Stop comparing Social Security “Crisis” to Clinton Health Care Crisis

Jesus, snichols is about to go snake on the punditocracy’s ass. Thrice this week she has heard Democrats and their spokesmodels compare the Bush administration’s manufactured social security “crisis” and their management of it with the Clinton administration’s very real health care crisis and their management of it.

The comparison appeals to the insiders because they think it means that they get to smash the privatization of social security, throwing the Bush administration into a tailspin, forcing Laura Bush to wear headbands and fire whitehouse travel agency employees and thereby win back both houses of the Congress in 2006–hel-lo!?

Okay, much as snichols completely utterly embraces that as a lovely fantasy and chain of events, she’s here to tell you that the comparison in-ept–these insiders don’t know what they’re talking about.

She knows this because she was an insider of a sort during the Clinton health care crisis (and used to like to think of herself as one of the principal critics of the Clinton health care plan, until she started to nostalgically yearn for Clinton as President and wish that every American got their health care from a “byzantine insurance-industry controlled bureacracy” as she used to like to trash talk it).

But this is the thing: 1) there really was (and still is) a health care crisis. And however misguided the Clinton plan might have been in addressing or solving that crisis, there was no doubt of there actually being a crisis; 2) to the extent that the Clinton health care debacle played a role in the midterm Republican gains (and there were other factors, mobilized gun nuts, the budget/tax increase), it seemed to predominantly play into anti-government sentiments.

The Dems should pursue their fantasy of using social security as a key issue in the 2006 elections, but they should drop the tactic (if it is one) of referring to the Clinton Health Care plan–it could really backfire–and they should resist the temptation to put up their own Social Security crisis remedy–that stupid tired serving of warmed up leftovers of Republican policy “strategy” has failed like seven times in the past couple of years and always leaves us doubly-screwed: the bad law gets made, with complete complicity by our “champions.”