Opportunity Costs

David Frum is probably the best Republican strategist that Republicans aren’t listening to. Which, for them, has proven to be a devastating mistake.
 
From “Waterloo”:

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination. When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

This is right.

Republicans had a difficult challenge from the start. As a party, they are positioned against universal health care. But saying “We’re against universal health care” is politically untenable. So, they took a different approach, involving “death panels,” complaints about the bill’s length, and a mish-mash of other red herrings. As Mitch McConnell himself has explained:

…As the year unfolded — whether it became the stimulus, the budget, Guantanamo, health care — what I tried to do and what John [Boehner] did very skillfully, as well, was to unify our members in opposition to it.

The Republican’s plan became “block any legislation”—at the risk of ignoring an excellent opportunity to advance their own party’s interests regarding health care, including tort reform, intrastate insurance competition, etc. Now, complete opposition is a fair risk to take—if you can win. But if you can’t, you lose twice: once legislatively, and once in the benefits you could have gotten from having so many potential votes to leverage. And that’s exactly what happened.

Given the magnitude, and symbolic nature, of health care, maybe such a tactic from the Republicans would have been better suited to a different bill. Regardless, Frum sees Health Care as Republican’s “most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.” Democrats will still lose seats in the Fall. But what’s a Fall, compared to forever?