Conservative-with-a-brain David Frum had the guts to tackle Senator Jim'DeMint's "Waterloo" plan for the numbnuts fundraising scam it was, and is, says Hendrick Hertzberg:
When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say—but what is equally true—is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed—if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office—Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.
So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.
Hertzberg adds:
By the end of the day after Waterloo, Senator DeMint had introduced a measure to repeal the bill. Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had announced, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” that the party’s message for the midterms is “absolutely” about repealing the bill. And Mitt “Romneycare” Romney had posted a fatwadenouncing the bill (“an unconscionable abuse of power”) and its most prominent supporter (“President Obama has betrayed his oath to the nation”) and concluding with this battle cry:
For these reasons and more, the act should be repealed. That campaign begins today.
That Frum post explains why this may not be such a hot idea:
No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994-style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25-year-olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there—would President Obama sign such a repeal?
Not very likely—about as likely as the Republicans winning a sixty-seven-vote majority in the Senate, which is what they’d need to override a Presidential veto, and which (as Yglesias notes) they aren’t going to have even if, come November, they win every single Senate race in the country.
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