| As healthcare legislation passed Congress, the GOP's initial reaction was to form their summer campaigns around repeal. Within a few hours, of course, this changed; electoral strategy would be about amending, or "fixing" healthcare reform.
In Montana, the GOP hasn't fixed on any concrete electoral strategy around healthcare. The typical reaction is, as this AP report demonstrates, labeling it as "federal takeover" and "social engineering." A KFBB report hints at other rhetoric the GOP is trying out: that the bill is too expensive and doesn't do anything to reduce healthcare costs.
If the GOP this summer goes after health care in Beck-ian fashion, don't count on it to be a winning strategy. I don't know if I'll go as far as Baucus did in the AP report and claim that most will "like" the bill once its provisions go into effect and they'll see what we got, but it's clear they'll see that it's not the bogeyman bill that will mean the end to the country that righties have made it out to be. If you've been actually following the health care debate, it's entirely apparent this bill is hardly government takeover of health care. It's not socialism or social engineering, or really any kind of change at all: most people's health insurance won't be touched by this bill.
If on the other hand, the GOP goes after it in a more responsible manner - cooling the Teabagger extremist rhetoric and concentrating on budget deficits and cost control - they'll probably do much better. (After all, in Massachusetts - the insurance reform model for national healthcare reform - insurers are suing to raise insurance premiums as high as 32 percent.)
Whichever strategy the GOP chooses, figure on its summer plans to include health care. Kellyn Brown:
State GOP Executive Director Bowen Greenwood has maintained that health care reform would be a "winning issue" for his party in the upcoming elections. Most national polls that show a small uptick in support for the legislation still record the majority of people opposing the bill. I would guess it's even more unpopular in Libertarian-minded Montana. And even more so in the Flathead, still a conservative stronghold in the state.
How this sways the November election and thus the makeup of the 2011 state Legislature will be determined by how effective the GOP candidates are in keeping the issue alive.
And whatever Republicans say this summer, what's clear is that they'll use the next legislative session to try and block healthcare reform from coming to Montana. From Brown's post:
A GOP lawmaker told me weeks ago that, if health care reform was made federal law, her party planned on introducing legislation similar to that in Virginia, which exempts that state from certain aspects of reform and laid the groundwork for suing the federal government. |
