Get us some anger, and make it snappy! I think Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposal to turn Medicare from a guaranteed-benefit program into a subsidized insurance plan (not unlike Obamacare) is politically suicidal. Voters rightly like the security of Medicare. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it. (The only thing that could save Ryan is Obama’s weakness as a point person on the issue–both because he’s a mediocre salesman in general and a weak champion of Medicare in particular, having supported at least one form of rationing, at the end of life. He’s especially bad at demagoguery! Remember how he turned around the 2008 election with targeted time-tested appeals to Dem interest groups? I don’t either.)
But if the Ryan plan is so toxic, Dave Weigel and Michael Barone ask, why aren’t there angry constituents jamming Congressional town halls, Tea Party-style? Answers: 1) There are. Here’s a town hall Weigel didn’t go to. Jason Linkins has some others. (In Illinois: “Audience members said buying private insurance is a shell game where no one really knows what costs a company will cover or to what degree.”) 2) Voters know Ryan’s Medicare plan isn’t going to become law. Obama’s expansion of government, as Greg Sargent notes, had already actually been enacted before the T.P. Summer of Rage in 2009.
Another, more intriguing factor suggested by Sargent: The Obamaites and the MSM initially played up the Tea Partiers in a counterproductive Alinskyist attempt to demonize them as crazy extremists, which backfired when voters kind of liked what the Teepers were saying. Obama may be about to make the same mistake again by building up Ryan as a foil. Ryan isn’t an infantile megalomaniac like Newt Gingrich–or if he is, he seems smart enough not to show it.* Obama may build someone up who stays built. Nor should Obama–Mr. Deny Grandma–be the one who takes the Ryan plan on in any case. Let someone more credible do it. Bill Clinton, for instance.
Finally, Democrats don’t need apoplectic town hall confronters to win an election. They just need worried seniors to make it to the polls and vote. The Dems have pulled this off before–many times. Were there angry town halls in 1982, 1996, and 1998? I must have missed them. Weigel’s guilty (again!) of Symmetricism–assuming Dems need to match the Tea Party spectacle to win. …
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*–Gingrich, remember, lost his budget showdown with Clinton when he whined about having to leave by the rear door of Air Force One. Even if he was gaslighted by the Clintonites–Maureen Dowd’s plausible theory–he shouldn’t have let them set him off.