PRESTOPUNDIT

Bruce Batlett on Bush, Nixon and the "Gimme Generation":

.. this is the price we are paying for being in the midst of a foreign-policy crisis and having a Democratic party controlled by its most extreme elements. The former tends to make conservatives reflexively support the president, while the latter makes the White House think that the middle of the political spectrum is there for the taking. With the elderly occupying much of that middle ground, the goal is simply to buy their votes with prescription drugs.

Richard Nixon did the same thing back in 1972 when he boosted Social Security benefits by 20 percent and automatically indexed them to inflation. But while this did buy the votes of the elderly that year, it did not buy their loyalty. When Nixon got into trouble over Watergate, the elderly did not come to his defense because of the windfall he showered on them. They simply took what he gave them for granted and asked, “What else are you going to do for me?”

Political analyst Charlie Cook suggests that something similar could happen to Bush. No matter how big a prescription-drug subsidy is enacted into law, it will never meet the outsized expectations of today’s “Gimme Generation” of elderly, who feel they are owed unlimited benefits simply for living through World War II and the Great Depression. Therefore, they are guaranteed to be disappointed by the results and will chafe at any limitations on the government’s largess.

When Bush refuses to expand the program to their liking, Democrats will be more than happy to say they will. And should Republicans ever suggest anything in the future to restrain the inevitable growth of the prescription-drug program, Democrats will predictably attack them for slashing it and killing untold numbers of seniors by denying them life-saving drugs. These attacks will work, leaving Republicans as the bad guys once again, even though no prescription-drug plan would exist without Republican support.

In short, the political calculation is penny-wise/pound-foolish in the extreme. Any prescription-drug plan will be an albatross around the Republican Party’s neck for generations to come. It’s a bad deal.

A little dose of reality. The Bushes have always been Nixon Republicans -- willing to give limited government Republicans a stick in the eye and a shove-off whenever there are votes to buy or favored interests to coddle .. either through wasteful spending or deeply flawed laws and regulations. Remember -- it was Nixon who gave us racial quotas and Bush I who gave us the federally mandated wheel-chair access for handicapped strippers, alcoholism as a federally protected "disability", and other such absurdities. These weren't accidents -- they reflected deep-seated "go where the votes are" thinking, untroubled by worries of doing what is healthy for a free and liberal social order.