EYKIW: A TRAP MORE THAN A PATH
Thu, 26 May 2011 14:51:12
If the special election in New York's 26th is to be taken seriously, then the Republican Senators who signed on to Paul Ryan's radical restructuring of Medicare are in for a rough time. Why else would Harry Reid have forced a vote of a bill that was dead on arrival in the Senate, except to put the opposition on record supporting a plan rejected by seventy percent of Americans. It could bring Dick Lugar down. This decent man is already a target of the Tea Party and now has put himself on the wrong side of the majority of Hoosier seniors and independents.
The Democrats aren't going to let this issue go. In the debacle in upstate New York, the GOP outspent them two to one and lost by four points in a district that Chris Lee dominated in the midterms. A lot can happen in the next seventeen months; but every day that the election draws near is another day that the under fifty-five electorate grows older and closer to the time when Medicare will be a matter of life and death. The "Path To Prosperity" may be the road to nowhere for the Republicans in 2012.