I see this morning that the NY Times' Joe Nocera has joined the commentariat's primal misunderstanding of the Medicare counteroffensive. He bumps from tree to tree, seeing this one and seeing that one and sizing up yet another, yet somehow he comprehends not that he is in a large political Schwarzwald.
He's mired in the personalities and particulars of the Medicare reform debate, but that's not what the Medicare reform debate is about, which I'll get to momentarily.
To review, very briefly, Nocera writes that he met with Paul Ryan and he listened to Paul Ryan's Jack Kempian fiscal doctrine and his defense of -- recently his offense for -- Medicare reform. No need to review those particulars; we're oversaturated with Ryan's overexposure. Nocera concludes: "I was not won over," since the plan "would undoubtedly shift the cost burden over time from the government to seniors themselves," and Ryan's Big Idea (oh, Lord, spare us, we've yet another Big Idea Man) about " 'empowering' health care consumers" as a way to control costs was something Nocera found merely "absurd."
With that as background, now we come to Nocera's incomprehension of the deepest, most fundamental political motivations behind the Medicare counteroffensive. Reflects Nocera:
Yet I found myself disheartened as I read about the Democratsโ gleeful reaction to the victory in New York. They had a strategy now: bash the Republicans into submission over the Ryan plan. In the Senate, the Democratic leadership forced a vote over Ryanโs budget purely to force Republicans to cast a vote "against" Medicare. Clearly, the Democrats are going to make hay over the very idea that Republicans were trying to mess with Medicare, the most sacrosanct federal program of them all.
Why is this discouraging? Because even if Ryanโs solution is wrongheaded, heโs right that Medicare is headed for trouble....
True, Medicare is headed for trouble. But the liberal (if you like) assessment is not to stick one's head in the sand and just hope the trouble blows over; nor was that liberal "glee" merely some emotional, tribal elation over the brutal slaughter of a feral, Medicare-stomping Elephas maximus.
It wasn't, even, the rewarding revelation of a winning strategy -- to "bash the Republicans."
At the deepest level, it was none of those: not policy indifference, not tribal elation, not a vividly promising political strategy in the can. It was instead a victory for Reason -- and that, in this profanely populist age, is something to be celebrated -- and a manifest glimmer of real hope that in 2012 the demonstrably Unreasonable can be swept from Capitol Hill, so that the nation's serious business can finally be addressed, seriously.
Which is to say, what occurred in the "victory in New York" was a kind of profound transcendence: the realization that perhaps, next year, exterminated at the ballot booth will be whole species of the political taxonomy that has brought us unfunded wars -- one unprovoked, deregulated plutocrats, endless debt, a massive unpaid-for entitlement, Katrina, oblivious and now seemingly deathless tax cuts, corrupt and Cheneyesque energy conspiracies, and torture.
No, Mr. Nocera, you have missed what lies far beneath the Medicare counteroffensive. It's just a tool, a necessary weapon, a political means to impel a rudely re-enlightened electorate to sweep -- with no small amount of righteousness -- the Pseudoconservatively Unreasonable from the floors of Congress.