For the last few weeks, Democrats in Washington have been thrashing about in search of some way to make the Republican corruption scandals relevant to the broader public. Meanwhile, the public seems much more concerned about the Medicare prescription drug plan, which, with its horror stories of bureaucratic bungling, has turned out to be the Hurricane Katrina of entitlement programs.

It’s the corruption! It’s the Medicare drug plan! Wait a second – is it me, or did the answer to the Democrats’ quest just fall right into their lap?

The Medicare drug plan is the perfect issue for Democrats to run on. It perfectly encapsulates the corruption of Republican Washington, and it’s a concrete thing voters can relate to. Running on this issue makes so much sense that naturally the Democrats won’t do it.

But let’s go ahead and indulge our imaginations anyway.

The sheer number of devious acts packed into one legislative act boggles the mind.

To begin with, creating the largest entitlement in 40 years without paying for it was a massive act of fiscal irresponsibility. Conservative Republicans balked at the cost, and the Bush administration assured them it would cost no more than $400 billion over a decade. This number was a lie. The chief Medicare actuary knew it would cost more – at least 20 percent higher – but was forbidden by Bush appointee Thomas Scully from sharing his estimate with Congress.

Even so, Republicans could not get the bill passed without breaking House rules and holding open the vote for an astounding three hours, ultimately eking out a victory shortly before dawn. Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein called it “the ugliest and most outrageous breach of standards in the modern history of the House.”

During those three hours, Republican leaders indulged in all manner of threats and bribery. One holdout, then-Rep. Nick Smith, R-Mich., later alleged that a member of the House leadership promised to raise $100,000 for his son’s congressional campaign to replace him if he’d support the bill. (When Smith was informed that he was describing bribery, a crime, he backpedaled from the allegation in highly unconvincing fashion.)

And the bill itself was a massive special-interest giveaway. Republicans packed it with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of subsidies to their corporate donors. The giveaways made the bill far more expensive than necessary. Yale political scientists Theodore Marmor and Jacob Hacker estimated that a better bill could have offered the same benefit for half the cost.

What’s more, the insistence on satiating the private sector is what made the plan so complex. It forces millions of poor senior citizens out of Medicaid and into private plans subsidized by Medicare. It’s so complex precisely because it funnels people through the private sector.

By contrast, the original Medicare program, as my New Republic colleague Jonathan Cohn writes, was simple, user-friendly and went off without a hitch at its inception because it used a straightforward government mechanism.

The beautiful thing about the drug-benefit fiasco is that every one of the GOP’s tawdriest habits was on full display. The phony numbers, the sucking up to corporate lobbyists, the dictatorial management of the House, the fanatical partisanship – all these are the hallmarks of the modern Republican style.

And what’s more, conservatives loathe this bill, so the more Democrats talk about it, the more it divides the GOP base.

It ought to be relatively easy for Democrats to explain that old folks are going through bureaucratic hell – and, in many cases, being denied vital medicine – because Republicans wanted to cut their corporate allies in on the action. If they vote for Democrats, they could have a better plan, at less cost to the taxpayers and without the incompetence reminiscent of Iraq or the New Orleans evacuation.

If there’s any Republican defense against this argument, I can’t imagine what it would be.