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Conservatism with a Twiste: A Thanksgiving Day Message for Democrats and Republicans
Conservatism with a Twiste: A Thanksgiving Day Message for Democrats and Republicans (Episode 6) In this week #39;s special Thanksgiving Day episode, our perturbed sounding host Twiste (aka -...

By: Conservatism with a Twiste

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Conservatism with a Twiste: A Thanksgiving Day Message for Democrats and Republicans - Video

The biggest political error committed by Democrats over the last four years has been to run away from their signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act. As a result, they've allowed Republicans and conservatives to depict a measure that improves the lives and health of millions of Americans as harmful, even un-American.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) disagrees about the Democrats' mistake. He thinks their mistake was passing the healthcare law in the first place, or at least putting it at the top of the Obama administration's first-term agenda.

It's a startling admission of political spinelessness. Schumer gets the positive impact of the legislation wrong, he gets the politics of it wrong, and he displays a shocking ignorance of the problems facing the American middle class. The only good thing about his remarks is that they confirm how bad today's Democrats are at messaging. Let's put it this way: Franklin Roosevelt would never have tried to discredit his own policies the way Schumer just did.

Schumer made his observations in a speech Tuesday at the National Press Club in Washington. Here he is, at length:

"Unfortunately, Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them. We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem -- healthcare reform. Now the plight of uninsured Americans and the hardships caused by unfair insurance company practices certainly needed to be addressed, but it was not the change we were hired to make. Americans were crying out for the end to the recession, for better wages and more jobs, not changes in healthcare.

"This makes sense, considering 85% of all Americans got their healthcare from either the government, Medicare, Medicaid or their employer. And if healthcare costs were going up, it really did not affect them. The Affordable Care Act was aimed at the 36 million Americans who were not covered. It has been reported that only a third of the uninsured are even registered to vote.

...

"So when Democrats focused on healthcare, the average middle-class person thought the Democrats are not paying enough attention to me. Again, our healthcare system was riddled with unfairness and inefficiency. It was a problem desperately in need of fixing. The changes that were made are and will continue to be positive changes, but we would have been better able to address it if Democrats had first proposed and passed bold programs aimed at a broader swath of the middle class."

What shall we make of this? Let's start with fundamentals. Healthcare reform directly impacts the middle class, for the better. People who get their health coverage from an employer or the government aren't immune from financial problems caused by medical issues. As this crucial study found, medical issues were major contributors to more than 62% of all bankruptcies in 2007. That was a sharp rise from a 2001 survey that placed the figure at 46.2%. (Among the researchers contributing to the studies was future Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), then a professor at Harvard Law School.)

The majority of these debtors were "well educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations," the authors stated. About three-quarters had medical insurance at the time they filed for bankruptcy, but often had experienced a lapse in coverage within two years of filing; presumably the lapses occurred because they had lost a job or couldn't afford offered employer coverage.

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On Obamacare, could all Democrats really be as clueless as Sen. Schumer?

Two internal Democratic Party disputes this week are surfacing tensions over who the party should focus on: the poor or the middle class.

On Tuesday, an emerging $450 billion tax deal on Capitol Hillhit a snag when liberal Democrats and the White House insisted it also include a permanent expansion of low-income tax credits that have been a quiet but critical feature of President Obama's anti-poverty policy since 2009. Before the uproar, Democrats appeared willing to acceptthe deal, which was to extend tax provisions benefiting industries large and small, in part because Republicans agreed to include a tax credit that makes it easier to payfor college. That is largely a middle-class policy.

Also on Tuesday, Sen. Charles Schumer criticized the White House and Democrats for pursuing passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 rather than continuing "to propose middle-class-oriented programs." The New York Democrat added that "Democrats blew the opportunity." The Affordable Care Act has many features, many of which are designed to aid the middle class, but the preponderance of the beneficiaries are poor or working class. Former White House officials ridiculed Schumer for the comment, and it no doubt angered current officials, too.

The disputes echo a broader debate within the Democratic camp that intensified this month after the mid-term elections about whether the party is too liberal or not liberal enough. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) appointed Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)to Senateleadership as a nod to the idea that more populist voices need to be leading the party.

The year began, however, with a push in another direction, after the president's reelection failed to produce legislative achievements in 2013.

Obama had zeroed in on reducing the gap between the rich and the poor as a top goal of his second term, but a number of Democrats, notably Schumer, began pressuring him to move away from the language of inequality. Schumer and other Democrats argued that inequality was too divisive a concept, and it was important instead to focus on bread-and-butter issues like affordable access to a college education.

Both the White House and the Senate agreed that the decline of middle-class incomes was the most serious issue we face in this country, but the focus had to be on how to get middle-class incomes up, rather than drive other peoples incomes down, Schumer told me at the time.

The debate over inequality the gap between the rich and the poor was largely about messaging. On most economic issues, the Democratic Party is unified. They want to raise the minimum wage. They want to fund domestic programs, like schools and infrastructure, through modestly higher taxes on the wealthy. Still, Obama shifted his tone and rarely mentioned inequality this year.

But this week's issues showdisagreements about strategy can have significant effects on actual policies that make a difference in people's lives.

'There is no political upside to the President taking this stand -- just a lot of upside for more than twenty million hard-pressed families trying to raise their children with a little less poverty and a little more dignity and opportunity," said Gene Sperling, a former top economic adviser to Obama.

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Wonkblog: Democrats have a new internal battle: the middle class vs. the poor

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