Democrats need to kill the Medicare prescription drug bills now steamrolling through Congress for two paradoxical reasons: The bills are (1) too generous a political gift to President Bush, and also (2) too generous in their subsidies to seniors who aren’t poor.

Since you are almost certainly not going to hear these two arguments made by the same person anywhere else, let’s make sure the political and policy critiques I’m making are clear.

Take the Bush political gift first. Bush told a bipartisan group of House members last week that he plans to “tour the country” once he signs a prescription drug bill to tout the accomplishment. Karl Rove knows why.

In 2000, 51 percent of Americans aged 60 and over voted for Al Gore, 47 percent for Bush. Yet among senior men it was 53-44 for Bush; senior women favored Gore by 56-42 (the data here is a bit dodgy because of exit poll problems in 2000, but it’s all we have).

Bush and Karl Rove have a simple political equation in mind: one prescription drug benefit plus $200 million in campaign advertising equals a bigger chunk of the all-powerful senior voting bloc, especially senior women. Along with the image of “compassion” that a drug benefit will communicate to key non-elderly independent voters, the drug bill could be the thing that puts Bush over the top in 2004.

Most Democrats don’t dispute this – they just don’t see how they can stop it without Bush painting them fatally as “obstructionist.” But we’ll get to that.

Take now the policy critique. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 70 percent of seniors incur less than $1,000 per year in out-of-pocket drug costs. Less than 5 percent spend more than $5,000. Facts like these – plus the reality that resources are finite, and the boomers’ costly retirement is only a few years away – argue for a drug benefit that targets those most in need (at least until we get much better at controlling overall health costs).

Yet in both the House and Senate versions of the drug bill, a hefty majority of seniors will get far more back in benefits than the modest premiums they’ll be asked to pay – a weird notion for “insurance,” which is supposed to safeguard against unpredictable or catastrophic expenses, not those that are routine.

Imagine getting back more each year than you pay in premiums for home or life insurance – the idea isn’t even intelligible. But, as Robert Reischauer of the Urban Institute told me, in America “we’ve become used to health assistance, not health insurance.”

This explains why Democrats, including the presidential contenders, are attacking the current bills because they’re not generous enough. Yet here’s another paradox: If acted on, this traditional liberal rallying cry virtually guarantees that in a few years liberals won’t be able to spend any fresh money on poor children or their desperate schools, because all available public resources will be devoted to subsidies for middle- and upper-income seniors.

These inevitable budget tradeoffs are apparently too much for Democrats to grapple with today. But even if they won’t share my policy rationale for killing these bills, the political reason – denying Bush a seminal “accomplishment” that could help make the GOP a majority party for years – should suffice.

How to do it? The best way is for Democrats to refuse to participate in the House-Senate conference that produces the final bill that gets voted on. This would make the final bill a pure Republican product. Democrats would then have a story to tell in a filibuster: that Republicans went behind closed doors and cooked up a drug plan that essentially puts the kind of folks who ran Enron in charge of drug benefits for seniors – a scandalous payoff to insurers and rich GOP donors that would leave seniors in trouble. Elect Democrats in 2004, they’d say, and we’ll get the job done right.

It’s risky, to be sure – and many details of such a strategy need to be worked through – but Democrats won’t beat Bush in 2004 unless they’re ready to take some big risks.

In ways too many Democrats don’t appreciate, the Medicare drug debate is a strategic crossroads that could shape American politics for years. Before they help Bush pass this plan, Democrats need to have this internal conversation, and fast.

Matt Miller is a syndicated columnist. His e-mail address is: [email protected].