WHAT THE PAPERS SAY: Will Sarah Palin run?
Andrew Cockburn
The First Post,
Will Sarah Palin run? The press is agog because the ci-devant Alaska governor and 2008 vice-presidential candidate is in the midst of her bus tour up and down the East Coast. A girl has to keep an eye on her TV ratings.
It's a safe bet that Ms Palin will be playing the 'will she/won't she' game as far as the elastic will stretch without breaking. But actually the elastic is already broken. It's also safe to say that Ms Palin will never be the presidential candidate of the Republican Party, however much the Obamians yearn to have her to kick around until November 2012.
The Republican Party has been on a suicide mission in the months since the midterm elections handed them the House of Representatives last autumn, with the US Senate almost within their grasp ….
The establishment press wrote encouraging editorials about newly elected US Republican Senator Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, hailing this throwback to the economic dark ages as a man of prudent principle, taking on social programmes reckoned by well-heeled press magnates to be fiscally imprudent.
Ryan was duly installed as the new Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee and lost no time in announcing his plan to change Medicare from what it is now – a federal medical insurance plan for America's seniors – into a privatised affair run by insurance companies which, given the slightest chance, would pare back services to what these same insurance companies conceive to be fiscal prudence.
It took about 30 seconds for America's seniors to realise that Ryan's plan represented an overt onslaught on one of the two federal programs left – the other is Social Security – that keep them barely afloat. On May 25, Democrat Kathy Hochul used the Medicare issue to win what had been a safe Republican House seat in the 26th congressional district in western New York state. {jathumbnail off}
Since then the wind has been whistling out of the Ryan balloon. Republicans who only a month ago were roaring their support for the man have scuttled for cover. As Ryan whimpers at Democratic opportunism and "demagoguery" his prime defenders are the above-mentioned press magnates and their hired opinion formers at the New York Times and Washington Post solemnly urging the Democrats not to over-use the Medicare bludgeon and to remember that Rep Ryan had at least advanced a plan which had not shirked Prudence and Responsibility.
Prudence and Responsibility don't carry much weight when seniors with cancer are suddenly faced with the prospect of bills of $2,500 every couple of months for the treatments keeping them alive. Seniors vote. The Democrats will run on defense of Medicare and Social Security all the way to 2012.
