Stromata Blog

Defeat Isn’t Really an Orphan

What happens is that everybody tries to foist paternity on somebody else. David Frum has earned a high degree of conservative odium (more than he deserves for a mere misjudgment of the political tides) by arguing that the enactment of Obamacare was a “Republican Waterloo”, for which the benighted GOP leadership’s obstinate refusal to bargain with the Obami is to blame. I must say that an alternative history in which the two parties compromise on a not-too-bad health care plan strikes me as rather less likely than one where Bonnie Prince Charlie conquers a Jacobite kingdom in Virginia. At the obvious moment for conciliatory gestures, in the wake of Scott Brown’s Senate victory, the President eschewed any attempt to deal with moderate Republicans and instead pressed ahead with a purely partisan bill. That fact doesn’t suggest that opponents of a government takeover of health care had any option but stubborn resistance.

There isn’t much point in arguing about counterfactuals. More interesting is the question of what kind of defeat we have suffered. It definitely isn’t a Waterloo. After that battle, Napoleon abdicated and the Allies marched unopposed into Paris. President Obama, by contrast, has embarked on another political speaking tour, trying to sell the public on what they’ve already been forced to buy. As the The Weekly Standard observe,

Leaving aside the injustice to Napoleon of comparing Obama to him, the better analogy is Borodino.

Napoleon invaded Russia in June of 1812. On September 7 of that year, the Grande Armée under Napoleon’s command attacked the Russian army near the village of Borodino. Napoleon won the battle, the greatest of the Russian campaign, but at a terrible cost – about a third of his soldiers were killed or wounded. The Russian army was not destroyed, and while Napoleon occupied an abandoned Moscow a week later, the French army was never the same. It soon had to begin its disastrous winter retreat from Russia, and Napoleon finally did meet his Waterloo almost three years later.

Last night’s victory was the culmination of Obama’s health care effort, which has been his version of Napoleon’s Russia campaign. He won a short-term victory, but one that will turn out to mark an inflection point on the road to defeat, and the beginning of the end of the Democratic party’s dominance over American politics. Last night was Obama’s Borodino. Obama’s Waterloo will be November 6, 2012.

In the course of losing the battle, the opponents of Obamacare won the fight for public opinion, forged a bipartisan coalition, and left a large part of the Democratic “army” in positions where they face defeat in detail in this year’s elections. Just how little the President won can be seen by looking at the fathers of this famous victory.

The first and most crucial father was the Democrats’ willingness to disregard public opinion and procedural niceties. The first step, one that has received less attention than it deserves, was the decision to ignore the Constitution and Senate precedents by allowing Paul Kirk, whose term ended the moment the polls closed in Massachusetts, to continue voting in the Senate. That breach of the rule of law may not be justiciable, but it was flagrant. Without that faux vote, Obamacare would have died in the upper chamber.

The second father was Bart Stupak, who preferred to be an unemployed progressive rather than a pro-life Congressman. It’s obvious in retrospect that Rep. Stupak and his band of ostensibly anti-abortion Democrats was always ready to be summoned when Nancy Pelosi needed them. The feebleness of their excuse for abandoning their soi disant principles – a meaningless executive order – is all the proof one needs. What’s significant is that the Speaker’s position was so shaky that she had to call on this reserve. From the strategic point of view, the “pro-lifers” were a useful Democratic asset, making it possible to contend that the party wasn’t wholly dedicated to the aims of NARAL. That asset had to be sacrificed in order to get the deciding votes.

The third, ironic father was the President’s own weakness. In the days before the House vote, he pleaded with progressive Congressmen to save his Presidency by going along with what most of them regarded as a milk-and-water brand of socialism. They dutifully propped him up. This is no Bonaparte, but a roi faineant, paraded at the head of an army he has no capacity to lead.

Repeal!

Not Europe Yet

Sure, repealing Obamacare and reversing the statist tide will be a grueling challenge, but pessimism (on the Right) or optimism (on the Left) based on European precedents is ill-placed. Nationalizing health care was a popular cause in post-war Europe, the remnant of the socialist/fascist mindset of the 1930’s. In 21st Century America, it is a direly unpopular cause. Dozens of Democratic congressmen knowingly threw away their reelection prospects to vote for it. There may be a certain crazed nobility to their kamikaze gestures. What’s self-evident, though, is that we have no parallel to the British Labour Party’s enthusiastically received creation of the National Health Service.

