What, Us Worry?
BROOKS, DAVID
Politics What, Us Worry? by David Brooks At a Washington strategy session for conservatives last week, Paul Weyrich was pounding the table about the disasters attendant upon the Republic should a...
...Gibbons said Friday that Medicare was so sound Congress should be throwing champagne celebrations...
...He didn't get the chance to call the Republicans a bunch of Hitlers, as he had on Wednesday, because fellow Democratic Rep...
...The Republicans steered attention back to their actuary, reeling out numbers so dull they made your teeth hurt...
...It is true that Republicans endure something akin to what Mike Schmidt experienced at the hands of Philadelphia sportswriters: the thrill of victory and the agony of reading about it the next day...
...Across the nation, conservative activists feared lest Ronald Reagan's national security adviser run for president...
...Pete Stark beat him to the punch by likening the proceedings to Nazi trials...
...The American Medical Association is getting malpractice reform...
...Part of the anxiety stems from differing senses of how fragile the Republican revolution is...
...Hospitals are getting antitrust waivers...
...The next day, Lamar Alexander came to the Cato Institute to declare that the Republican revolution had run aground...
...Conservatives are getting medical savings accounts...
...The American Association of Retired Persons can continue to sell insurance, and may be able to peddle more still...
...As he was endorsing the GOP effort, a group of old people wearing "Shame" tee-shirts stood up, shepherded by a young woman in a business suit who was simultaneously offering to arrange media interviews with them...
...But the final law, which will probably be close to the Senate bill, is a world-historical change from the current system...
...To reduce their exposure to enemy fire, the Republicans decided to hold only this one hearing on the plan, and determined it would last only one day-and all this without even releasing a copy of their bill...
...But there is little outright good cheer in conservative ranks...
...But he sat there and took it...
...Consider the welfare bill...
...Along with that comes a hair-trigger sensitivity to deviationism, a penchant for seeing each setback as a failure instead of just a delay, and a tendency to get gloomy over tactical retreats and while paying scant attention to strategic victories...
...But as all baseball fans know, and conservatives might do well to recall, Mike Schmidt kept slugging for 16 years...
...No wonder the country has little sense that things are changing in Washington...
...They held a mock hearing al fresco on the Capitol grounds to demand more hearings inside, where it's air conditioned...
...Maybe everybody isn't happy, but they are mollified...
...They seem to have accepted the deals that Gingrich, in a spirit of compromise, has offered them...
...On Friday, Sept...
...Amazingly, the dullness is working...
...The Democrats had rows of old ladies screaming about death...
...Even so, the hearing was beastly for committee chairman Bill Archer...
...The Republican revolution has to scale a fortress of anxiety...
...Only 11 percent agree with Sam Gibbons that the program is financially sound...
...The effort to pare Medicare reverses the 30-year momentum of Great Society entitlement programs, just as the welfare bill undoes a 60-year-old framework for poverty programs...
...Many conservatives in the Senate are low because in the last three weeks they had to make one concession after another to GOP moderates...
...Ranking Democrat Sam Gibbons wasn't lunging at Republican neckties, as he had earlier in the week, but he was smoldering mad that there was nothing for him to pick apart...
...by David Brooks At a Washington strategy session for conservatives last week, Paul Weyrich was pounding the table about the disasters attendant upon the Republic should a lobbying reform dear to right-wing hearts fail in Congress...
...22, by the time the House Ways and Means Committee began its one-day hearing on Medicare, it was clear the major lobbying organizations were willing to live with the Republican plan...
...On Thursday, the Los Angeles Times released a poll showing that 60 percent of Americans favor across-the-board increases in monthly premiums...
...On one side are those who fear that Republican power is a rose, beautiful but doomed to wither...
...Has the Congressional Budget Office yet determined what kind of savings the bill will generate...
...When Archer gets angry his eyes dart back and forth as if he were watching a high-speed Ping-Pong match...
...More Washington conservatives are thinking flower rather than tree, and so they are a little manic...
...All these hands were being wrung the week that the Senate passed welfare reform by a vote of 87 to 12...
...Surely if there was a week to step back and count some blessings, this was it...
...In the House of Representatives, Republicans were off to a good start in what looked to be the toughest fight of the revolution-Medicare reform...
...The Republican difficulty in establishing a positive mood was captured during the testimony of Roland King, former chief actuary for the Health Care Financing Administration...
...Others consider it a sapling that will grow bigger and stronger...
...Charlie Rangel of New York bombarded Archer with sarcastic questions: Where's the bill...
...It's said that bull markets climb a wall of worry...
Vol. 1 • October 1995 • No. 3
