In the wake of the House healthcare vote, has the fat lady essentially sung on Tea Party and attendant liberty movements? Ann Althouse writes:
I tend to think people will get used to the change and stop paying attention, and the polls will move back to equilibrium between the parties. People will never be giddy and dreamy about Obama again, but so what? (Note to Althouse haters: “So what?” is a serious question.) We shouldn’t be so optimistic about government. That’s why we resisted the reform. We didn’t trust it. Now that it’s happened, won’t most people get bored with looking at the government and turn back to their immediate lives? The mistrust that made people say “no” will be processed into jadedness and aversion to politics. People will try to live good lives on their own and be fatalistic about how the reforms will affect them. My basic political orientation is aversion to politics, and I found myself thinking, as soon as the vote count reached 216 last night: Well, I hope some good comes of this and the bad isn’t too horribly bad. People aren’t going to stay fired up. The natural process is to stabilize and find normal. Isn’t that why we’re so conservative in the first place?
There’s a good chance Ann is right in this assessment that we are at heart compliant Good Germans or Good Hungarians or whatever. The moderate rise in the stock market today (many had predicted a steep decline) argues for just that return to the status quo ante that she describes.
And yet I wonder. Opposition to Obama’s healthcare reform was grouped around two basic themes. One was ideological – that it was a statist restriction on the freedom envisioned by the founders of our country. The second was economic – we simply can’t afford it. Continuing the first of these themes has everything to do with human will and is subject to the mood of the populace. But the second is cold, hard reality. No jubilation over what happened Sunday night on the part of Obama, Pelosi and company can change that. If we’re headed for bankruptcy, we’re headed for bankruptcy. We may be a culture in denial, but sooner or later we’re all going to have to face the obvious. Entitlements must be paid for.
And I suspect it’s going to be a lot sooner than any of us think. What happened in the House of Representatives Sunday night is that the government voted itself a new credit card – the kind which offers you the opportunity to transfer credit from all your other over-stretched cards at a “special” interest rate that magically escalates into a rate that would make Simon Legree or Shylock blush.
To hide this, the Democrats posted some numbers from the Congressional Budget Office, but you don’t have to read the deathless prose of the CBO’s own The Uncertainty of Budget Projections: A Discussion of Data and Methods to know how accurate they are. Occam’s Razor tells us almost all budget projections are absurd – and ones regarding healthcare are beyond absurd.
So what Althouse may be talking about is a temporary respite. I know how she’s feeling. Riding back from NY to LA Sunday night on JetBlue, I watched the voting on the DirecTV system, but at a certain point I had had enough. I couldn’t take it anymore and switched the damn thing off. I noticed most of the passengers on the plane weren’t watching either. They were tuned to the basketball game or some version of the Real Houswives of wherever.
But it ain’t over. As the man said, it’s the economy, stupid. And the economy isn’t getting any better, not in a discernible way, in any case. And this is only going to make it worse. On top of that, the Obamacrats, in all their newfound glory, will undoubtedly double-down and go for broke with such brilliant ideas as cap-and-trade, further exacerbating the situation. You don’t have to march around in a three-cornered hat or even hold any truths to be self-evident to be royally pissed off about that. You just have to have a modicum of common sense.
So pass the tea and chuck that new credit card in the trash compactor. The game is on.
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