Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Presciption: Rove   [Jonah Goldberg]

Ross basically agrees with me and Frum, but offers a caveat about the prescription drug bill. He writes:

I only wonder about his remark that "the Medicare prescription drug benefit may be surprisingly popular, but the promised political windfall never materialized." It depends on what your definition of windfall is, I suppose. The prescription drug benefit may not be remembered as a step toward a lasting conservative majority, but my sense is that it was intended more as a necessary concession to a popular liberal idea - with a few free-market elements and some sops to business constituencies worked in, obviously - than as a pillar of Rove's long-term realignment strategy. And in the short term, it did produce something of a political windfall: Promising a prescription-drugs benefit on the campaign trail in 2000 clearly helped Bush in his race against Gore, and passing it helped the President more in 2004 that most people realize. Bush's biggest gains, by age bracket, from '00 to '04 came among voters 60 and older, and without Medicare Part D I'm willing to bet that those numbers would have been different enough to tip a few extra states to John Kerry.

Me: I think this is fair (and I've heard Ramesh make a similar case). So, yeah, if the deal is "no Roberts or Alito but two Kerry appointees plus Kerry as commander-in-chief in exchange for no Republican-authored prescription drug benefit " I'll take the prescription drug benefit. Indeed, the choice is even more ominous than that. Because we would have gotten an even bigger benefit under a Kerry administration, without the silver lining of a few free-market mechanisms. So, if framed as an unpleasant concession to political reality I can accept the necessity of Medicare part D.

But, I fail to see this as an enormous defense of Rove the conservative master-technician (nor am I suggesting that Ross is offering it as one). In fact, it sounds like precisely the sort of thing Rove was supposed to stand apart from according to NR's editorial. Recall the passage highlighted by Rich:

The leading Republican strategists of the 1990s accepted a liberal hegemony and moved cautiously within it.

Well, isn't the defense of Bush's Medicare reform — offered by Ross and others — that it was precisely the sort of cautious maneuvering within a liberal hegemony that Rove supposedly rejected? Indeed it sounds more like me-too Republicanism in the name of winning then just about anything since Richard Nixon was in office. There's a place for such things in politics, but I fail to see why conservatives should celebrate it, never mind label its primary author the greatest political mind since man started walking upright.

08/14 08:06 PMShare