Burr vows to wreck own career

Sen. Richard Burr now says he will base his re-election campaign around repealing the new health care law. And he says it with the foolish confidence of a man raising a loaded gun to his temple, thinking the gun’s chamber is empty. Here’s the thing: opponents of health care reform read a poll that said 59 percent of Americans were against the reform bill, and they assumed everyone “against” it was opposed for the same reasons the GOP has been pushing. If you look at the results more closely, though, you see that many of those “against” the bill didn’t like it because they thought it wasn’t liberal enough (doesn’t go into effect soon enough, isn’t a single-payer system, etc.). Pollsters also noted that as a Congressional vote on reform got closer, support for the bill started ratcheting up. More importantly, perhaps, is the USA Today poll showing that the day after the bill passed, 49 percent said passage was “a good thing,” as opposed to 40 percent who thought it was “a bad thing.” As a Huffington Post headline put it, “That didn’t take long.”

We’ve said it before, but if GOP lawmakers, including Sen. Do-Nothing Burr, honestly think they can win Congress by “promising” to cut benefits that have already been passed, well, good luck with that. It’s as transparently stupid a strategy as could be imagined – one that has failed miserably before, during the New Deal and after passage of Medicare – but I don’t expect much better from the kind of know-nothing, do-nothing GOP Congressional halfwits who stood and applauded for an anti-reform heckler who was being dragged out of the House chamber Sunday. If these guys want to commit suicide by running on a platform of “Bring back ‘pre-existing’ conditions!”, let ‘em go right ahead.

This article appears in Mar 23-29, 2010.