I finished James Carville and Paul Begala's Take It Back: Our Party, Our Country, Our Future (copyright 2006).
My
latest reading covered health care and Hurricane Katrina, then the book
closed with a resounding call for communitarianism, even going so far
as to praise Ronald Reagan for his optimism and faith in America. Here
are three items:
1. The chapter on health care was good,
overall. It went into how the cost of treating the uninsured results in
higher health care prices for consumers, the fact that the uninsured
consist largely of people who work, and a proposal to allow
people to buy into the same health care options that are available to
federal employees. According to Carville and Begala, this proposal
works well for federal employees, for the "government gets to say which
plans participate, then negotiates prices, covered services, and other
standards for care", and the "health care companies" accept those
requirements because they want the nine million government employees as
customers (page 279).
I appreciated Carville and Begala's
discussion about the pharmaceutical industry, though I wish that they
had gone a little deeper. Carville and Begala say that "Drug companies
that invest in research should be able to keep their patents until
they've made back the amount they spent on research plus a reasonable
profit" (page 280). This is an important point because Carville and
Begala are acknowledging that the profit motive plays a significant role
in the development of new drugs. A number of conservatives and
Republicans have argued that such measures as allowing the importation
of cheap prescription drugs and permitting Medicare to negotiate for
lower drug prices would discourage the pharmaceutical companies from
researching and creating new drugs because those measures would reduce
the companies' profits, thereby undermining the profit motive for
research and development. But Carville and Begala are sensitive to the
role of the profit motive, and so they say that drug companies should be
able to keep their patents on their drugs until they have made a
"reasonable profit".
But then Carville and Begala
criticize drug companies for being "hell-bent on keeping their patents"
and for seeking to inhibit cheaper "generic versions of the same drug
from coming to market" (page 280). According to Carville and
Begala, Senator Chuck Schumer introduced a bill to prevent the gaming of
the patent system, even as Republicans sought to restrict competition
against the pharmaceutical companies. This bill passed when the
Democrats controlled the Senate. I wish that Carville and Begala had
gone deeper by explaining how they could support patents as a way for
pharmaceutical companies to make a profit, while also not wanting for
the patent system to be abused. What exactly is abuse of the patent
system? Is it the pharmaceutical companies trying to hold onto the
patent longer than they are permitted?
Another beef that I had
with this chapter: Carville and Begala talked about how a Toyota plant
chose to locate in Canada on account of Canada's national health care
system, rather than in the U.S., where Toyota would provide employees
with costly health insurance. That's a good point, but Carville and
Begala appear to stop short of advocating a single-payer system, the
sort of system that attracted Toyota to Canada. This issue is arguably
relevant to Obamacare, as businesses in the U.S. are reducing workers
from full-time to part-time status so that they don't have to pay for
health insurance. Leftists have contended that the big businesses are
merely using Obamacare as an excuse for their own failures, and they may
be correct on that. But, in my opinion, a single-payer system
is better for businesses than is requiring big businesses to provide
health insurance to their employees.
2. The chapter on
Hurricane Katrina was about how President George W. Bush failed to
provide sufficient funds for the levies (since money was going instead
to the Iraq War) when he was warned that this sort of policy would be
disastrous, and how Bush appointed inexperienced political lackies to
FEMA, whereas Bill Clinton had appointed competent and experienced
professionals. One of my conservative relatives once told me that Bush
should not be faulted for failing to provide sufficient funds for the
levies because Bush didn't know how bad the hurricane would be, or if
there would even be a hurricane, but Carville and Begala narrate that
Bush was warned that his policy could have ill effects, that "Bush's own
federal government designated a major hurricane hitting New Orleans as
one of the three 'likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this
country'" (page 284), and that there had been another hurricane earlier
in the year.
I tend to agree with my conservative friends and
relatives that others besides Bush dropped the ball on Hurricane
Katrina----there were the local authorities that failed to use buses to
help people to evacuate, for example. But I still think that Bush
failed to provide adequate leadership during that disaster. I wonder if
things have gotten better, in terms of the federal government's
management of natural disasters. President Barack Obama has been
praised for how he handled Hurricane Sandy, but there are still people
who complain about FEMA, and who say that they are not getting enough
help.
3. On communitarianism, I agree with Carville and Begala
that we should try to see society in terms of "us" and not just "me".
Carville and Begala contend that Republicans tend to support a mindset
of "What's in it for me?" (my paraphrase), but a number of conservatives
and Republicans would come back and say that Democratic policies
themselves engender this sort of attitude by creating an entitlement
society in which people receive free stuff from the government.
I think that Democrats do well when they combat this narrative----when
they show that it benefits society as a whole when people don't go broke
because of medical bills, when people can receive a decent education,
etc.
I'll close this post by saying that I
prefer Carville and Begala's self-reflection after the Democrats lost to
how a number of Republicans reacted after Obama's defeat of Mitt
Romney. There were many Republicans who reacted to their loss
by portraying the majority of voters in the election as moochers, who
merely voted for Obama because he was giving them stuff from the
government. Even when Republicans lambasted this narrative, they did
not appear to be overly authentic, for how often did they question this
narrative before Romney lost? Moreover, I'd say that the view that many
Democratic voters are moochers is widespread among Republicans.
Carville
and Begala, by contrast, did not seem to look down on those who voted
for Bush in 2004. You could say that a number of Democrats did
look down on those voters, seeing them as duped by Republicans, who
spoke to their values on wedge issues while undercutting their economic
security. But my impression was that Carville and Begala did not have
that attitude (though they did recommend What's the Matter with Kansas?).
Rather, they acknowledged that Democrats had to work on showing that
they were not hostile to the values of those middle-class and
lower-income people who voted for Bush. And Carville and Begala were
authentic about this, for they talked about the place of God, guns, and
the military in their own lives. I did not always agree with their
policy analysis, but I appreciated their outreach to American voters who
differed from them politically.