This has become a serious, not metaphorical, question, a question seriously considered by serious analysts. Although there is not (yet?) a consensus, more and more analysts are answering in the affirmative.
Thus Jay Cost, one of my favorites, asked a few days ago, Have Democratic Leaders Gone Mad? After noting that proposing cuts in Medicare dearly cost the Republicans back in the 1990s and that the Reid bill, according to the CBO, would cut Medicare $491 billion, Cost concluded, dumfounded:
Why are Obama, Pelosi, and Reid doing this? How could they be so foolish as to repeat the most egregious mistake of the Republicans of the 104th Congress? Why are they forcing their vulnerable members to vote on a bill that would cut Medicare in this fashion? Do they dislike their moderate colleagues? Do they find the chore of being the majority party too burdensome? Have they simply gone mad?
In short, they’re nuts.
Similarly, Rick Lowry writes today that in insisting on such an unpopular bill the Democrats have
talked themselves into the ludicrously self-delusional notion that what ails them and the president is that they haven’t yet passed the hundreds of billions of dollars of tax hikes and Medicare cuts that finance (albeit incompletely) ObamaCare.
This will long be a case study in the annals of abnormal political psychology. Tax hikes undid George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton (Bush lost his presidency, Clinton his congressional majority), and Medicare cuts undid Newt Gingrich (taking the air out of his “Republican revolution”). Obama’s Democrats are prescribing themselves a strong dose of both, in an exercise in self-destructive quackery.
In short, they’re nuts.
I’m not so sure. Or let me put my point a different way: of course they’re nuts (what else is new?), but I’m not so sure that is the primary explanation of their current bout of masochistic self-destruction. Instead, what I think is lighting the fire under their political funeral pyres is a veritable pandemic of ideological fervor that has spread from the White House and infected virtually the entire Democratic Party. The Democrats are convinced that they know what is better for the people than the people do themselves, and like suicide bombers and other true believers they are willing to sacrifice themselves for that belief.
One example of many:
Sen. Michael Bennet, a junior Democrat who will be seeking his first full term next year in Colorado, where many districts lean conservative, said he would support the health care overhaul even if doing so means losing his seat.
“The thing that our working families need more than anything else is to end these double-digit cost increases that they’re having every single year with health insurance,” Bennet said.
Even though they don’t want what may pass as health care reform, and even though the insurance premiums of many of them will go up rather than down, they need this reform, and I’m going to give it to them whether they want it or not.
Nuts? Not really. Just a supreme (and supremely undeserved) self-righteousness that characterizes all true believers.
