We Can Only Hope

that if the Republicans go all in on destroying Medicare, then, indeed, we will be in 2013 congratulating Speaker Pelosi.


by Paul Krugman


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

June 3, 2011, 11:11 am
The Commentariat Candidate
Jonathan Chait thinks Paul Ryan will run for president, and that he might well be the Republican nominee. Interesting point. On the surface, it seems crazy: Ryan’s budget plan is, after all, both spectacularly bad policy and spectacularly bad politics. But Ryan may have a secret weapon: despite everything, much of the punditocracy (myself obviously not included) still has a crush on him.

As Jon Cohn points out, many of the pundits who gushed over the Ryan plan, after being rocked back a bit when the plan was exposed as the nonsense it is, have decided to double down. In particular, they are insisting that anyone who describes a plan to dismantle Medicare as a plan to dismantle Medicare is somehow engaged in disreputable scare tactics.

I’m of two minds about how much this matters. As Atrios says, the Very Serious People reaction to the Ryan plan is very similar to their reaction to the Bush plan to privatize Social Security:

Often I think like the Villagers only have a few scripts that they keep running through over and over again. The ZOMG WE HAVE TO DESTROY MEDICARE TO SAVE IT and WHERE’S YOUR PLAN? HUH? HUH? stuff is just the same as it was when Bush was trying to destroy Social Security.

I’d add that we’re playing the same word games: just as it was considered uncouth to call privatization privatization, it’s now uncouth to call a voucher system a voucher system.

The point here is that in the case of Social Security, the pundit consensus mattered not at all: the public hated the plan, and it went down in flames.

If it’s a presidential campaign, however, things might be different, because the pundit crush on Ryan might translate into the Goreing of Obama — even though it’s allegedly about policy, suddenly all sorts of alleged character flaws might be found in the Democrat.

On the other hand, if the Republicans really do go all in on destroying Medicare as the be-all and end-all of their campaign, we might be congratulating Speaker Pelosi in not too long.