The Great Republican Flip-flop

             An article in the June 25^th New Yorker Magazine, entitled “Unpopular Mandate”, by Ezra Klein is about why politicians reverse positions on issues.   The particular issue they use as an example is the total flip-flop that Republican politicians have done on the health care individual mandate.  Most Americans seem to have forgotten that this mandate was originally a Republican idea.   In fact, it was the cornerstone of the GOP healthcare policy for two decades. 

            The mandate burst onto the scene in 1989 in a paper written by the conservative Heritage Foundation, entitled Assuring Affordable Healthcare for all Americans.  Stuart Butler, the foundation’s health care expert observed, “Many states require passengers in automobiles to wear seat belts for their own protection. Many others require anybody driving a car to have liability insurance.”  He then went on to suggest that the cost of an illness can be just as catastrophic as a car accident,  yet neither the federal government nor any state requires individuals to buy insurance against it.  In 1993, Republicans in Congress offered this mandate plan, called The Health Equity and Access Reform Act, as a Republican alternative to Clinton’s health care plan.  It was sponsored by John Chaffee of Rhode Island, and supported by 18 influential Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole.

            In 2006, Democrat Ron Wyden joined with Republican Bob Bennett to offer a similar plan called the Healthy Americans Act. It was co-sponsored by nine Democrats and eleven Republicans, and had broad by-partisan support. In June, 2009, speaking on Meet the Press, Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts had signed a universal mandate plan, said he supported the bill and he thought most Republicans could support it.  But by July 2009, President Obama had changed his mind, and said he could accept the individual mandate, and it was included in the bill. Then in December 2009, when the bill was voted on, Republicans voted against it, denouncing the individual mandate as “unconstitutional.”  This shift--Democrats lining up behind a Republican plan and then the Republicans denouncing it--was absurd.

            But there is a problem. Politics is a zero-sum game.  The only way one party can win is to make the other party lose. And if your party is out of power, if the other party controls the White House, then the only way to make the president’s party fail is to prevent any of his programs from becoming law, or if they ever do become law, to challenge them in court.  The minority party really has no incentive to cooperate or compromise.   If a compromise is reached and becomes law, and if it works, then the public will assume that the president’s party can govern effectively--and will re-elect them.  And the minority party which agreed to the compromise will be rewarded by losing the next election. It doesn’t make any difference whether the compromise which they agreed to was a good compromise or a bad one. Either way, they lose the next election.  As the saying goes, “no good deed goes unpunished.”  So no matter what policies the president proposes, the minority party has to oppose him.

            Obama understood this, but thought he had found an “end run” around the problem.  When the GOP opposed his “government insurance option”, and offered the individual mandate instead, he just accepted it, believing that the GOP could not possibly oppose a policy which they themselves had invented, and had pushed for twenty years.   But he was wrong.  They simply switched sides.  And the same conservative think tanks that had for twenty years churned out papers arguing that an individual mandate was the only answer, now cranked out policy papers denouncing it as unconstitutional, and the mainstream press printed this stuff.

            The article explains why politicians can get away with this nonsense.  When a party does an “about face,” all party members in Congress fall into line and adopt the new party position. How do they explain this to their constituents?   The think tanks crank out positions papers to justify the change, and besides, most voters have pretty short memories.  And what about the rank and file party members?  How do they make the change? Issues have now become so complex that voters do not actually try to do their own thinking on most matters.  They simply assume that their own party has their interests at heart and would not take a position that was not in their interests.  So whatever the party does, they accept it--and begin preaching it as if it were their own idea.  

            Years ago, I heard it said that someone was “so obstinate that he would switch sides just to keep an argument going.”  Today, such behavior is not just some bizarre individual character flaw—it is the Republican national strategy.