More from David Frum -- about what his fellow righties won't acknowledge about health care or about their "leadership"

"If Republicans succeed -– if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office –- Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds."

-- David Frum, in his blogpost "Waterloo"

by Ken

From time to time I mention how eerie it sometime is to discover how similarly Howie and I respond to things. This morning I was about to write him an e-mail asking if he planned to do anything with David Frum's "Waterloo" post when I glanced at his 6am post and saw it there as an update!

At any rate the first part, setting out how the Republicans had made a dangerous gamble by refusing to participate in the health care reform process, believing that by so doing they could use it to bring the administration down. After offering his take on lessons learned from the health care wars of 1993-94, he concluded, "This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none."

For me, though, this was where the post really got interesting. Goodness knows, David Frum is not someone I turn to generally for insight. But as a semi-sane observer bobbing in a sea strewn with cuckoo crazies, he has sometimes sent back reports that fill in parts of the picture -- dating back to some of the deepest depths of the Bush regime -- less easily perceived from the shore.

If you haven't already read the part of his post that Howie quoted, by all means go back now and catch up. At this point Frum went on to make two points that seem to me awfully important.

First he pointed out what the demagogues of the Right -- and at the moment the leadership of the Right seems to consist of nothing but demagogues -- managed to totally obscure, especially from the troubled masses they were so eager to foment to revolution:

The compromise package arrived at (and it really was the only reform package ever seriously considered, allowing for relatively minor differences in detail) is something very close to a Republican plan.

Here at DWT we of course would drop the qualifications. It really is in all essentials the kind of plan you could have expected to be endorsed, if not actually proposed, by Republicans, if there were sane ones. It's a package that starts from the premise that the interests of their soul mates the insurance and drug companies, and thus all the basic outlines of our present system, must be protected. It might have been both interesting and even productive to have a genuine ideological battle as to whether it's sufficient to tinker with the present fucked-up system or we needed to genuinely reform it.

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise -– without weighing so heavily on small business –- without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal--making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or –- more exactly –- with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother? [Emphasis added.]

Frum is setting the stage here for a final point that interests me even more. I'm sure other people have made this observation, but I'm not sure many people grasp it, or its significance.

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters –- but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination. When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say -– but what is equally true –- is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed -– if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office –- Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours. [Again, emphasis added.]

This is the shame of the Teabagger movement. Part of the uprising is made up of people with legitimate reason to be upset by what has happened and is happening to them. Unfortunately those poor souls can't tell who their friends and enemies are, and have leapt into the arms of manipulators who don't give a damn about their legitimate grievances. All those "leaders" care about is how those handy legions of pliable suckers can be manipulated for the masters' personal agendas.

The political wing of the Waterloo Movement, as represented by Sen. Jim "De Jerk" DeMint," didn't even bother to hide its agenda: to destroy this adminstration (as if it weren't capable of doing that all by itself!) and make way for the long-awaited successor to Jefferson Davis as the second president of the Confederate States of America, ruling as well over an enslaved United States of America.

However, as Frum points out, it hasn't really been the political wing of the movement driving this bus, it's been the entertainment wing. And its agenda has very little to do with political goals. Rush and the others have a ton of air time to sell, and they're aiming to sell it at top dollar.

I might add that the new star of the right-wing broadcast spectrum, Glenn Beck, may very well not yet have grasped this basic fact of wingnut life, and so probably doesn't understand:

* that in the long run it may not enhance his standing to be known as the schlub who drove advertisers away, and --

* that he's become less and less popular among his extreme-right-wing broadcast cohorts, not because of jealousy at his meteoric rise and present superstar status, as he surely imagines, but because of concerns for their business's bottom line, and a fear that he could screw the gig up for all of them.

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