Ms. Collins is still reading, the poor soul. In “The Coyote Candidate” she says in this week’s session of the presidential primary book club, we’re discussing Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. Gov. Goodhair has been being very coy, but maybe he’ll get into the race and discuss why he doesn’t want you to be able to vote for your Senators. Mr. Blow, in “Endangered Ryan-os,” says Democrats aim at a Republican weak spot. Mr. Nocera, on the other hand, says “Don’t Scorn Paul Ryan.” He actually says that however wrongheaded his Medicare plan, at least he’s facing the problem. Again a column full of pants-pissing and hand wringing about how we need to cut entitlement programs without ONE EFFING WORD about revenue enhancement (maybe that’s a less scary phrase than “raising taxes”) or land wars in Asia. Here’s Ms. Collins:
Today, we are going to discuss Gov. Rick Perry of Texas.
Get back here and sit down.
Perry is the latest Republican Party crush. Rush Limbaugh delivered a 20-minute paean on the radio, begging him to run for president. He’s from the South, and he has great hair! What more could you want?
The G.O.P. is desperately seeking someone who can save the party from the fate of nominating Mitt Romney. But every time a non-Mitt throws his hat in the ring, the hat explodes. Newt Gingrich has been a candidate only about two weeks, and already he has announced that anyone who quotes his comments about Medicare on “Meet the Press” would be lying. And he responded to the question “did you owe a half-million dollars to a jewelry company at one point?” with a series of nonanswers, one of which was “we are very frugal.”
Meanwhile, about-to-announce Rick Santorum told an interviewer that John McCain doesn’t understand about interrogating people under torture.
Perry! Perry! Perry!
O.K., there are a few problems. One is that a Texas Tribune poll this week showed that Perry was only the choice of 4 percent of Texas Republicans for the presidential nomination. (Sarah Palin came in first and Gingrich second, which suggests the Republicans in Texas may not be totally focused.)
On Friday, Perry seemed a little more interested in the whole idea than he had in the past. “I’m going to think about it,” he told reporters after he ceremonially signed a bill making it more difficult for poor Texans who do not have drivers’ licenses to vote.
Anyway, we will refrain from any snide comments about how, in Perry’s case, thinking is a very intense commitment. Really, the guy might be president. Show some respect.
So who is this man called Rick? He is, in his own words, “the kind of guy who goes jogging in the morning packing a Ruger .380 with laser sights and loaded with hollow point bullets, and shoots a coyote that is threatening his daughter’s dog.” That really happened. In fact, it was possibly the high point of Perry’s political career.
You can see the attraction. Try to imagine the Republican convention being asked to choose between Mitt Romney, who once drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of his car, and the guy who shot a puppy-eating coyote. With a Ruger .380 with laser sights!
Also, Perry wears boots named “Freedom” and “Liberty.”
Clearly, this is a force to be reckoned with. So, today, as a public service, I am going to continue my survey of books by potential Republican presidential nominees by examining the collected works of Rick Perry. Fortunately, there are only two. And, if it’s all right with you, I’m going to skip over “On My Honor: Why the American Values of the Boy Scouts Are Worth Fighting For.”
Let’s go straight to “Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America From Washington,” which does read a whole lot like an I’m-running-for-president tome. Somewhere between “No Apology: Believe in America” (Mitt) or “To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine” (Newt).
“Something is terribly wrong,” Perry starts off. And he doesn’t mean coyotes or scuff marks on “Freedom” and “Liberty.” American people are fed up with federal government: “We are tired of being told how much salt we can put on our food, what windows we can buy for our house, what kind of cars we can drive, what kind of guns we can own.”
I hate it when the salt police come into your house and interrogate your French fries. The federal government actually doesn’t tell us any of these things. Although it is true that federal regulations have driven the price of machine guns way up.
Perry is a true believer. He hates Social Security. (“A crumbling monument to the failure of the New Deal.”) He wants the Supreme Court to stop its activist ways — as soon as it declares the health care reform law unconstitutional.
He hates the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, which permitted Congress to pass an income tax. (“The great milestone on the road to serfdom.”) He also hates the 17th Amendment, which allows for the direct election of the U.S. Senate because it reduces the power of state legislatures.
This is where he lost me forever. People, have you ever seen a state legislature in action? Have you ever seen the Texas Legislature in action? I have, and my first thought was not: “Gee, let’s give these folks a whole lot more clout.”
If Perry were elected president, perhaps he would do for the entire United States what he’s done for Texas, which ranks first in the nation in the percentage of the population without health insurance, and 45th in high school completion. We could return to grass-roots, state-driven environmental regulations, the kind that have made Texas the nation’s leader in clean-water permit violations, hazardous waste spills and toxic emissions from manufacturing facilities.
But the coyotes would really have to watch out.
Now here’s Mr. Blow:
It’s hard to overstate just how profoundly Republicans underestimated the public’s distaste for their draconian Medicare proposal.
Aside from the rich, the electorate is hurting — a pulsing mass of tender nerves, hypersensitive to things that portend pain, reflexively reacting to the thump of even the softest mallet. Needless to say, this is not the time for sledgehammer solutions.
Yet that’s exactly what Paul Ryan offered.
Scared of being labeled R.I.N.O.’s (Republicans in name only), Republicans became Ryan-os, blind devotees to their young Achilles in electoral flip-flops. Former Vice President Dick Cheney went so far as to say, “I worship the ground that Paul Ryan walks on.” When the Sultan of Sadism gushes over someone, you know there’s a problem.
