Conventional Wisdom and Health Care Reform

“You lie!”
- Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC)

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) joined a long line of South Carolina Congressmen behaving badly. Not since Rep. Preston Brooks beat Sen. Charles Sumner nearly to death on the Senate floor has a South Carolina Congressman gained so much notoriety by a single act. Rep. Wilson seems confident that no one in South Carolina can hurt their political career by insulting a black man. He may be wrong. A poll taken the day after Obama’s speech showed 62% of Wilson’s district disagreed with his action. His opponent raised $750,000 in forty-eight hours. Wilson raised less than half that in the same time frame.

But Wilson also inflicted significant damage to his party.

Nothing better crystallized the debate over health care than watching Wilson heckle Obama. On one hand you had Obama, who was clearly having a good night at the podium, laying out his vision of health care reform in clear, stirring terms. On the other you had someone behaving like a crazy at a town hall meeting in a church basement. The Democrats will use Wilson’s sound bite to paint all Republicans as screaming obstructionist, in the same way the Republicans turned all anti-war Democrats into Cyndi Sheehan.

Obama’s speech not only threw the Republicans off balance, it upset the carefully constructed myths of the pundits. On Sunday you could read Frank Rich in the New York Times as he argued Obama has not been involved enough in the debate over health care. If you put down the paper and watched Bob Shieffer on CBS, you could hear him say that Obama was over exposed and too involved. Listening to conventional wisdom try and decide what the conventional wisdom is, only highlights how superficial the reporting of the debate over health care has been.

The “wise ones” of the media are desperately trying to fit the current situation into a formula they can understand and predict. They have tried to follow time honored rubrics that go back to the 1930’s. In reality their beliefs and rules are really no better or worse than the priests of ancient Rome who read the entrails of slaughtered chickens. The same group of “wise ones” who a month ago told us health reform was dead, is now saying - without any shame in contradiction – that health care reform will be done by November and that the Republicans are in flight.

Conventional Wisdom is by definition short sighted and myopic. So what is the long view that the pundits are missing?

The best analogy for where we are in health care reform is Civil Rights legislation in the 1950’s. The 1957 Civil Rights act was the first Federal civil rights legislation passed since the end of Reconstruction, and was fairly limited in its scope, compared to what was proposed and passed eight years later. As proposed, it would have mandated a sweeping end of Jim Crow and segregation. As passed, it only guaranteed that violations of voting laws would be tried in Federal not State courts.

Liberals were incensed that Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson had given away so much and got so little in return. But Johnson and his opponents understood that once you passed the first piece of legislation – no matter how small - and the sky didn’t fall, it would be easier to pass subsequent more radical legislation. That is why the Southern Senators opposed this legislation so vehemently. They were afraid that if this passed and all the evil things that they predicted would happen if blacks were guaranteed their rights didn’t occur, the dam would burst and the flood of civil rights legislation would sweep their world and power away. It was that fear that brought Strom Thurmond to his feet for 27 hours in the longest filibuster ever by a single Senator.

The opponents of health care reform share the same fear.

They know that any successful reform now will bring greater reforms later. They have already seen this happen. Drug prescription reform set the stage for the current debate. It showed you could effectively reform part of the health system and the world would not end. Opponents fear not what Obama’s reforms will bring now, but what they will make possible in the future.

The demographics prove their point.

The main opponents of health reform are the older voters. Age not race or income is the main indicator of whether someone will support or oppose reforms. The “wise ones” tell us that this leaves Obama vulnerable because young people don’t vote. But in fact young people who do vote remain remarkably loyal to the party of the presidential candidate for whom they cast their first ballot. We see this today. The “twenty something’s” who cast their first vote for Reagan are now the core Republican base.

First-time voters in 2008 will be no different.

They will develop into the most loyal of Democratic voter cohorts. The younger Obama voters believe strongly in a public option and/or single payer health insurance plan. As this group grows and exerts more and more power, it will push for wider reforms. As a result America will in 10 or 15 years wind up with a public option or a single payer plan as part of the health system.

This would make Obama wrong on one point in his health care speeches. He will be the first President to get major health care reforms passed, but he won’t be the last.