What's the plan? Shield doctors from lawsuits (regardless of whether they've hurt someone), eliminate state regulation of health insurance plans (by requiring states to accept plans from other states) and some vague pronouncement about health savings accounts. They also say they will end exclusions for pre-existing conditions (already addressed in the new health law) and end taxpayer funding of abortion (already done since 1977). That's health reform, Republican style. Then what? Yet more pictures of House Republicans including a pensive shot of John Boehner.
It goes on and on, but in the end it goes nowhere. And just before the two back covers? More pictures of House Republicans, of course.
In the end, context mattersThe Pledge is being promoted during wartime and near-depression, when the importance of everything is measured against a soldier's life and a father's unemployment. This sort of fluff has less gravitas in a time of great challenges. The Pledge may have been a mistake of bad timing, bad analysis, or perhaps simple hubris. It motivated no Republican and disappointed most every conservative commentator. Its arrival, timed to step on a health care implementation date, has coincided with a Democratic resurgence in the polls.
In the years that followed 1994's Contract with America, none of its goals were accomplished. It amounted to nothing. The Pledge to America simply starts out that way. Now that's a new style of government efficiency. Go Republicans!
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