlighted their failures and idiocy, and called for a better way. Rush Limbaugh reached the nation with something people hadn't heard but wanted to, and told them things that the party in power didn't want them to know about.

In twenty years, congress has completely changed hands three times between the major parties, which was unheard of in previous history. Democrats had controlled one or both houses of congress for more than forty years before that point. By now, Democrats are back in charge, but that hold seems very unlikely as of this November. And these shifts are happening much faster. Republicans took the House in 1994, the Senate in 2002, then lost both to Democrats in 2006. In 2008, Democrats took such a strong majority in both houses of congress the Republican Party was helpless to stop them in any way. Republicans might win the House in 2010 and much of the Senate.

The difference is a combination of greater political interest among the public and a greater awareness of what is going on. Congress has always been corrupt and misused funds. It has always tried to grasp more power, and for more than a century has been crushing the constitution more and more with greater federal power. There have always been incompetents passing sneaky junk in the middle of the night. There have always been venal politicians helping out friends and sticking spending into legislation which throws money to their district. And there have always been bribes by leadership to get congressmen to vote a certain way.

The big difference today is we know about it. And we know about it faster and in greater detail than ever before. The hour something happens in congress, it reaches a billion computers and is commented on by more than one hundred million people. When corruption happens among Republicans, you generally could rely on the legacy media to let everyone know and then comment on it for weeks so they wouldn't forget. If a Republican did something scandalous like Mark Foley, you could rely on popular culture to spread the word and focus on it with jokes and catch phrases because the left controls the entertainment industry.

What's different today is that the legacy media and the entertainment industry no longer controls the information, so both parties get hammered. When a Democrat like Eric Massa (D-NY) resigns just as information about him sexually harassing male pages, thousands of bloggers are talking about it and millions of readers learn about it. When Charles Rangel (D-NY), incredibly powerful congressman and chairman of the Ways and Means committee, continually breaks the law, violates tax statutes, lies, and misuses his power, people hear about it and read about it and he finally is forced to take a "leave of absence" from his chair.

Its not that the media doesn't cover this stuff at all, they do mention the events in passing. Its that they cover the events differently. The Massa scandal is a perfect example of difference in coverage. When Mark Foley was caught flirting with an 18 year old male page, the press was on it for weeks, on the front page and with the lead story in television news. When Eric Massa does, it gets a slight mention and they move on, the story dies rapidly. But the internet does not drop it so easily, and what's on the internet is on for the long term.

My blog posts from 2006 are still around to read. I don't delete them, and they're stored all over the internet. I'm nobody, but even my work is there for all to read years later. The big blogs are repeated and linked all over the world and their stuff is out there too. The information is too readily available and too broadly accessed now. In the past, stories like Massa could be swept under the rug, and Democratic Party leaders like Steny Hoyer (D-MD) think that's still true.

Democrat congressmen Ben Nelson from Nebraska learned this lesson well. He voted for the first health care bill attempt because he'd been given a massive bribe and exemptions for his district. The people of Nebraska and around the nation made it very clear that they were displeased with this and mocked him heavily. He probably will lose his job this year, after one term. Throwing money at your district doesn't buy you votes like it used to. We could call this the Nelson Blunder, and the Democratic Party leadership is walking right into it once more.

The political landscape has changed. A party cannot rely on giving out goodies to retain power any longer, and they cannot rely on information being controlled to protect them any longer. Relying on a big piece of legislation to protect your job and keep your side in power for decades is simply and inexplicably ignorant. Surely the lessons of the previous Republican leadership are plain to all who have the eyes to see: passing prescription medicare coverage and flooding your district with earmark funds did not save their majority. Pundits and Republican leaders were talking about a "permanent Republican majority" even into 2006. The rules have changed. The only question is what party will wake up to this first and take advantage of it.

Will the Democrats pass this bill? Probably, and even if the Republican party takes over congress and has the guts to pass a bill reversing the legislation in the face of the media's smearing and the Democratic Party's screams, President Obama will laugh as he vetoes it, knowing that there aren't the votes nor the political will to overrule such a veto. The congressmen who vote for this will likely pay a very high price for their votes. House Speaker Pelosi knows this, President Obama knows this, Senate Majority Leader Reid knows this. They're just betting that a big win here means Democratic Party wins in the future.

I'm betting that's a serious mistake.