How the GOP will Campaign in 2010
Well worth watching:
more from Mike Stark, the interviewer, here:
SHADEGG: I don’t understand either bill. Both the House and Senate bills contain mandates that compel, or would compel you and I as individual Americans to buy insurance from Americas private insurance industry. I think America’s private insurance industry is the problem…
STARK: So are you for a public option?
SHADDEG: Well, you could better defend a public option than you could defend compelling me to buy a product from the people that have created the problem. America’s health insurance industry has wanted this bill and the individual mandate from the get go. That’s their idea. Their idea is “look, our product is so lousy, that lots of people don’t buy it. So we need the government to force people to buy our product. And stunningly, that’s what the Congress appears to be going along with. Why would they do that?
STARK: Congressman, you’re making the progressive argument here.
SHADDEG: I’m with the progressives on this one! The notion … I mean, I completely agree with my progressive friends here. The notion of forcing Americans to buy a product they don’t want to buy from companies that aren’t doing it right right now is goofy.
…
Making the IRS the bill collector for Aetna and the rest of America’s insurance companies…Blue Cross/Blue Shield and United… isn’t the way to do it.
That’s what’s going to happen. It didn’t need to be this way: the Democrats could have proposed single payer, could have supported a public option, could have allowed drug reimportation, and a whole bunch of other coulda-woulda-shouldas.
But they chose to let the corporations win. Unfortunately for the Democrats, while corporations can buy support for this or that legislation, they can’t actually buy the electorate. And when the people start to find out that they have to give up something like 10% of their pre-tax income to the universally hated health insurance industry, for the purchase of mandatory junk insurance, they will vote for whoever is promising to repeal it.
When Susie Madrak spent a good portion of 2008-2009 railing against the “educated elites” of the Democratic Party, I would get angry, because I didn’t know what she meant. After all, I’m highly educated and a Democrat, but hardly an elitist: I’m working poor, live in a low-income neighborhood, and work for a nonprofit.
I know what she means now though: she’s talking about the people who, by dint of their education, think they know what’s best for working people and the less-educated; that if only the less-educated would listen to the better-educated, they would learn about what’s best for their families.
The problem is, of course, is that “educated” is a two way street. And unless you’re in those working class shoes (or in my case, those working poor shoes), you don’t “know” what’s best for others. You need to experience those tight margins yourself for an extended period of time before you REALLY understand what it’s like to be on the margin of failure and penury.
And of course the Democrats don’t realize this, but the Republicans, who are evil, do: that’s why they talk the way they do, pretending to represent the interests of the very working people they keep down.
But both parties have abandoned the working class: the Republicans never had their interests at heart to begin with, and have always represented America’s elites in the classic sense of the word; and the Democrats have become the party of the highly educated, who don’t really understand the struggles of the working class.
