Much of the time Newt Gingrich is a loud mouth blow hard - a demagogue even. But every once in a while he does get it right. Such is the case with his criticism of the GOP obsession with obstructing Obamacare while offering nothing in its place. America's health care system is very broken and the least cost effective in its delivery of medical care of any developed nation. Doing nothing is not an option, particularly if one is serious in reining in health care costs and government spending in programs like Medicare and Medicaid. A column in the Washington Post looks at Gingrich's condemnation of the GOP House and other Cassandras who are advising that things need to change in the GOP mindset. Here are excerpts:
There’s been lot of chatter today about these rather blunt remarks from Newt Gingrich about the perils of the GOP’s obsession with destroying Obamacare while refusing to offer any meaningful alternative:
“I will bet you, for most of you, you go home in the next two weeks when your members of Congress are home, and you look them in the eye and you say, ‘What is your positive replacement for Obamacare?’ They will have zero answer,” Gingrich said.
Gingrich blamed the problem on Republican culture that rewards obstruction and negativity instead of innovation and “being positive.” “We are caught up right now in a culture, and you see it every single day, where as long as we are negative and as long as we are vicious and as long as we can tear down our opponent, we don’t have to learn anything,” Gingrich said, acknowledging the “totally candid” nature of his remarks. “We have to do the homework.”
It looks to me like there are enough data points out there to suggest that Republicans now recognize that their overall posture on Obamacare — not to mention on the president himself — is deeply problematic, and are seriously grappling with it at the highest levels of the party.
Just two days ago, the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore — whom Dems believe sometimes channels the thinking of GOP leaders — floated the radical idea that Republicans should point to the sequester and the falling deficit to declare victory in the spending wars, instead of provoking a costly and destructive government shutdown fight that would only help Obama and Dems.
And earlier this week, GOP strategists with direct experience of GOP midterm losses in 1998 told the also-well-connected Byron York that Republicans are at real risk of duplicating 1998′s mistakes. The strategists noted that Republicans ran relentlessly against Bill Clinton — even though he wasn’t on the ballot — and that this didn’t work; rather than gain seats, as is customary in the off year of an oppositional president’s second term, Republicans lost seats. York concluded that a similar outcome was possible next year “if Republicans stick to being an opposition party on the attack rather than the alternative party offering an agenda.”
Will the GOP change course? Probably not given the reality that the party is now the hostage of the Christofascists and Tea Party loons who refuse to change with objective reality.
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