Plenty of liberals have distanced themselves of late from a certain MIT economics professor, but not Esquire blogger Charles Pierce, who in a Monday post headlined “In Defense of Jonathan Gruber” identified Gruber as “both a source and a friend.”
Pierce acknowledged that Gruber has been guilty of “some impolitic remarks” in his discussions of Obamacare and Romneycare, but argued that conservatives have wildly overhyped those indiscretions. He also predicted that even though congressional Republicans would like to “make a meal of Gruber as a political performance piece…they probably won't call [him] to testify. This is because Gruber is a lot smarter than are people like Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, he who clings still to the shreds of his freedom against the onslaught of poor people who now have medical care.”
From Pierce’s post (emphasis added):
[T]here was enough of Romneycare in the Affordable Care Act for [Mitt] to have claimed not a little credit for it, and he would have, the way he did in 2008, had his party's base in 2012 not been utterly insane…
…Gruber is the target du jour because of some impolitic remarks he made about how this particular sausage got made. The latest, and silliest one, is that Gruber allegedly kept secret the fact that the initial mechanism for Romneycare in Massachusetts was a bit of legerdemain regarding Medicaid…[I]t's not like Gruber's been seriously keeping this a secret…[H]e was quite open about it with me, two years ago.
In one of history's king ironies, given the distortions that Romney has made this year of the president's remarks about how no business is built all on its own, and given his tortured position that his health-care reform was really a triumph for states' rights, Governor Romney saw an opportunity to reform health care and burnish his national profile through the judicious use of ... federal money. "Here was the deal," Gruber recalls. "Ted Kennedy was delivering $400 million in federal slush funds to our safety-net hospitals, Boston City and Cambridge Hospitals. President George W. Bush said, 'Why am I giving $400 million a year to Ted Kennedy? I'm taking that away.' Romney, to his credit, went to Bush's HHS and said, 'Instead of taking this money away, why don't we just use it to cover the uninsured?' And Bush, to his credit, said sure. "That was the money that made all this happen - federal money. It was delivered by Ted Kennedy and then rededicated at the front end to cover the uninsured."
The only difference? In the newly "revealed" tape, Gruber used the phrase "ripped off," which, dammit, he shouldn't have done, but the idea that this was some dark liberal plot only now coming to light is complete foolishness.
The fire is not entirely coming from the Right…But it is the Right that is going to ghost dance on this issue because it is no more interested in "governing" than it was before it elected an even more radical Congress than the one that swooped into the capital in 2010…
You have to love these guys. They're willing to make a meal of Gruber as a political performance piece, but they probably won't call the real person who is Jonathan Gruber to testify. This is because Gruber is a lot smarter than are people like Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, he who clings still to the shreds of his freedom against the onslaught of poor people who now have medical care…Of course, the elite political press will go on "covering the controversy" and will not notice that the Republicans have decided to do nothing, again, because cowardly nonfeasance works for them, and because, of course, both sides do it.