What future historians will find most puzzling is why its supporters wanted this jerry-rigged set of tangled lines and ill-patched sails. President Clinton’s long ago scheme had a coherent, albeit fundamentally flawed, rationale: The federal government was going to become a health care monopsonist and squeeze costs by exercising its monopoly power. The theory behind Obamacare is, throw everything against the wall and maybe something will stick.

If I believed that progressives were smart and devious enough to think of it, I’d opine that there is a secret rationale: Stir up such tumult in the health care market – floundering insurance companies, disgruntled doctors, persistent mismatches of supply and demand, bureaucratic meddling, unenforceable mandates, tax hikes during a weak economic recovery – that the public will turn to socialized medicine as a last resort. Whether or not that’s the plan, it’s now the initial trajectory. It’s not, I suspect, a clever plan or a sustainable (oh, that word!) trajectory. We’ll see the reaction on November 2nd.

BTW, “. . . but for airport maintenance, Bart?”

Barack Obama’s Role Model

Not FDR, but another eminent politician of the 1930's, Kingfish Huey Long. That, at least, is what I thought after reading the President’s pitch at his campaign stop health care forum in he Philadelphia suburbs. His principal – practically his only – argument was that greedy health insurance companies deploy monopoly power to charge too much for their policies. Therefore, Congress must enact Obamacare.

One could say a great deal about that argumentum ad odium, starting with the facts that health insurance is not a strikingly profitable business and that premiums already must pass muster with state insurance commissioners (many of them elected officials ambitious to rise to higher office). One might note, too, that the best way to unsettle alleged monopolistic practices in particular states would be to expand the market by allowing insurance purchases across state lines.

What truly puts the speech in the Huey Long category, though, is that the Senate bill the President wants the House to pass, and that he will then sign into law, has no provision for federal regulation of insurance rates. If one accepts credulously that insurance company greed is the problem and federal price controls the solution, Obamacare is irrelevant. Any federal oversight would have to be legislated separately. The reconciliation process is almost certainly not available, because the proposal has no discernible budgetary impact. Hence, the chances of passage are effectively nil. There certainly aren’t 60 votes in the Senate, where every Republican opposes price controls. Probably some Democrats are against them, too, either on policy grounds or because state insurance regulators have plenty of political influence and won’t take kindly to having a big chunk of their domain handed over to the feds.

The President would make just as much sense if he declared that closing Gitmo will bend the health cost curve downward, or that his carbon cap-and-tax scheme is the best way to prevent unsound credit default swaps. The gulf between rhetoric and even an approximate version of reality rapidly widens. It’s no wonder that the crew of the White House ship are scrambling to make sure that on one mistakes them for captain.

How Did the Little Crocodile?

Far be it from me to quibble with a scientific “dream team”, which has converted into Settled Science the hypothesis that an asteroid strike 65 million years ago extinguished the dinosaurs. Certainly, the event that it describes would have wiped out a lot of things:

It would take a mighty rock to do in the mighty lizards known as dinosaurs, and on that count the Chicxulub asteroid fits the bill. It was big – more than seven miles across, three times the width of Manhattan – and it was moving fast – 20 times the speed of a rifle bullet. When it hit, the explosion unleashed a billion times more energy than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, says Gareth Collins of Imperial College London.

In a paper published last year, Collins found that the asteroid in 30 seconds drilled an initial crater 19 miles deep, nearly penetrating the Earth's crust. Earthquakes of up to magnitude 11 – 1,000 times more powerful than the recent Chilean earthquake – shook the area, and tsunamis more than 300 feet high inundated nearby coasts. . . .

The impact was so violent that it melted and vaporized both the asteroid itself and the spot the asteroid hit. Within an hour, melted rock had splattered as far as northern Canada, says David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute. An immense plume of vaporized and melted material burst through the atmosphere and into outer space. Within a few hours, tiny drops from that plume began raining down through the atmosphere all across the Earth's surface.

As they fell, these drops grew hotter, literally broiling the planet for several minutes, according to another 2009 study. . . .

The combination of dust, soot and caustic chemicals filling the air blotted out the sun, Kring says. The sky close to the crater first glowed red then went pitch black. All over the globe, a biblical darkness fell, lasting perhaps a week, maybe nearly a year.

