Mark Steyn: "In entirely non-ideological, technocratic, utilitarian terms, Obamacare is a bust."

With regard to outreach, Steyn continues his tradition of apocalyptic stand-up and gets the messaging pitch-perfect for the majority of Americans. "Obamacare don't work, Ma."

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been opposed to government health care because, as I’ve said in at least two books, it fundamentally redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state into one closer to that of junkie and pusher. But that’s a philosophical position. Others prefer constitutional arguments: The federal government does not have the authority to do what it’s doing. Dear old John Roberts, chief justice of the United States, twisted himself into a pretzel to argue that, in fact, the government does. But he might as well have saved himself the trouble and just used Nancy Pelosi’s line: Asked by a journalist where in the Constitution it granted the feds the power to do this, she gave him the full Leslie Nielsen and said, “You’re not serious?” She has the measure of her people. Most Americans couldn’t care less about philosophical arguments or constitutional fine print: For them, all Obamacare has to do is work. That is why the last month has been so damaging to Big Government’s brand: In entirely non-ideological, technocratic, utilitarian terms, Obamacare is a bust.

The emphasis is mine, not because I don't find the philosophical, economic, moral, ethical and constitutional arguments compelling, but because that is where we are now. There is enough to blast about Obamacare now that you don't have to bring up what Reagan thought about government-controlled healthcare systems, nor what chapter of Socialism Ludwig von Mises would have added Obamacare to, nor what Sarah Palin wrote on Facebook about Death Panels. Improving Obamacare with a laughably-named "tech surge" is a worthless exercise in turd-polishing. There is no way they can get to 46,000 signups a day by March, unless maybe they get Michelle Obama's imaginary Facebook friends on welfare and SSA simultaneously and sign them all up.

Steyn ends with the line "Obamacare is not a left–right issue; it’s a fraud issue." I agree. Conservative I-told-you-sos are worthless at this juncture.

Conservative inreach and conservative outreach

Given the popular response which has greeted my last two posts on Charles Krauthammer but more broadly on conservative voices in general, I'm going to wrap up this effort by offering two basic categories within which conservative principles get promulgated, catechismal inreach to the faithful and missionary or diplomatic outreach to the faithless yet to be converted.

Obviously, if your conservative sway in the world is already powerful enough to secure your practical, real life conservative interests, all you need are the voices of the former category to keep everyone true to the principled mission. If not, if what you find yourself actually living in is a practical world of principled hope over practical conservative experience, you pretty obviously need recruits and converts from the not-yet-conservative outside to make that practically effective conservative majority a reality.

At the top of the list of conservative voices of conservative inreach I myself would have to put Rush Limbaugh, with a radio audience consistently faithful enough to date to have enabled him to produce for his efforts an impressive $370MM net worth.

From my previous posts I think it's reasonably obvious that I put Charles Krauthammer in the latter category of those conservatives more effective in swaying those not yet firmly within the conservative fold, if at the same time not considered to exhibit the same fidelity to conservative principles as a Rush Limbaugh. I would put George Will firmly in this second category as well.

But in the real world these categories don't break into a brightly separate either/or: conservative voices will more or less rally the faithful internally while more or less swaying the faithless externally, the latter often dependent on to what extent they are first able to even reach them.

At this point I'll turn the post over to commenters to list and discuss if they want to which conservatives fall where along my spectrum from mostly conservative inreach to mostly conservative outreach, and which, if any, do the best job of bridging both categories, and why.