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- The policy reasons for passing health-care reform are obvious. But as to the political reasons, many of us argued that Democrats would be better off having succeeded in passage, rather than failing to do so. I always understood this not as the legislation suddenly making Democrats more electorally attractive in general -- it has not done so -- but rather in making Democrats more attractive to the Democratic base. And indeed, according to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll, Democrats have closed the "enthusiasm gap" with Republicans heading into the 2010 elections. That will be insufficient to prevent losses, but it will make it easier to avoid a landslide defeat.
- One often hears from conservative critics that liberals, in their pursuit of the nanny state, are motivated solely by consolidating political power; that is, creating constituencies of entitlement dependency. From this point of view, creating a foundation for universal health insurance would be the ultimate in constituency creation, making 95 percent of the country dependent on the federal government. Of course, most of those people will actually be dependent on a system of private insurance, and those who receive other forms of government assistance, while loving their "handouts," feel compelled to bash the provider of those handouts in the same breath. Despite these setbacks, the Democrats' deviously Machiavellian plot to deny Republicans congressional representation continues apace.
- National Review might be "edited by people who are unwilling to countenance simple lying," which I suppose makes it better than
The Weekly StandardGOP Pravda, but if that's the new bar to clear for respectability among conservative publications, then there's still much work to be done in other areas. In that Hendrick Hertzberg post Nancy Scola linked below, he observes that if William F. Buckley had groomed better editorial successors, perhaps the magazine would be less "adolescent" and carry a bit more "literary-intellectual" heft. Instead, the current editors of the magazine came to be in the late 1990s, when the Republican Party and conservative movement was legendarily restrained and dignified. - Weekend Remainders: Ezra Klein explains how the Affordable Care Act is ending a subsidy, not penalizing businesses; Nate Silver calculates the magic number Democrats must keep their midterm losses to in order to act on their agenda in the 112th Congress; John Holbo presents a hypothetical and far-fetched two-party political system; get swept up in the drama that was the presidential election of 1800; last week's doubt that "a 'very interesting conversation' could be had between Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Reynolds on our political zeitgeist" appears to have been justified; and bonus Reynolds, from TAC: "I’m not sure what to say in response to that other than to note that Reynolds is apparently insane, which is to say that he is a rightwinger in the age of Obama."
--Mori Dinauer
