Sen. Kennedy, healthcare and the people’s government

Senator Ted Kennedy is a symbol of an idea that once seemed old-hat, that America’s government can and should be a force for good in all our lives.

From the earliest days of the New Deal, conservatives have recoiled from this philosophy.

Efforts to dismantle social security, health care for the elderly and unemployment insurance began almost before the ink had dried on those programs.

While those efforts failed, Republicans scored some big ideological victories. Ronald Reagan famously declared that government wasn’t the problem but the solution.

When Bill Clinton conceded that the era of big government was over, it seemed like the era of Roosevelt and Kennedy era was over.

It turns out not so much.

Republicans and Democrats quietly kept the big government bandwagon rolling, expanding social programs, exploding the size of military and intelligence programs.

The truth is that Americans talk a good game about our libertarian bootstrap ideals.

But we still want the government to help us get a job, care for our parents when they’re aging, keep our streets safe, and on and on.

Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 and the market’s failure to insure tens of millions of Americans further discredited many of those laissez-faire ideas in the minds of voters.

The townhall meetings — crowded with people who think the Federal government is a conspiratorial cabal formed to devour individual freedoms — are a distraction.

The truth is that the vast majority of Americans want a strong and capable and activist government.

The real danger is this: Somewhere in the fugue between our small government rhetoric and our big government greed, we apparently forgot how to actually govern well.

We blow tons of money on programs, on big-business subsidies, on cash for farmers — while our economy and our quality of life continue to contract.

Worse yet, we’ve continued down this path long after we had the bankroll to pay for it. We’re a welfare nation, lining up for our monthly checks from China and the Middle East.

Which brings us to the current debate over health care. Of course it matters that the Democrats find a way to improve and expand insurance coverage for millions of Americans.

But far more important — to the nation and to the legacy of men like Ted Kennedy — is that they prove America can still do this kind of big-government well, with innovation and creativity.

I’ll be honest. So far, I haven’t heard a single stunning new idea.

The Brain Trust that roared into Washington last January hasn’t produced a single game-changing model or approach.

Is there anyone who voted for Barack Obama who didn’t expect more and better than this?

Part of the problem seems to be that the Obama Administration is still trying to wink at the notion that big government is a bad thing.

That’s nonsense. For better or worse, this Democratic Party is rooted in the ideology of Roosevelt and Johnson and Kennedy.

They’re not socialists. They’re certainly not communists.

But they believe that a modern, industrial and urbanized society like ours needs a strong, well-run central bureaucracy, capable of providing a safety net and smoothing the rough edges of capitalism.

This is the real test Democrats face in the fall. Not whether they can be bipartisan or moderate or centrist.

The measuring stick now is whether their ideals and their activism can achieve practical and sustainable results — or not.

If the health care reform we see at the end of the day is a colossal and overpriced mess — or if it fails outright — Mr. Obama will have lost more than a fight over one issue.

He will have discredited the ideas at the heart of his own movement.

Tags: health