Health care vote ominous for moderate Democrats
OUR VIEWS: Pelosi intent on pushing ahead
The Oklahoman Editorial
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Published: November 6, 2009
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is ready to force moderate Democrats to walk the plank again. Earlier this year it was a tough vote on climate change. Now health care. Pelosi has ordered all hands on deck for a possible vote Saturday.
Like Admiral Farragut at
Mobile Bay during the Civil War, Madame Speaker took in Tuesday’s Republican landslides in
Virginia and
New Jersey, lashed herself to the rigging and ordered, "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” on health care.
Moderate
Blue Dog Democrats, without the safety of Pelosi’s liberal
San Francisco district, deserve sympathy for seeing explosive risk everywhere in her health care vote — a trillion-dollar price tag, a government-run insurance option, mandates on businesses and new taxes, all with no prospect for actually doing something to slow soaring health care costs.
Rep. Parker Griffith, a freshman Democrat from
Alabama, told
Politico that some members are worried leadership’s big-government agenda, signified by health care, could "cost some of our front-line members their seats” in Congress. "I should be nervous,” Griffith said.
Too bad. The speaker has spoken. Moderates are on their own, forced to choose between their leadership and their constituents. Fortunate are members like
Rep. Dan Boren, D-Muskogee, who said no on health care months ago. The fence-straddlers now must weigh what they’ve seen and heard against Pelosi’s rhetoric.
The broader landscape is hard to ignore: Across the country, Americans expressed deep reservation about the Democrats’ health care proposals in town hall meetings this summer. This week voters in Virginia and New Jersey told exit pollsters they’re worried about the country’s economic direction — the ballooning budget deficit, cap-and-trade’s true costs to taxpayers and employers, and health care.
Still, Pelosi and her lieutenants remain in denial, choosing to declare the elections as irrelevant inside Washington’s Beltway and/or as a compelling reason to push a left-wing agenda even harder. They believe Democrats’ greatest risk is in failing to pass a health care overhaul.
Maybe that’s the case for San Francisco Democrats. Real-world Americans will judge harshly congressional leadership’s refusal to listen — to slow down, to address rising medical costs and to back away from the seeds of a government takeover of the health care system.
On this Pelosi is tone deaf. "We are on the verge of doing something great,” she said this week, allowing that Democratic victories in two House special elections outweighed gubernatorial setbacks in states
Barack Obama won handily just a year ago. A more rational assessment came from
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va.: "We got walloped.”
More beatdowns will follow if Pelosi gets her way on health care.
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Want to reduce costs, got an idea, a competing public option. The ole invisible hand of the free market wingnuts are always going on about. There is no competiiton noe. It's a cartel, a mob racket.