Martin Schneider writes:
In 2005 I attended a debate on the then-hot topic of “Social Security Reform,” featuring Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, Paul Krugman of The New York Times, and Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute. I was reading a transcript of the debate earlier this evening, and I was struck by an odd parallel or perhaps mirror relationship between that political fight, which the Democrats won, and the fight to pass the Affordable Care Act in 2009-10, which the Democrats won.
The parallel I’m interested in is not that the Democrats won both fights. Rather, the resemblance has to do with what a ruling party does when it pushes an ambitious reform that is not very popular.
A little bit of context. The debate took place on March 15, 2005. After his reelection in 2004, George W. Bush chose to move forward on a favored policy idea of his, Social Security Reform. The Republicans had initially called the project “Social Security Privatization,” but after noticing how poorly that term polled, they switched up their terminology and began accusing Democrats of having attempted to demonize them with this term, “privatization.” (Something very similar happened later the same year with the term “nuclear option.”) The “private accounts” morphed into “personal accounts”—Republicans generally began running away from their own terms.
That spring, Marshall had a huge amount of fun trying to make Republican congresspersons squirm by asking them whether they supported Bush’s plan on Social Security (whatever name you gave it). Over those weeks, it became harder and harder to get any Republican congressperson to state on the record that they supported privatizing Social Security. The plan fizzled out, in the face of Democratic unity in favor of preserving the current system for the time being.
(I mentioned that Marshall got some enjoyment by embarrassing and neutralizing these Republicans. That is a massive understatement; I think when Marshall looks back on his illustrious career of Internet muckraking, this episode, in which he tarred this or that Republican a “bamboozler,” will be on the short list of the most satisfying moments of all.)
In the debate, Marshall was asked to describe the political aspect of the battle over Social Security reform (as opposed to the substantive side). In his opening remarks, Marshall said this:

The second thing is, and Democrats did this very quickly, is their party unity took away all the political cover. It was really going to be up to Republicans to make privatization an entirely Republican enterprise, and they were too afraid to do it because a lot of those representatives could see how their constituents were going to react and so forth.

Re-reading the transcript tonight, it was this passage that reminded me so much of the fight to pass the ACA (what used to be known as “the health reform bill”). That phrase, “an entirely Republican enterprise”…. that’s the position the Democrats were in all of last year, wasn’t it? You bet it was.
A person might conclude from this that Democrats and Republicans both obstruct, but that the Democrats happened to be better at it (aided by a larger minority than the Republicans now have). But I think there’s something more fundamental going on that tells you a great deal about the two parties and what they stand for.
Consider these two statements:

In 2005 the Republicans, in control of the White House and Congress, proposed a bold new reform that would affect a key area of American life, and it didn’t poll very well, and as soon as the unpopularity of the proposal was made apparent, the Republicans dropped the policy when they realized that it would be associated solely with Republicans.

In 2009-10 the Democrats, in control of the White House and Congress, proposed a bold new reform that would affect a key area of American life, and it didn’t poll very well, and as soon as the unpopularity of the proposal was made apparent, the Democrats, with a great deal of difficulty, passed the policy even though they realized that it would be associated solely with Democrats.

To put it more simply, both parties were given an opportunity to foist their favored policies on the nation in a unilateral way. The Republicans did not want to be associated with their own stated policies, but the Democrats were willing to be associated with their own stated policies.
I have a few conclusions about this, which may reflect my political bias.
Conclusion 1: By and large, Republican positions are minority positions, and Democratic positions are majority positions. Or to put it another way, the Bush administration and the Republican Congress of 2002-2007 found it difficult to implement their ideas because they were favored by such a small portion of the electorate. The Democrats of 2010 do not have this problem; their ideas held by a great many people, broadly speaking.
Conclusion 2: Democrats are sincere about their policy ideas; Republicans are not. I don’t want to overstate this too much, but there is more than a kernel of truth to it. Republican ideas ideas sound appealing and have some populist appeal but would have pernicious effects. Republicans express generalized distaste for the government services, but a lot of that is just rhetoric, and when push comes to shove, they are not very interested in decreasing those services. Contrariwise, the Democrats are more willing to argue for the benefits of social services and intelligent deployment of government generally, and when the going gets tough, it turns out that they actually do believe that.
And lastly,
Conclusion 3: Democratic ideas are good ideas; Republican ideas are bad ideas. Again, don’t want to take this too far. But the fight in 2005 was between a group that wanted to kill or at least diminish Social Security in favor of retirement accounts tied to the stock market in some broad way. Surely, the stock market crash of 2008 reveals this to have been a terrible idea.
Similarly, the fight of 2009-10 was between a group that wanted to provide uninsured people with health care and a group that was quite happy to keep them uninsured. Democratic ideas are easier to defend not only because they are popular but also because they are genuinely good ideas.
Thus endeth the sermon.