Doug Holtz-Eakin, senior policy advisor, and Carly Fiorina, RNC Victory 2008 Chair and former Hewlett-Packard CEO, held a conference call today as part of John McCain’s healthcare rollout.
There’s good in the McCain plan. Both advisors stressed that McCain’s plan puts “patients in charge,” and they both emphasized that under the McCain plan drug importation would be permitted. McCain has broken with many Republicans and drug industry interests in pushing to allow drug imports from places like Canada.
But there are real problems with the plan as well. Skeptical questioners on the call asked how McCain is going to compete with Democratic plans that guarantee health insurance universally. This is an intractable problem. McCain will need to convince people that the Democratic plan is either unrealistic (see the Massachusetts example), too expensive, or will impair the good things in the American health care system (e.g. doctor choice innovation). And we have yet to see McCain get fired up on a domestic issue to the extent he can sell something like this, which is not at first glance better than what the Democrats are offering.
There is also a fair amount of fudging going on. Where are all the cost savings going to come from? In large part, says the McCain team, from innovation. But, as they revealed in response to a question, these are things that private companies (e.g. insurers or employers) do. So where is government going to get money to cover or subsidize all those hard-to-insure people in the GAP plan? Not clear.
And isn’t GAP really another entitlement? The McCain campaign said in response to my follow-up question after the call that the GAP plan is “an effort to work with states to develop approaches to establishing a market to assure coverage for higher-risk folks who find it hard to get insurance.” That is thin gruel for those advocating universal coverage, and ominous for fiscal conservatives concerned this will be a drain on taxpayers. So the McCain team has its work cut out for it. But it is best to start practicing healthcare salesmanship now, on a day when the media is consumed with Obama-Wright coverage.
is hardly wishy-washy or leftist, and I concur with Max Boot that 
Boot and Hanson, Final Round: Fixing Our Mistakes
Dear Max,
I wouldn’t necessarily conflate being more aggressive with being more brutal. We can patrol more, embed more advisors, shoot and arrest more insurgents, all without being gratuitously cruel or needlessly overbearing to civilian sensibilities.
Here is what I think happened in Iraq after April 2003. Bolstered by a 70-percent approval rating, and still smarting from all the prewar hysteria from the Left, the Bush administration felt that it could run out the clock, so to speak.
Thus, each time a challenge arose—looting, the Fallujah outbreak, the Sadr uprising—their idea was to finesse the crisis as much as possible. They were afraid to squander the capital of hard-won public support through (unneeded?) escalation, escalation that would increase casualties and only encourage further domestic and international condemnation of the war.
As a result of this policy, public support vanished anyway, in dribs and drabs, each time we did not react strongly and decisively enough to a provocation. The administration thought, apparently, that using more aggressive tactics would only further incite the growing anti-war movement and that the good news of progress in reconstruction would only continue to be ignored by a biased media.
And so with a whimper rather than a bang, our complacency and over-sensitive attention to perceived public opinion made us ever less aggressive and ever more attuned to “force protection”—at precisely the time more and more offensive operations were needed to break the insurgency and win back public opinion.
Now we must shatter that complacency and do in nine months what textbooks warn takes years. It is still not too late; history might still record as a considerable military achievement the removal of Saddam and the creation of a constitutional government in Iraq. The President and the military believe they can pull it off, while the opposition (whose proposals to withdraw are not matched by votes to reduce budget appropriations) remains, to say the least, doubtful. But the American public’s patience will, apparently, tolerate this final effort.
I am tired of reading the latest declarations of moral outrage from politicians and pundits blaming Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, Franks, Sanchez, Casey, Abizaid, etc., for “their” three-year-long occupation that ruined “our” perfect three-week war. What happened in Iraq pales when compared to the horrifying mistakes our government and military made in the Civil War, in World War I and World War II, in Korea and Vietnam. What would this generation of politicians and journalists have said after Cold Harbor and the Battle of the Wilderness, after the two-year-long nightmare of the fall of France, after our World War II losses in the Atlantic, after the debacle in Greece, after the surrenders at Singapore and Tobruk? One can only imagine.
All that matters now is correcting our mistakes, countering the defeatists, and defeating the insurgents. We have to keep firmly in mind the correct notion that a functional democracy in Iraq would be the worst nightmare of jihadists the world over, of Iran, Syria, and the royal Gulf “moderates.” Allowing Iraq to devolve into the Lebanon of the 1980’s or the Afghanistan of the 1990’s, on the other hand, would restore al Qaeda’s lost sanctuary and provide a new base of operations for Iranian-backed terrorists. To paraphrase one commentator, such a failure would inflict “1,000 Mogadishus”-worth of damage on the reputation of the U.S. military and on a nascent and necessary U.S. Middle East policy, a policy seeking to transcend the dangerous (and cynical) “realism” of the past.
Best,
Victor
Boot I • Hanson I • Boot II • Hanson II • Boot III • Hanson III • Boot IV