I imagine most of you watched tonight’s health-care speech. My first day back at work was a long one, and so I missed almost all of it; I’ll have to find a transcript. From the post-mortems I did see on the news channels it seems the central issues linger, including perhaps the most central of all: how on earth is all this to be paid for? The notion, for example, that in order to cover new costs we will squeeze $9 trillion out of Medicare by trimming fat without reducing services is obviously a vaporous fantasy, but seems to be part of the plan.
As has been the case throughout, both sides seem far more interested in ideological purity than practical problem-solving, and have busied themselves setting up straw-man caricatures of each other’s positions. Sarah Palin, for example, did nobody any favors by coining the ghoulish term “death panels”; the Democrats, in return, deny reality by pretending that in amongst a vastly expanded national health-care bureaucracy there will be no government panels making life-and-death decisions about allocation of resources. I am not about to rehearse here the many valid concerns that conservatives have about this initiative, but there are indeed a great many of them, and they are not all, despite Democratic protestations to the contrary, rooted in corporate greed and calumnious falsehoods. And there are a great many things that I think indeed ought to be done that could be agreed upon by almost everyone; I certainly wouldn’t suggest that things are just fine as they are, and I don’t think anyone is.
What has struck me most of all, recently, in American politics, is not only how very polarized we are — how deeply the Right and the Left in this country differ in their view of what this country ought to be — but, in particular, how very evenly divided we are. Congressional power seesaws back and forth, but in poll after poll, on issue after issue, we seem split almost exactly in half.
Why, I wonder, should that be?
5 Comments
Maybe it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, as most of us have convinced ourselves of the rightness of the “two-party” system. Who knows?
Kevin
This may be overly simplistic but I consider demographic-geography has quite a bit to do with it. But like Kevin, “Who knows?”
It is curious.
Well, as for geography, one remarkable recent example took place entirely within the state of Minnesota, where the Senate race came down to a few tens of votes out of millions.
rural vs. urban? maybe an even demographic divide?
Good point. I suppose we could ask former Governor Ventura about that.
Of course that takes nothing away from the curiousness of that seeming 50/50 something split. Perhaps curiouser, I found myself recently engaged in debate (an online local newspaper – Southern US) and found that while nearly all agreed “Houston, we have a problem” the most vicious comments came from the anti-changers. Strangely (perhaps) my best guesstimate was that of that group 95% were on Medicare, VA or both. The[ir] main objection was “We don’t want government controlling our healthcare choices.”
Disclosure – I recognize a need for change – but I’ve not a clue (except, in part, perhaps a ban on pharmaceutical advertising) on how best to achieve it.