Contrary to political punditry’s consensus, the unity with which the Republican Party opposed the stimulus bill will hurt their party. After the bill passed without a single House Republican and with only 3 “defecting” Republicans in the Senate, it was proclaimed by the media, especially Fox News, that this solidarity was a great victory for the Republicans. The stated logic was that before the ARRA bill, the party was decimated by the ineptitude of George W. Bush and thus suffered massive electoral defeats. These losses and disillusionment with the GOP were thought to take some time to recover from. Now however, as a result of this stimulus debate, the party found its roots of fiscal conservatism and was able to unify. So, the beltway consensus has now become that if the stimulus works, the Republicans will lose the mid-term elections, but if it fails then they will win them as well as the 2012 presidential elections.
Hogwash!
This assumes that regular Americans have an attention span of a goldfish and will forget about the Bush Administration. It assumes that the voting population cannot see the Republican hypocrisy of running up the biggest deficit ever and then claiming to be fiscally responsible. This supposed GOP comeback also rests on the assumption that people will forget what caused this calamity. Sure FOX News will scream that it was Barney Frank’s initiative to get everyone a home, and the Fannie and Freddy distorting the market value. Both of these claims are true, but the economy is suffering from a credit freeze and a banking crisis. Those sub-prime mortgages didn’t compile themselves into bundles, then chop themselves up into thousands of pieces and sell themselves at high rates and then leverage those sales at a 30:1 ratio to make further purchases. They also didn’t create a whole separate market that insured these transactions. I got a great CDO that you can CDS, any takers? Under whose watch did that happen? Sure, Democrats held Congress for the last 2 years, but that’s a hard sell to make to the voters.
On top of this aforementioned hard sell, the GOP assumes that voters will view their newly unified party as one that is working for the people. It’s great to philosophize about the role of government in society from your mansion, but when people’s livelihood is at stake, its time to act. The GOP’s solution is, as always, tax cuts. However, people, especially unemployed people, aren’t in need of more money, they need jobs and job security. They know that companies are suffering because nobody is buying their product, and therefore any amount of tax rebate won’t change that. Everyone is hunkering down until “The Customer” comes back and wants to start doing business again. Until confidence returns, customers will stay at home, and job security will remain shaky.
I know that Republicans disagree with my last paragraph and will argue about crowding out, wasteful spending, socialism, supply-side economics, and the failure of the New Deal, or whatever else Sean Hannity spews out. That’s fine, but common sense isn’t on their side, because the general public feels like we just tried tax cuts for eight years and they didn’t work. The common rebuttal to that is that we had an unprecedented 52 months of prosperity. However given the disaster it has lead to, the claim seems as preposterous as stating the Madoff Ponzi scheme was a great success because it had years of unprecedented 10% growth.
As Frank Rich said, “The G.O.P. doesn’t recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle even worse off than when it started.” Their unity has shown them to be hypocrites with no original solutions to 21st century problems. Despite them claiming to not be the party of NO, it seems that that’s exactly what they have become. Bobby Jindal is a perfect example, making a lot of hoopla about not accepting the stimulus money, and then it’s discovered that he is in fact accepting 98% of it. Also, the whole talk about the “porkulous bill” seems silly when all they can come up with is a fictitious high-speed railway to Vegas and a fabricated marsh mouse funding. In the last couple of weeks, the GOP’s unity has shown them to be ideologues instead of pragmatists and its hard to win an election on ideology alone especially when your only results are Bush’s adjunct failure. Good luck in 2010!
