Paul Waldman on why health care reform won’t change the public’s attitudes about government:
For many years, it was hard to know whether the oft-told story of the elderly woman who walks up to her congressman, wags a finger in his face, and says, “Tell Washington to keep its hands off my Medicare!” was actually apocryphal. But today, this episode is being re-enacted over and over again, at town meetings and in coffee shops where politicians go to practice their phrenological arts, passing their fingers over the ever-changing bumps on the public’s collective pate. One recent example came in a Washington Post article, in which Rep. Bob Inglis, a Republican from South Carolina, related that an elderly constituent gave him this very instruction. The depressing punch line, however, was this: “I had to politely explain that, ‘Actually, sir, your health care is being provided by the government,'” Inglis recalled. “But he wasn’t having any of it.”
Both parties hope that the successful implementation of their favored policies will lead to a broader acceptance of their ideology. Republicans want to privatize government services not only as an end in itself but to show people that the private sector works better than government. In the same way, Democrats advocate for effective government services not only to solve an immediate problem but to demonstrate that government can in fact do some things very well.
