Now that President Obama has defined the legislative path forward for HCR (text of his remarks here), and Dems are lining up in support of the consensus, the glaring weakness of the Republicans’ strategy is coming into focus. With benefit of hindsight, it now seems terribly obvious that Republicans hurt their cause with their “throw it out and start over” message.
First, few Americans want to ditch all the work that’s been done and go through the whole yammering process all over again. People are simply growing tired of the health reform debate and it’s hard for a sane person not to agree with President Obama’s point that everything has been said and everyone has had their chance to say it. Clearly, they overestimated the public’s tolerance for never-ending debate.
Second, “let’s start over” is such a transparently partisan notion. ‘Let’s just trash all the Democrats’ efforts, and start over again so we Republicans, who just got one new, pivotal Senate vote, can dominate the deliberations.” No one with a triple-digit I.Q. could possibly believe that idea comes from a genuine bipartisan spirit.
You have to wonder what deluded world the authors of that strategy inhabit. Did they really think the Democrats would roll and say, “OK, you guys are right. let’s start all over again.” No. But it’s equally-dumb to believe that voters would think, “Gee, those reasonable, bipartisan Republicans have a point, we really should start over.”
Instead of “start over,” Republicans might have gotten more support by fighting hard for a few key measures, even if they lost. Then, at least, they would not look quite so obstructionist and negative. Their portfolio of ideas was admittedly limited, but they had a couple of measures they could have been positive about. Instead they went whole hog negative and amped up ‘the party of no’ meme.
Consider an alternate reality. What would be happening now if a few Republicans negotiated in good faith and could credibly claim they had a significant impact on the reforms? The Republican Party could then share some of the credit. Now President Obama and the Dems will get bipartisan cred for including a few Republican ideas of their choosing, while Mitch McConnell and his chorus of whining parrots will be reduced to dissing both majority rule and the enacted legislation, undoubtedly threatening to repeal it (more negativity) at some future date.
Assuming Dems have the votes to enact the legislation pretty soon, perhaps we have just been provided with an instructive lesson about the limitations of message discipline: When a party’s message is that lame, message discipline is not so great.