The darkness shut down photosynthesis, the process by which plants capture sunlight to grow. Huge swathes of forest died.

All very spectacular. My scintilla of a doubt is this: Crocodiles existed in the late Cretaceous and survived to the present day. They do not strike me as the creatures best suited to living through a succession of broiling rain and prolonged, presumably chilly darkness. Were they just lucky? Did a crocodilian Deukalion and Pyrrha somehow escape the cataclysm and repopulate the terrestrial marshlands?

Maybe. But I still like the theory that big game hunters from the stars took a fancy to dinosaur-hunting safaris, while overlooking less spectacular reptiles.

Anti-Stratfordianism on the Screen

This could be hilarious:

Fresh from annihilating the entire planet in 2012, Roland Emmerich is soon to set to work on the reputation of the Bard himself, William Shakespeare, with Anonymous.

It’s a major departure for Emmerich, who’s abandoning global cataclysms and puppies-in-peril for sonnets and subterfuge, and swapping CGI for live action. Anonymous tackles the thorny theory that's circulated for the past 100 years that Shakespeare’s plays were, in fact, written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. . . .

So how does Emmerich describe Anonymous? “It’s a mix of a lot of things: it’s an historical thriller because it’s about who will succeed Queen Elizabeth and the struggle of the people who want to have a hand in it. It’s the Tudors on one side and the Cecils on the other, and in between [the two] is the Queen. Through that story we tell how the plays written by the Earl of Oxford ended up labelled ‘William Shakespeare’.”

The reporter goes on to confuse Robert Cecil with his father William, Lord Burghley. Whether that muddle comes from Mr. Emmerich, I don’t know, but the casting of David Thewlis, languid romantic werewolf, as old, fat, gouty Burghley suggests a certain casualness about mere historicity.

What I look forward to is learning which of the batty Oxenfordian theories about their idol’s political role will wind up on the screen. Roger Stritmatter’s notion that he fathered the Earl of Southampton on Queen Elizabeth and resented her refusal to name the child as her heir? Nina Green’s that he was the prime mover in James VI of Scotland’s accession to the throne? Ron Hess’s that he ran an European-wide intelligence network and used the plays of “Shakespeare” to chronicle his life-long rivalry with Don John of Austria? Paul Streitz’s that he was Elizabeth’s son as well as her lover? It’s not impossible that Anonymous will make 2012 look relatively sober.

Historical Footnote: Oxenford played a role in the drama over the succession to the throne, though not at all like the one apparently assigned to him by director Emmerich. In March 1603, a few days before the Queen’s death, he invited the Earl of Lincoln, a rather dissolute and worthless nobleman, to supper and proposed a scheme to derail James of Scotland’s seemingly inevitable ascension. In James’s place, he put forward Lincoln’s nephew, an 18-year-old with a remote royal claim in the Yorkist line. (He was a direct descendant of George, Duke of Clarence, of butt-of-malmsey fame.) The idea was that the lad would travel to France, gather supporters there, and bring back a French army to vindicate his pretensions. Oxenford was confident that the French would back any alternative to James, “how small soever his title were”.

The proto-plot was, of course, crack-brained, though some figures at the French embassy may have encouraged it. Lincoln had the good sense to report the conversation to the lieutenant of the Tower of London, who passed the word onto other authorities. No one, however, felt any need to take action. Oxenford was even allowed a nominal place on the council that handled English affairs pending the new King’s arrival. He had no money or influence. Arresting him would have thwarted no real danger, but might have reflected badly on important men to whom he was related, notably his first wife’s half brother, Sir Robert Cecil, and the husbands of his two eldest daughters (one an earl, the other a baron).

This minor incident displays Oxenford at his vainglorious and ineffective norm. He would be a better subject for a comedy than a thriller.

Sources: Alan H. Nelson, Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, ch. 81 (2003); Sir John Peyton, Letter to Robert Cecil (Oct. 10, 1603).

The Coming Torricelli Maneuver in Illinois

Let me be the first to predict it: Just before the deadline for putting the ballot into final form, Alexi Giannoulias will withdraw from the Illinois Senate race, and the Democratic bosses will name Dan Hynes, who came within a fraction of a percent of winning the gubernatorial primary, as their replacement candidate.

Obvious when you think about it, no?

Update (3/4/10): Jennifer Rubin agrees with me.