Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at the effects of health-care reform. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.
House Democrats have passed the health-care reform bill. Assuming Senate Democrats pass the accompanying reconciliation bill, this is a punctuating moment in the history of the American state, and a game changer for the politics of Elections 2010.
Since the New Deal, Democrats have embarked on a state-building enterprise. Democrats have expanded the functions of the state because they believe that individuals left by themselves and markets do not give us optimal levels of economic rights, civil rights, or health-care rights. Some Republicans were on board for a while, but today most see the accumulation of governmental responsibilities as the road to serfdom.
I am not sure that health-care reform takes us one step closer to socialism, but the Republicans are correct in their public statements that health-care reform will effect a major reconfiguration of citizens’ relationship with the state, and in their private sentiments that it is very difficult to roll back the state once it has been bloated. There was a time when bills calling for federal funding of roads between states were vetoed, when a federal income tax was unconstitutional, when investment banks were not regulated. None of these federal prerogatives are controversial today. Ted Kennedy and Barack Obama are correct that health-care reform is about the character of our country, though it might be fairer to say that it is about the evolving character of our country, because the developmental history of the expanding American state has paralleled America’s steady transition from pluribus to unum.
There are now 32 million new constituents of the (health-care) state, even if many will end up purchasing insurance from private exchanges. They are going to be committed to the state as wards are committed to their patron, and as seniors have come to love Medicare. Americans may not like the state, but our appetite for government tends to increase once we have been touched by its largess. Barring catastrophic implementation failure (because Medicare isn’t exactly a perfect program and it remains popular), the Democratic Party has just earned itself a sizable new constituency, not unlike what it did when FDR passed pro-labor legislation, or when the Republican Party handed out pensions to civil war veterans. At least some of these 32 million will go to the polls in November, and Republicans who have been fighting very hard to kill health-care reform know this. But because health-care reform has passed, Democrats have at least a fighting chance of keeping their congressional majorities when this seemed all but impossible a few weeks ago. For the first time since Scott Brown’s election to the Senate, the momentum is back in the Democrats’ court.
Barack Obama’s poll numbers are going to go up too. He lost many independents over the past year because he was seen to be too liberal, but he lost just as many because he was seen to be incompetent in delivering change. When members of congress were chanting “Yes, We Can” on the floor of he House on Sunday night, we know that some of the old magic is back. He has done something that the last popular Democratic president, Bill
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Today is a very sad day. Senator Ted Kennedy has died after a brave battle with brain cancer. His memoir is set to be released on September 14th.
In this landmark autobiography, five years in the making, Senator Edward M. Kennedy tells his extraordinary personal story–of his legendary family, politics, and fifty years at the center of national events.
TRUE COMPASS
The youngest of nine children born to Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, he came of age among siblings from whom much was expected. As a young man, he played a key role in the presidential campaign of his brother John F. Kennedy, recounted here in loving detail. In 1962 he was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he began a fascinating political education and became a legislator.
In this historic memoir,Ted Kennedy takes us inside his family, re-creating life with his parents and brothers and explaining their profound impact on him. or the first time, he describes his heartbreak and years of struggle in the wake of their deaths. Through it all, he describes his work in the Senate on the major issues of our time–civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, the quest for peace in Northern Ireland–and the cause of his life: improved health care for all Americans, a fight influenced by his own experiences in hospitals.
His life has been marked by tragedy and perseverance, a love of family, and an abiding faith. There have been controversies, too, and Kennedy addresses them with unprecedented candor. At midlife, embattled and uncertain if he would ever fall in love again, he met the woman who changed his life, Victoria Reggie Kennedy. Facing a tough reelection campaign against an aggressive challenger named Mitt Romney, Kennedy found a new voice and began one of the great third acts in American politics, sponsoring major legislation, standing up for liberal principles, and making the pivotal endorsement of Barack Obama for president.
Hundreds of books have been written about the Kennedys. TRUE COMPASS will endure as the definitive account from a member of America’s most heralded family, an inspiring legacy to readers and to history, and a deeply moving story of a life like no other.
About the Author
Edward M. Kennedy has represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate for forty-seven years. In 2004 he began interviews at the Miller Center of the University of Virginia for an oral history project about his life. Since then, he has drawn from his fifty years of contemporaneous notes from his personal diaries and worked closely on this book with Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Powers, coauthor of Flags of Our Fathers and author of Mark Twain: A Life.
