GOP ‘spending us silly’

The scene: A bright but modestkitchen, through the back door of which, right, the noontimesunis streaming. At kitchen counter stands Louise, a fit senior citizen of indeterminate age wearing an apron over a warm-up suit. She is chopping healthy salad ingredients.

Enter Harry,her trim husband of the same vague senior age, an athletic towel draped over the back of his neck, happily aglow following some unspecified exercise regimen, through the back door.

Two-shot as Harry enters. Louise, cheerfully: “Welcome back. The mail came.”

Harry wipes brow with towel as camera pans right, bringing kitchen table into view foreground. Harry: “Anything important?”

Cut to Louise, chopping: “A letter from your company about our retirement benefits.”

Pan right to two-shot as Harry picks up letter from kitchen table. Cut to close up as he reads, his cheery expression changing first to incomprehension then to stunned worry: “Oh no, Louise.”

Cut to two-shot. Louise: “What is it, Harry?”

Harry: “They’re dropping our prescription coverage. They say it’s because of what Congress has done to Medicare.”

Cut to Louise, who has stopped chopping. Louise: “But Harry, I thought Congress was supposed to be helping people to get prescription drug coverage.”

Cut to Harry staring ashenly at letter: “Well, it looks like Congress won’t let us keep ours.”

Cut to grainy black-and-white still photo of Capitol building. Voiceover: “Tell Congress: Fix Medicare, but don’t take away seniors’ choices on prescription drug plans.”

Ah, who can forget the heady days of 1994, when “Harry and Louise” took to the airwaves in a massive counterattack on the Clinton administration’s health care reform plans? The new Clinton administration, seeing itself as completing the mission of the New Deal, proposed a massive new entitlement program to guarantee all Americans health insurance coverage. A newly energized conservative minority in the GOP was galvanized by a small group of policy intellectuals, making the case that defeat of the initiative was both politically possible and essential to the health of the system itself.

The opposition was part of a wide-ranging conservative indictment of big-government, bureaucratic entitlement programs that neither solved the problems they were meant to address (welfare and poverty, for example, and public schools and education), or whose future unfunded liabilities threatened the country’s very solvency (Medicare, Social Security). This was the defining policy battle of the age.

Industry associations pitched in with money to fund the brilliant and notorious “Harry and Louise” campaign, in which the eponymous fictional characters discover that under the Clinton proposal, they may no longer be able to choose their doctor. The indictment of the plan was devastating. This, combined with political inexperience and miscalculation on the part of the new administration, led to the collapse of the proposal on Capitol Hill and contributed hugely to the election of a GOP House and Senate for the first time in 40 years.

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