It’s been sixteen years since Hillary’s assault on healthcare.  That assault led in part to the Republican takeover in 1994 but one has to look at the differences between today and sixteen years ago.

 

In 1993 Bill Clinton ran on the economy and succeeded in beating George HW Bush on that issue in spite of the fact that Bush had in fact led the country out of the recession by the election.  Clinton felt he was invincible so he let his wife take on the issue of healthcare.  The thing that Clinton underestimated was that the economy was already rebounding and people were positive on the economic situation.  As such people didn’t see healthcare as that big a problem that required a government takeover and as such it went down to defeat.

 

So we move forward to the last eight years where we have had a drumbeat of Democrats, in congress and the media, telling people just how bad everything was.  This in spite of the fact that for much of the George W Bush years the economy has been booming.  The media succeeded in talking the economy into recession in late 2008 along with a democrat controlled congress that created the mortgage mess.

 

We now have the perfect storm for Democrats.  They have created circumstances where we have unemployment near 10%, we have healthcare costs through the roof mostly because trial lawyers have driven the cost of malpractice insurance through the roof.  We have government takeovers of the auto industry, and the banking industry.  We haven’t seen misery like this since the days of Jimmy Carter.

 

So now there is a narrow window of opportunity for Obama and Democrats to pass socialized medicine.  i call it a narrow window because the have to be careful, they have to orchestrate this takeover and spin it so it appears that they are helping everyone.  If people perceive this for what it is, another power grab by liberals and Obama then they could see a backlash.  People are already weary of the takeovers they’ve seen in the automotive and banking sectors.

 

The Democrats running congress are talking of big tax increases, the global warming bill isn’t widely supported by voters but congress is beholden to the environuts that elected them.  The more they force this stuff down the throats of the American people the greater the consequences in 2010 and 2012.

 

So in the end it appears that Democrats have created the circumstances under which socialized medicine may be possible.  Maybe they learned from 1994 but will the country be better off from the lessons learned?  I doubt it.

This being the inaugural post of the Blog Conservative Matters I feel to need to ask the question above.  Now for those of you who are inherently liberal you will no doubt find several examples of when government was the solution to a problem.  However being conservative I will first likely debate who created the problem in the first place and with that most of the time if you remove the liberals in government who created the problem then you have solved the problem. 

 

In fact I can only think of war against our aggressors as a problem government can solve and most of the time even that is necessary because we listened to liberals and allowed history to repeat itself thus forcing us to take some military action against some aggressor that has done or means to do us harm.

 

Take for example the current recession.  This recession was brought about by mismanagement of the mortgage markets particularly Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.  Now for some strange reason most of the people in this country think that those two entities are private banks or privately owned institutions.  This couldn’t be further from the truth.  Freddie and Fannie are creations of government charged with making loans to those with a questionable ability to repay.

 

In 2003 the Bush Administration seeing a crisis on the horizon asked for an overhaul of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae by creating an oversight agency within the Treasury Department that would have oversee Freddie and Fannie.  Would that have fixed the problem, probably not but Senator Chris Dodd, and Congressman Barney Frank insisted there was nothing wrong and wouldn’t allow even discussion of further oversight.

 

Now we have Obama acting as chairman and ceo of General Motors, Chrysler, Bank of America, and several other banks and insurance companies.  Where is the constitutional authority to take over private business, where does it stop, what businesses are deemed ok to fail?  Why do taxpayers have to fund this boondoggle?  We already know it doesn’t work, when President Bush initiated this bailout last fall we were told that GM and Chrysler couldn’t be allowed to go through bankruptcy that it would put too many people out of work yet where are we today?  Chrysler has already entered bankruptcy, GM will within days, they have closed down plants, suppliers are going under at an alarming rate, dealerships are going under.  And where have the billions of dollars gone?

 

Obama has yet to fully take on HealthCare, his other attempts being a guide I don’t think Obama can handle 3 1/2 more years of him “fixing” things.  It’s clear that he has dropped the ball on North Korea and Iran.  We are a weaker nation today than we were four months ago, unfortunately thanks largely to his socialist policies we are also a poorer nation as well.