This was a big mistake. Now the Democrats have a quiver of arrows aimed squarely at this newly exposed Republican weak spot.
According to Representative Steve Israel, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, “There are 97 Congressional districts in the country right now that have a Republican member of Congress, but the districts are more moderate and have a higher Democratic performance than NY-26,” which is the Republican district that Democrats won on Tuesday.
Democrats understand that many older Americans are just treading water. The last thing that they’ll countenance right now is any suggestion that one of the last remaining federal life preservers is being withdrawn.
A poll of people ages 50 and over that was released this week by the AARP Public Policy Institute found nearly half had experienced extraordinary and unexpected expenses in the previous three years; half had delayed getting medical or dental care or delayed or ceased taking medication; a quarter said that they used up all their savings; and 12 percent said that they had dropped health insurance coverage altogether.
Only a quarter expected their financial situation to improve next year, and most said that they were not too confident or not at all confident that they would have enough money to live comfortably throughout their retirement years. Only 8 percent were very confident that they’d have enough money.
This is not to say that Medicare isn’t in crisis. It is. But, we don’t have to gut it to save it. This election season, Republicans are suffering from the same disconnect over the idea of change that caused problems for the Democrats in 2010: Voters say “rearrange the furniture”; politicians hear “remodel the house.”
Ryan is known as a numbers guy, but numbers can be cold comfort. People don’t quantify the quality of their lives by the money they save or the money the government saved on them, but by the moments they savor. When dread creeps into the spaces where those moments should be, politicians pay a price at the polls.
And now here’s Mr. Nocera concern trolling and telling us we should take Ryan’s proposal as a starting point for discussions…
I hadn’t realized until I met him on Tuesday that Paul Ryan had been a protégé of Jack Kemp. But the minute I heard him talking about his late mentor, everything suddenly made sense.
Kemp — the former pro football quarterback, longtime Republican congressman, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and vice presidential candidate (on Bob Dole’s 1996 ticket) — was, above all else, a man of Big Ideas. Especially big economic ideas. An early advocate of supply-side economics and tax cuts for the rich, Kemp did as much as any single person to create the modern Republican gospel.
“Jack used to talk about the battle of ideas,” Ryan told me. In fact, he lived for those battles.
Ryan clearly views himself as Kemp’s natural successor. At 41, he’s been in Congress most of his adult life, where he has pushed the boundaries of Republican economic orthodoxy, just as Kemp did. He has the same kind of “happy warrior” mentality. (“I’m a walking piñata,” he said with a smile.) And he’s finally latched onto a Big Idea that could reshape the country even more than the Kemp-Roth tax cuts did in 1981 — namely, the Republican budget he masterminded, particularly its radical vision for turning Medicare into, essentially, a do-it-yourself voucher program.
It was pure coincidence that I met Ryan on the same day that the Democrats were winning a special Congressional election in upstate New York that had been fought almost exclusively over his Medicare plan. The interview itself was not terribly enlightening; I got his standard talking points about how “we can’t keep kicking the can down the road,” because “Medicare will be bankrupt in nine years and the status quo is unsustainable.” He was, not surprisingly, largely dismissive of the political importance of the Congressional race in New York. His most memorable line came as we were parting ways, when he shook my hand and said, “We’re heading toward a debt crisis. I don’t want to be on the wrong side of history.”
I was not won over, just as I had not often been won over by Jack Kemp’s various enthusiasms. Not that I expected to be. The Ryan plan, which would give seniors a fixed amount they can use to buy health insurance, would undoubtedly shift the cost burden over time from the government to seniors themselves, making health care far less affordable for millions of people. Ryan says that “empowering” health care consumers will help control costs, but that’s absurd: Medicare itself has far more pricing power than the people who actually need treatment.
“It is a rejection of the social insurance principles that are at the root of Medicare,” said Theodore Marmor, whose 1973 book, “The Politics of Medicare,” remains the classic work on the subject. “Its pro-market conception is standard Republican orthodoxy.”
Yet I found myself disheartened as I read about the Democrats’ 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 Ryan’s 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 Ryan’s solution is wrongheaded, he’s right that Medicare is headed for trouble. It might not be in nine years, but as health care costs continue to rise uncontrollably, and as baby boomers continue to age, Medicare will gobble up an ever larger percentage of the federal budget. “The problems are real,” said Alice Rivlin, the Brookings Institution fellow and former Congressional budget director (and a Democrat).
To put it another way, while the Democratic Party might be well served in trying to use the Ryan plan to bury their political opponents, the country itself is not. The debate we need is not about whether Medicare should be reformed, but how.
Marmor, for instance, says that the root problem is not with Medicare itself but with the larger phenomenon of rising health care costs. And he finds himself in philosophical agreement with Ryan about, as he puts it, “the need to put Medicare on a budget,” though he would approach it differently. Rivlin, along with former Senator Pete Domenici, a Republican, has come forth with a less-mean-spirited variant of Ryan’s voucher plan. There are also parts of the Ryan plan that deserve serious consideration, like means-testing — that is, forcing the elderly wealthy to pay more for health care than everyone else. At the very least, it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.
It would be nice if we could treat the Ryan plan not as an object of derision but as a launching off point for a serious debate. That way, maybe for once we could avert a crisis instead of acting shocked when it finally arrives.
It figures that Ryan is a Kemp disciple…
