The Next Ross Perot will be a Democrat

I was inclined to go easy on David Brooks this weekend. Why? For one thing, I had a moment that kind of made me feel like it's David Brooks's blue state caricature and we just live in it: At the Whole Foods, they now offer bags of what look basically like Fritos or Bugles -- reconstituted, molded corn chips. Except they have now been relabled "Polenta Chips," and sell for $4.99 for a 5 oz. bag.

And, more to the point, I basically agreed with Brooks' point on Saturday that "a leader will arise" who will speak about the deficit and fiscal irresponsibility in a way that is as compelling as Ross Perot, possibly more so.

So I was basically nodding along with Brooks's column, even choosing to overlook his characterization of the new cost estimates of the Medicare prescription drug bill as some sort of accounting oversight, as opposed to information that was fully known, easily figured out by any member of Congress who wanted to know, and probably the largest systematic fraud in human history. ($900 billion is even beyond the Ebbers/Scrushy/Lay zone.)

But this sentence turned me back:

[This new leader] is going to slam Democrats who loudly jeer at Republican deficits but whose own entitlement proposals would make the situation twice as bad.

And what entitlement proposals are those, exactly? Not John Kerry's. Not Hillary Clinton's or Evan Bayh's. I worry that such a sentence passes by most readers without a moment's hesitation. We take it as a given that even if the Republicans are bigger spenders than they said they would be, the Democrats must be even worse. If the Republican Medicare plan will cost $1.2 trillion, then it is assumed that the Democrats' must have had a $2.2 trillion plan.

This makes me angry -- not only at Brooks, but at Democrats for failing to press this point every single day. Back when the Medicare bill was on the floor and I was just starting this blog, I argued that the Democrats, rather than proposing a $1 trillion prescription drug benefit, should have proposed something that cost less and did much more, such as the Clinton bill of 2000, which at the time cost $253 billion and even three years later would certainly not have cost more than the $400 billion claimed cost of the Bush bill, while doing much more. Such an alternative would have put the handful of real conservatives, who were being told by their leaders that if they didn't vote for the Republican bill, the Democrats would sweep in with something even bigger, in a very awkward position. But now that the real cost of the Bush bill is $1.2 trillion, I realize that I was wrong: the Democrats were perfectly responsible, and did propose a bill that cost less and did more than the Bush bill. And because it contained some real cost controls, its cost was not likely to escalate much beyond that.

There is no reason that the "leader who arises" should not be a Democrat. We have nothing to apologize for, certainly not in the department of huge, out of control government programs that don't deliver what's promised.