Conservative inconsistency

30 Apr 2010

A while back, I wrote about why I thought conservatism as a set of ideological principles was functionally obsolete. Several recent events have highlighted to me some pretty glaring contradictions on the part of prominent conservatives which I think deserve highlighting. My purpose here is not to argue that all people who argue for limited government are always wrong (there are cases where I do the same), merely that blind adherence to this principle is just as dangerous as blind adherence to any other. Conservatives have managed to paint themselves as the exception to this rule, and I think that’s a big problem.

Okay, here we go. Case number one is Bobby Jindal. I swear that I noticed this contradiction all on my own, but Salon.com has a good piece about it, which I’ll excerpt here:

Remember when Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal briefly became a right-wing hero for threatening to refuse stimulus money that would boost unemployment payments?

Ah, yes. Good old ideology-over-results. Well, that’s not a purely conservative flaw. Everyone’s been guilty of that. Give the guy a break. NYTimes, any commments?

Governor Jindal of Louisiana had declared a state of emergency on Thursday and mobilized the Louisiana National Guard to participate in response efforts.

On Friday, Mr. Jindal also requested federal assistance for state fishermen, asking the Secretary of Commerce to declare a commercial fisheries failure.

I’m not suggesting that Jindal should have just let his citizens (and wildlife) get all oily because of his principles. No, I think he did exactly the right thing by calling the Guard and asking for federal assistance. Furthermore, I’m not assailing him for changing his mind, because I don’t think he did. I think he was lying through his teeth to begin with. He turned down the stimulus money as a political move, but as soon as he saw a tangible benefit to accepting federal help, he jumped at it (like any sane person responsible for other people’s lives would). Yes, it’s petty politics. But there’s a good case to be made the stimulus had some pretty damn tangible benefits too, they just weren’t as obvious as ducks covered with oil, which make for a pretty sad cover story. Whether Jindal’s putting his reputation or his ideology before his citizens, he’s doing the wrong thing.

Let’s move on to someone a little closer to my heart, or at least my hometown. My old governor, Mitt Romney, passed a health care bill that’s remarkably similar to the one that ultimately was signed into law in March. In fact, here’s Romney quoted by NPR shortly after passing the thing in ’06:

After studying the problem, Romney says, he came away with a key insight: “People who don’t have insurance nonetheless receive health care. And it’s expensive.”

Some good sense from a businessman, who, for all of his failings, wasn’t actually that terrible of a governor. Yes, our health care wait times have gone up, but, as BZ so aptly pointed out on a Jewschool comment thread, “Without insurance, the wait for a doctors appointment is infinite!” If the cost of covering everyone is that I have to wait a little while longer, I’m really okay with that.

Further evidence of Romney’s practical approach to HCR in MA:

“We’re spending a billion dollars giving health care to people who don’t have insurance,” Romney says. “And my question was: Could we take that billion dollars and help the poor purchase insurance? Let them pay what they can afford. We’ll subsidize what they can’t.”

Perhaps this pleases me because it’s such a vindication of liberal policy ideas: that the government can actually help poor people in some way other than deregulating large financial firms and waiting for their executive bonuses to trickle down (I suppose in the form of the minimum wage paid to Lloyd Blankfein’s personal head-shiner [seriously, if he doesn’t have one of those, he really should]), but it could also be that Romney was embracing a concept that a lot of people thought was a really good idea (and has worked pretty well).

In promoting the plan, Romney brushes off those in his party who attacked the plan as just another big-government scheme. He emphasized that those who can afford insurance should get it.

“Otherwise you’re just passing your expenses on to someone else,” Romney said. “That’s not Republican, that’s not Democratic, that’s not Libertarian. That’s just wrong.”

Damn, Romney. I couldn’t have said that better myself. I’m sure glad that someone with as much interest in the substance of policy and making a difference in people’s lives is probably going to run for national office. We could use more pragmatic Republicans like you, especially on matters of importance like health care.

“An unconscionable abuse of power,”Romney declared while asserting that the president “has betrayed his oath to the nation.”

Well, that’s current-day Romney, with an about-face covered in another great Salon.com article. Fortunately, the GOP base doesn’t care that much about facts, so he probably won’t have a very hard time convincing them that his health care plan is nothing like the national one, thus conveniently distancing himself from the tyrannical socialists he’ll be running against.

Jon Kingsdale was appointed by Romney in 2006 to run the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority, which operates the state exchange that serves as a health insurance marketplace for Massachusetts citizens. Kingsdale announced Thursday that he is stepping down from that position to pursue opportunities in implementing the national reforms, according to reports.

Ouch. And it gets worse.

“We should all feel very proud of having created the model for national health reform,” Kingsdale wrote in his resignation letter, the Washington Postreports. “The power of the Bay State’s example is enormously consequential. I believe that national reform would not have happened without it.”

So now one of the people with the best understanding of the day-to-day operation of MA’s health insurance exchanges, which were the model for the ones that the Patient Protection Act institutes in all other states, has drawn a direct parallel between them. And of course Romney hasn’t stopped distancing himself from something that he actually did a good job on. Yet another case of conservatives realizing that reality is catching up, in the form of sensible policies that just aren’t quite libertarian enough for the increasingly rabid right-wingers the GOP is courting.

Trouble is, as Stephen Colbert said (and in front of W, no less), reality has a known liberal bias. I might modify that slightly to say that reality has a known reasonable bias, and that reasonable lawmakers are always vindicated if they just stick with being reasonable. But given today’s increasingly uneven party dichotomy, where a core group of liberal pragmatists looking to get things done squares off against a group of disciplined conservative ideologues ready to ignore any facts that stand in their way, asking said ideologues to remain reasonable is just a little too much. Whether it’s Arizona empowering its police to ask anyone for identification at any time for pretty much any reason, Oklahoma allowing doctors to lie to a pregnant woman about possible fetal birth defects if they think the truth would incline her to consider abortion (not to mention requiring that she see be shown an ultrasound of the fetus and hear a verbal description of some of its body parts [and that ultrasound? If a normal one isn’t good enough, the doctor has to perform a vaginal ultrasound, which, if you haven’t heard of it (I hadn’t), sounds pretty damn scary]), or the government deciding which of the various types of people who fall in love should be allowed to get married and visit each other in the hospital, it’s just another example of conservative inconsistency. Legislate women’s bodies all you want, restrict consenting adults from getting married, and feel free to detain brown people on street corners, but don’t you dare close the gun show loophole, or think about putting a price on carbon.

And keep your government hands off my Medicare.