Here's a memo Bill Kristol wrote to Republicans in 1993, explaining that the Republican strategy towards Bill Clinton's Health Care Plan should be to stomp your feet, complain, and fight it with every breath. Because if Americans “fall for it,” then Republicans won't win elections. It basically says that American health care has problems, but Bill Clinton should not be the one to fix them because his mere status as a Democrat means he has bad intentions, and is only trying to acquire more power for his party and hurt the American people.
They're going through the exact same strategies right now. They're probably planning on repeating their '94 Congressional victory. But then their party is split in half, they have no leader, they have no rational arguments, and they're running around like chickens with their heads chopped off. They're trying to distract voters from the actual debate, and keep repeating things like “socialism”, “welfare-state”, or “FDR sucks balls” in the hopes that one of them will stick. I hope they don't change their strategy at all, because these elections are going to be hilarious.
Here's the memo in full
And here are some awesome quotes from it:
“Any Republican urge to negotiate a “least bad” compromise with the Democrats, and thereby gain momentary public credit for helping the president “do something” about health care, should also be resisted. Passage of the Clinton health care plan, in any form, would guarantee and likely make permanent an unprecedented federal intrusion into and disruption of the American economy – and the establishment of the largest federal entitlement program since Social Security . . . And, not least, it would destroy the present breadth and quality of the American health care system, still the world's finest. On grounds of national policy alone, the plan should not be amended; it should be erased. But the Clinton proposal is also a serious political threat to the Republican Party. Republicans must therefore clearly understand the political strategy implicit in the Clinton plan – and then adopt an aggressive and uncompromising counterstrategy designed to delegitimize the proposal and defeat its partisan purpose.”
“The Administration's only option, then, is singlemindedly to focus on the fears many middle-class Americans have about health care as an abstract “system” that might someday threaten them. The Administration's public pronouncements ignore all basic, practical questions about how their health plan will actually affect the quality and flexibility of American medical care. And its spokesmen encourage the notion that radical change involving a sacrifice of quality and free choice is necessary for health “security.”
“Genuine, yet remediable problems do exist in the American system of medicine, but the rhetoric surrounding the president's health plan deliberately makes those problems sound apocalyptic. “Fear itself” does not trouble the new New Dealers; indeed, they welcome it as a powerful tool of political persuasion. Mrs. Clinton, in particular, routinely describes a nation of individual lives teetering on the brink, each only an illness or job switch away from financial ruin. The text of the president's Health Security Plan and virtually all public remarks made by his advisors are filled with images of a health care system spawning little else but frustration and tragedy. It is a brazen political strategy for fear-mongering, conducted on a scale not seen since the Chicken Little energy crisis-speeches of President Carter.
“There is no reason to believe that such a system won't follow the pattern that price controls have established in every other area: rationing, queuing, diminished innovation, black markets, and the creation of a government “health police” to enforce the rules.
Though the president and his surrogates deny all this, the basic building blocks of his proposal permit no other result. Republicans should insistently convey the message that mandatory health alliances and government price controls will destroy the character, quality, and inventiveness of American health care.”
“But Republicans must recognize the policy and tactical risks involved in near-term advocacy of sweeping change, however “right” it might be in principle. The Clinton plan's radicalism depends almost entirely for its success on persuading the nation that American medicine is so broken that it must no just be fixed, but replaced – wholesale and immediately. And it would be a pity if the advancement of otherwise worthy Republican proposals gave unintended support to the Democrats' sky-is-falling rationale.”
“The first step in that process must be the unqualified political defeat of the Clinton health care proposal. Its rejection by Congress and the public would be a monumental setback for the president, and an incontestable piece of evidence that Democratic welfare-state liberalism remains firmly in retreat.”
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