Nelson’s sellout on health won’t play in Nebraska

Who knew that it would take Ben Nelson to make Mary Landrieu look like a high-minded negotiator?A month ago, Sen. Landrieu got $300 million in Medicaid funding for her home state of Louisiana in exchange for her vote for what’s left of the president’s health plan.Republicans called it the “Louisiana Purchase,” saying she sold the rest of the country down the river in exchange for preferential treatment for her own state.But her deal had the merit of frank simplicity.Landrieu had objections to the part of the plan that included a new government health insurance entitlement.Liberal Democrats want the government to raise taxes and give the money away in the form of health care. Moderate Democrats want to make the government into a manic-depressive insurance agent: They want to force you to buy a policy, but feel guilty about this strong-arm tactic, so they’ll help you pay for it by stealing from other clients.A “public option” (which will go down with “undocumented worker” and “enhanced interrogation” as the worst political euphemisms of the decade) isn’t a point of debate for conservatives, who hate the plan for its expansion of government power, not any particular means of delivering it.Conservatives don’t want the government in the process. No peeking into your tax returns to make sure you’re paying for coverage. No asking your doctor if you looked too wobbly to own a gun or if you’ve been puffing Dominican cigars or eating too much pistachio ice cream.But on the Left, no one minds the idea of the government being in charge of health care; it’s just a debate between the socialists and the crony capitalists in the Era of Obama.Landrieu is assuredly on the crony capitalist side of that argument, hailing from a state in which cronyism is as common as alligators. But Louisiana has also become more Republican.Obama got less than 40 percent of the vote in the Pelican State last year. Landrieu’s support for his hugely unpopular health plan is not a political freebie for her.But she knows her state. All of the national scorn heaped on her shakedown played well in Baton Rouge. Louisiana voters still expect their representatives in Washington to bring home the bacon, and a vote for a watered-down bill in exchange for some cold cash is no scandal. Since she’s been in office, a former governor and a congressman from her state have been sent to prison on corruption charges.Nebraska, though, is a different place.Nelson, an insurance executive, got elected governor in 1990 by hammering a Republican incumbent for raising taxes. Once in office, he reinstated executions at the state penitentiary and slashed the state sales tax.But it’s not just that Nebraska is conservative, it’s that the state has a strong, nonpartisan idealistic streak stretching back to William Jennings Bryan and beyond.Pro-war Democrat Bob Kerry and anti-war Republican Chuck Hagel have both represented the state in the Senate, and current Republican Gov. Dave Heineman is the only governor to succeed a member of his own party since 1955.The last big political scandal in the state was in 2003, when the state treasurer got caught writing and then voiding $300,000 in checks to keep the cash away from last-minute budget cuts. She had to quit and plead guilty to a misdemeanor. In Louisiana, she would have been commended for not stealing the money.Even so, in the health care negotiations, a senator from the land of good government conducted himself even more crassly than his colleague from the swampland of corruption.Nelson is part of a pack of Democrats who said they would never vote for a bill with a government insurance program. He stood out because of his ardent and oft-repeated objections to any federal dollars subsidizing insurance policies that covered elective abortions. Landrieu and other moderate Democrats raised strenuous fiscal objections, but bringing up abortion in the Senate is like announcing that you have a bomb in an airport. People take notice.In the end, though, Nelson treated abortion like any other of the dozens of shoddy little deals that have been the hallmark of the legislation. The final abortion compromise that won Nelson’s support was not substantially different than the one he had despaired of the week before. The change was that Nelson got free Medicare money for his state and some stroking for his own ego.Landrieu, who holds the same Senate seat that Huey Long once did, will fly home to New Orleans with her head held high. I suspect Nelson’s return to Omaha will not be so triumphal.