John Perr — The Real Reason for the GOP's All-Out War on Obamacare

At its core, the Republicans' scorched-earth opposition to Obamacare has never been so much about "freedom" or "limited government" or any other right-wing ideological buzzword as it has been about political power, pure and simple. Now as for the past 20 years, Republicans have feared not that health care reform would fail the American people, but that it would succeed. Along with Social Security and Medicare, successful health care reform would provide the third and final pillar of Americans' social safety net, all brought you by the Democratic Party. To put it another way, the GOP was never really concerned about a "government takeover of health care", "rationing", "the doctor-patient relationship" or mythical "death panels," but that an American public grateful for access to health care could provide Democrats with an enduring majority for years to come.

But what Utah Senator Orrin Hatch called a "holy war" to block health care reform didn't start when Barack Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, but instead when Bill Clinton was inaugurated in 1993. It was then that former Quayle chief of staff and Republican strategist William Kristol warned his GOP allies that a Clinton victory on health care could guarantee Democratic majorities for the foreseeable future. "The Clinton proposal is also a serious political threat to the Republican Party," Kristol wrote in his infamous December 3, 1993 memo titled "Defeating President Clinton's Health Care Proposal," adding:

"Its passage in the short run will do nothing to hurt (and everything to help) Democratic electoral prospects in 1996. But the long-term political effects of a successful Clinton health care bill will be even worse--much worse. It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for 'security' on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government."

And that, for Kristol, meant it had to be stopped at all costs:
"The first step in that process must be the unqualified political defeat of the Clinton health care proposal. Its rejection by Congress and the public would be a monumental setback for the president; and an incontestable piece of evidence that Democratic welfare-state liberalism remains firmly in retreat."

PERRspectives
The Real Reason for the GOP's All-Out War on Obamacare
John Perr

The market state versus the welfare state. 

In this endeavor, the right worked very diligently to recast the framing so that welfare state would be perceived as living on the dole instead of its original meaning of public purpose being oriented toward the "general welfare," in the words of the Preamble to the US Constitution. Even if you were not taken in by the framing, many people have been.

The strategy in this endeavor was to use wedge issues and inter-group conflict to dupe the rubes into voting against their economic and social interests by creating a tribal mindset of "us versus those people." They even frame it in terms of "the real Americans" versus those people who aren't real Americans.