Send not to know for whom the political bell tolls. It tolls for Senator Bob Bennett (Probably)

By Christian Probasco, 4-21-10

	No sacrae, ritus, communio, crypta, potestas, praedia sacra, forum or civilia jura vetantur per Senator Bennett per omnia saecula saeculorum. Deo gratias. Amen.

Unless he starts toeing the pro-free market Club for Growth line and renounces his demonstrated heretical socialist inclinations, Utah Senator Bob Bennett may be looking for a new job after the upcoming election cycle.

Bennett, who had promised to serve only two terms when he got the job, has outspent his opponents 20 to one, and still doesn’t have a lock on his own seat. A Rasmussen Report election survey says about 37 percent of voters would support him, compared to 14 percent for challengers Tim Bridgewater and attorney Mike Lee. Candidate Merrill Cook, a former State Representative who had been accused by his own former chief-of-staff of “taking up permanent residence in whacko land,” polled at six percent.

Twenty-one percent of potential voters were undecided. As Utah Blogger Cindy Whitehair says in her analysis of the current race, anti-Bobism is eventually going to coalesce around a single candidate who could smash him in the primaries where Bennett has to meet a 40% approval threshold or face excommunicatumization from the race for his office.

“But he’s getting his seniority on,” say Bennett apologists, who view his career as a sort of economic investment for the state. “He’s serving as counsel to Minority Leader Senator Mitch McConnell. He’s up there in Washington, D.C. planning the Republican comeback. He’s gonna be on committees and subcommittees and councils and such, steering Federal buckage to Utah. If he goes, we’ve got to start over.”

So why do Utahans and many others want to dump Bennett? Bennett collaborated with known liberal Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon on the Healthy Americans Act/ Wyden-Bennett bill which went nowhere but played some obscure part in the recent larger health care debate. The bill acknowledged that “Americans want affordable, guaranteed private health coverage…that can never be taken away,” and “Staying as healthy as possible often requires an individual to change behavior and assume more personal responsibility…” and “the fact that (United States) businesses…compete globally against businesses whose governments pay for health care, coupled with the aging of the American population and explosive growth of preventable health problems makes the status quo…unacceptable.” There’s plenty more.

Bennett’s approach and that junk about the “status quo” could not have clashed any more starkly with the Republican Party’s strategy of killing reform measures and then failing to follow the shining path illuminated by its own rhetoric about allowing the free market to correct skyrocketing costs. This while doctors, drug companies, hospitals and health care agencies continued to bankrupt patients and otherwise bilk them out of literally trillions of dollars.

Bennett was willing to compromise with liberals to fix that situation but the Club for Growth, with whose values many Utahans agree, says he went too far, and they’ve got a point. Note the above reference to “guaranteed private health coverage.” That’s Washington-speak for guaranteed state and federal bureaucracies. It’s an objectively-verifiable fact that most Americans don’t give a damn about “guaranteed private health coverage.” They just want to pay a reasonable price for their health care. They don’t want their medical benefits to keep them tied to jobs which suck. And they don’t want the small percentage of very sick individuals who might one day be them to have to sell their own organs and/or children to pay their medical bills.

Also in the bill, this clause: “All citizens and permanent residents would be required to pay for coverage as part of their federal tax liability.” Note the key words, “required” and “liability.” The Club for Growth hates that sort of language and argues that if market competition were allowed to work its magic, fees for doctors and hospitals would return to the realm of reality.

Bennett also voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which Club for Growth President Chris Chocola characterizes as “part of the problem in Washington.”

“Bob Bennett is out of touch with the times and with his state, and Utah Republicans have better choices for their candidate in November,” says Chocola.

The Club for Growth has spent at least $120,000 getting the anti-Bob message out with phone banks, TV ads, Internet ads and an anti-Bob website.

Trouble is, the American medical “system” bears and has borne almost no resemblance to a free market. The aforementioned interests would continue to donate big money to politicians who intend to maintain the status quo, or make it even status quo-ier and the Federal Drug Administration would continue to expand its own charter and make it even more difficult to bring any sort of new drug to a market that already favors a few behemothic pharmaceutical companies, and health insurance providers would never have to compete across state lines and so on and on per omnia saecula saeculorum (for a long time).

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