[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJClXb8vQpY[/youtube]
Well, things certainly went well for that cheery fellow, didn’t they? Mondale went on to lose 49 states that year as the Democratic presidential nominee attempting to unseat Ronald Reagan. But more to the point, Mondale’s inability to convince the American public that the “Reagan Tax Cut” of 1981 needed to be repealed allowed Republicans to move the goalposts substantially right-ward on issues of federal taxation. Indeed, the modern-day, standard issue Democratic position on federal taxes continues to be well to the right of the standard issue GOP position from, say, the Eisenhower or Nixon years. That’s because the Reagan years created a “new normal” in terms of the tax rates that Americans would accept out of Washington.
As Republicans prepare to face President Obama in 2012, they are tasked with an objective similar to that of Mondale ’84. The GOP nominee must be able to convince Americans that ObamaCare needs to be repealed. Otherwise, like President Reagan’s key first-term domestic achievement, ObamaCare will create a “new normal” in the financing of American health care, and will become unable to repeal possibly as early as the latter part of the current decade.
I hinted around at this last week, but the reality is that Republicans will have a very narrow window during which repeal will be possible. That’s because one big chunk of ObamaCare, the insurance regulations, will always be difficult to repeal, as the attack ads just write themselves, and another huge portion of ObamaCare, the exchanges, once fully operational, will become the financier of health care for millions of people as employers prepare to dump their employees into the ObamaCare system. Once enough Americans are sent packing by their employers into the exchanges, repealing ObamaCare will amount to “taking away your health plan.”
Once all of this takes place, the goal posts on health care will have moved substantially left-ward, just as the Reagan Tax Cut moved the goal posts on taxes to the right. The debate will move from one over whether to repeal ObamaCare, to one over how to reform ObamaCare. Then we will start to see lots of Mitt Romneys pop up and suggest replacing the mandate with a waiting period for pre-existing conditions to be covered, lots of Ross Douthats advocating weakening some of the federal requirements for insurance plans, etc. But the point is that Republicans will be put in a Bill Clinton position, circa 1992, being forced to essentially validate the “new normal” of ObamaCare.
What Republicans have to do, then, is be a tad more convincing than Mr. Mondale in 1984 when he was arguing for repeal of the Reagan Tax Cut. And it wouldn’t be hard to envision the GOP nominee standing at the podium during the 2012 Republican National Convention stating, “Mr. Obama will change ObamaCare. So will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.” But as Democrats found out in 1984, it took more than a clever one-liner to take down a president. And by failing in 1984, Democrats ensured that many of Reagan’s policies stayed in place indefinitely.
