Ezra Klein makes a very important observation in comparing Senator Olympia Snow's approach to health care to more right wing approaches:
Klein continues:For all the talk of Olympia Snowe's relative liberalism, this is a very conservative answer. It's not necessarily a Republican answer, or a Tea Partier's answer, but it's a small-c conservative answer: It's respectful of tradition, wary of unintended consequences, and suspicious of excessive ambition.
The fact that Olympia Snowe is the only currently serving Republican to date to sign onto a bill is substantially similar to what the moderate Republicans proposed in 1994 helps demonstrate - as does so much else - how far from common sense and how far to the right the Republican Party has moved.[T]he health-care reform plan we're likely to get is extremely conservative. It builds on the employer-based system, and because that system seems to work better than the individual market, puts in place some new structures to give folks on the individual and small-group markets the same advantages (size, scale and competition, mainly) that seem to have worked for large employers. As I've noted before, the basic structure of the plan actually looks a lot like the plan proposed by moderate Republicans in 1994. Only this year, Democrats are proposing it.
To a large degree, the Republican Party is no longer conservative in any meaningful sense - it is a party of reflexively anti-Obama, right wing radicalism.
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