Newt Gingrich! for President! 2012 !

[miraja2]

Originally Posted by Riot

Politics. And Hilary's involvement. None of them can stand the other parties success. If Teddy Kennedy hadn't freaked out about it not being aggressive enough, we'd all have had Richard Nixon's mandated health care from our employers years ago. As it is, much of what ended up in the PPACA has plenty of Republican history and previous recommendation. They can't stand that a Dem finally gets credit for passing something (because most of us realize the PPACA isn't any aggressive or major "socalized medicine" overhaul. It's some tweeks to administration by private companies, in an effort to simply better provide consumer protections to people within the current system)

It's strange, what the GOP has turned into, in the past 5-6 years. Very bizzaro.

I think the conservative counterrevolution goes back a bit further, and I think you may be underestimating how ideologically opposed many Republicans in Congress were to health care reform by 1993.
You are surely correct that the Republican "conservatism" of the Nixon/Goldwater/Rockefeller era was a whole lot different than it is today, but I don't think it just suddenly changed in the W era. The Post-Regan Republicans of the 90s were already pretty set in their anti-government (by the standards of the 60s and 70s) ways.