What's in your wallet, Mr. Gingrich?

Various news outlets reported recently that Mexico has decriminalized possession of small amounts of various drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin, LSD, and methamphetamine. This is a good thing, though not as good a thing as a much broader legalization both there and here would be, but that's not really my topic today. Two of my pet political peeves are health care reform (which I commented on here), and drug policy. Apart from the obvious connection between the two issues (drugs are medicine), something else joins the two topics that I find interesting: Many politicians' views on these subjects are bizarrely disconnected from their own life experiences.

Most of the elite political and business leaders of our society (the people who control the debate and outcome for almost everything important) came of age in the sixties and seventies, which means that most of them a) got high when they were young, and b) are now over the hill and starting to fall apart. One would think that people in this cohort would be able connect those two facts of their existence to the policy questions they face, yet somehow many of them don't, and as a consequence fight for rules that they wouldn't live by if push came to shove.

Here's why I say this:

On the question of drugs, there is virtually no politician anywhere on the mainstream spectrum of left to right even willing to entertain the notion of legalizing drugs. Case in point: Barack Obama. By his own admission, the president regularly smoked pot and snorted cocaine. In his memoir, he placed front and center his realization that he was on the road to self destruction and needed to sober up and grow up, which he did (except for the cigarette thing). Yet when faced with the question of whether marijuana should be legalized (via an electronic town hall in which three million people voted for him to be asked this question), he firmly said that he was against it, and made a joke about the preferences of his questioners. In other words, for him learning how to control himself is OK. Other people should go to jail.

It's become a bit of a ritual that politicians of a certain age get asked about past drug use. Most of them have given up on denying the undeniable. Instead, the politician gets a serious look on his face, talks about how much he regrets having done so, offers the excuse that he was young and stupid, and says that it is wrong to do such things. But the young and stupid thing the politician did was a crime. Can you imagine a seeker of of high public office getting away with the same dance about, say, having sex with a girl he met at a party who was too drunk to give consent? Of course not. The politician gets away with it because neither he nor his interlocutor really believes the conduct to have been wrong, but neither wants to admit it. Whenever the "did you inhale" question gets asked, this is done with the intention of giving the pol an easy out and staying away from the real implications of the admission.

So this is what I'd like to see asked: Given your stance on enforcement of drug laws, is it OK that you got away with using illegal drugs in your youth? Should you have been arrested for this? If there were no statute of limitations on marijuana possession, would you turn yourself in? I would love to see, say, Norm Coleman wriggle his way around that.

So what does this have to do with health care? Well, the thing is, all these aging boomers are, well, aging. They're either already medicare eligible, or damn close. I would love to know how those who oppose universal access to affordable health care square their positions with their actual or impending membership in a publicly-funded, universal (for those of a certain age), affordable health insurance program.

Take, for instance, Tom Coburn, senator from Oklahoma and licensed physician who opposes health care reform of any stripe and wants to throw us all into the free market. He was also born in 1948, which means he's four years away from being medicare eligible (or may already be under certain circumstances). Or Newt Gingrich. He's over 65 already, regularly disses medicare and other government health programs and lobbies for "choice".

Coburn is a special case because he was a practicing physician before he became a politician. I'd like to see him asked: "You are a staunch opponent of government run or funded health programs, and you are on the record opposing both Obama's 'public option' and the idea of 'medicare for all.' Why did you accept both medicare and medicaid patients in your medical practice? Why did you accept fees from government programs you condemn?"

But Gingrich (and any other pundit over or in the vicinity of 65) should be asked one simple question: "Are you enrolled in medicare (or do you intend to enroll when you become eligible)?"

I'd be willing to bet that all of them would have to say 'yes,' because medicare is such a valuable and useful benefit that only an idiot (or that mythical creature known as the consistent ideologue) would turn it down. For reasons that I cannot grasp, media types never ask this. They do ask congress people why they wouldn't want everyone to have access to the same type of employer-provided health benefits they get, but that's really too much of a softball. It's too easy to for them to say that they do in fact want to bring that about, but it's a matter of how and how much it'll cost (which they all say). The question doesn't really expose the, I don't know, cognitive dissonance? hypocrisy? involved.

Looking at it in these terms brushes up against argumentum ad hominem, the fallacy for which I have the most scorn. So I'm reluctant to say that one should disagree with Gingrich, or Baucus, or Boehner, or Ensign or Coburn because they don't even agree with themselves. Still, I can't help but think that in the domain of political discourse on matters of inherently personal import, that the personal is in fact political. So, with that thought in mind, I can't help but wonder whether Newt et al are card carrying FICA members. What's in your wallet Mr. Gingrich? Indeed ...