Obamacare Weekend: Cui bono?

In my younger years (not that I’m all that old now), I was pretty liberal and had the potential to become a radical. I’ve often said that if I came of age in the sixties instead of the eighties I probably would have been fallen with real radicals and would have been lost forever. As it was, the most extreme phase I went through was my obsession with the Oliver Stone movie JFK. He convinced me that Kennedy was a peacenik who was ready to leave Vietnam and that our President had been killed by the CIA. Upon further learning and reflection, I now realize how silly all that was, but I still appreciate Stone’s movie as a brilliant work of art/propaganda.

That movie came to mind last night as I pondered Obamacare weekend. Specifically, in the middle of JFK there is a long scene where Donald Sutherland describes the conspiracy to Kevin Costner. At one point, he says, in effect, don’t get too caught up in the details of exactly what happened. Who shot from which rooftop is really just a distraction. The important thing is to ask who benefited from the whole thing. I don’t think Sutherland actually uses the Latin aphorism “Cui bono?”, but I’m a lawyer so I get paid extra whenever I can throw in some Latin gratuitously.

I suspect that Pelosi will find the votes and Obamacare will be passed this weekend. We will surely be distracted worrying about whip counts, “deem and pass,” parliamentary objections to reconciliation, etc. But as Sutherland explains to Costner in JFK, all that is just a parlor game to distract you and keep you guessing. What we should really be asking is: Cui bono? Who benefits?

Raise you hand if you believe that the Democratic caucus is a group of courageous altruists who are passing healthcare because of their compassion for the uninsured.

Anyone? Anyone?

That’s what I thought. Now, raise your hands if you think that the Democrats really believe that the country is going to take a second look at Obamacare, change its judgment, and rewards the Democrats in November.

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

So why, then, are they engaging in this apparent act of political suicide? The best answer to that question, I believe, has been articulated by Mark Steyn:

Because it’s worth it. Big time. I’ve been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (Let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a “conservative”).

The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.

In other words, the Democrats are willing to trade short term electoral losses in 2010 (and maybe even 2012) for the long-term “permanent left-of-center political culture” identified by Steyn.

That’s what is really at stake this weekend. Let’s not forget it.