Columnist.
"More talk, no deal" was The Wall Street Journal's headline on Thursday's Blair House health care summit. "After summit flop, Democrats prepare to go it alone on Obamacare," proclaimed the headline here at The Washington Examiner. These were appropriate verdicts if you viewed the summit as an attempt to reach bipartisan agreement or even a limited consensus. But that of course was not why Barack Obama convened this unique colloquy. He did so as part of an attempt to pass some Democratic health care bill, somehow, through both houses of Congress -- and to discredit the Republicans who opposed the bills passed by the House in November and the Senate in December.
You are victims. You are helpless against the wiles of big corporations and insurance companies, and you need protection. You need the government to take over and do things you cannot do for yourself. That is the thinking of what David Brooks calls "the educated class" that favors the Democrats' health care bills. Members of this elite spout tales of woe of people denied coverage or care with the implication that there but for the grace of government go you. So sign on, and the government will take care of everything.
Just whom are we trying to impress? That's a question that occurred to me when, on his second full day in the presidency, Barack Obama announced we would close the Guantanamo detainee facility within one year. It's a question that has kept occurring to me over the last year and nine days, even though Obama and his administration have proven unable to keep that promise. Whom are we trying to impress by ruling out enhanced interrogation techniques on unlawful combatants, techniques that produced valuable intelligence that saved American lives? Whom are we trying to impress by limiting questioning to the Army Field Manual?
When the New York Times columnist David Brooks first sat down with Barack Obama, they talked a lot about Burke. That's Edmund Burke, the 18th century conservative British politician and philosopher. Not Jimmy Burke, the 20th century Massachusetts pol, who said that all you had to know to serve in Congress was "Social Security and shoes." The cold hard numbers in the Massachusetts special Senate election this week tell you something important about the appeal of Barack Obama and his policies on his 365th day in office. Democrat Martha Coakley did fine among the voters that would be impressed by your knowledge of Edmund Burke.
Year One of the Obama administration ends Wednesday. Another era may come to an end the day before, when Massachusetts voters -- or at least those of them motivated enough to vote -- choose a senator to fill the three years remaining in the term of Edward Kennedy, who held the seat for 47 years. If Republican Scott Brown wins that election -- and at this writing he seems to have an excellent chance to do so -- that election will mean the end, after just seven months, of the Democrats' 60-seat supermajority in the Senate.
In his New York Times column last week, David Brooks contrasted "the educated class," which supports Barack Obama and his liberal worldview, with the tea party movement, "a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against ... the concentrated power of the educated class." Many conservatives read Brooks as putting down the tea partiers. I think he was indicating distaste for both sides. "I'm not a fan" of the tea party movement, he wrote, but he also noted, "Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the year."
