Republicans are crying foul over Democrats’ resort to “Mediscare” tactics to win an open House seat in New York. Democrats are chortling because they think the GOP’s heretofore unstoppable austerity offensive may have met its Stalingrad.
All this is diverting to aficionados of partisan thrust-and-parry in Washington. But the rest of the country may be less amused. By adhering to unbending, absolutist positions on Medicare and taxes, could Democrats and Republicans be cracking open the door to a serious third party challenge in 2012?
On Tuesday, Democrat Kathy Hochul won a traditionally Republican House seat in upstate New York in a special election. She relentlessly linked her GOP opponent to Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan for making deep cuts in Medicare while preserving the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Many Democrats now see this as the winning formula for next year’s elections.
Ryan complained yesterday that Democrats are “shamelessly demagoguing and distorting” his plan. It was hard to feel any sympathy for the earnest House Budget Commission chairman, however, since Republicans in 2010 spent millions on ads shamelessly blasting Democratic candidates for backing the proposed Medicare cuts in Obamacare. There’s actual double hypocrisy at work here, since Ryan’s Medicare proposal works through the same health exchanges Republicans find so objectionable in Obama’s plan.
Being called a demagogue by the party of death panels and death taxes is like being called ugly by a crab.
Nonetheless, Democrats need to resist the temptation to pay back their opponents in kind. They need to retain the flexibility to slow down Medicare’s cost growth, which as Bill Clinton said yesterday at the Peterson Foundation Fiscal Summit, is the sine qua non of any serious proposal to reduce federal deficits and debt.
Medicare spending is by far the biggest driver of federal spending growth. Together with Social Security, it represents nearly one-third of federal spending. According to the Social Security and Medicare Trustees, the government is slated to transfer over $3.4 trillion in general revenues to Medicare by 2020. This problem needs to be tackled now, even if it complicates Democrats’ ability to run on “Medagoguery” in 2012.
Meanwhile, “progressives” aren’t helping by running a ridiculously over-the-top ad showing a Ryan look-alike pitching a wheelchair-bound granny off a cliff. True progressives believe in solving the nation’s core dilemmas, not fetishizing the status quo. Cutting the nation’s debts down to manageable size will require both higher revenues and lower rates of entitlement spending growth.
If Democrats and Republicans can’t produce a fix along these lines, they practically invite the 2012 version of Ross Perot into the race.
