Every day I wake up with the same thought: "I used to be such a goddamned idiot."
I am a former Republican. And I wasn't merely the libertarian, live-and-let-live, fun-at-parties kind of conservative whose primary concern is balancing the budget; I was a spiteful, narrow-minded, fire-breathing paranoid lunatic who questioned the patriotism and morality of my liberal fellow citizens. Recognizing the error of my ways has done wonders for my mental health but left me with constant, unremitting remorse; I really want to go back in time and kick my own ass.
Surely I am not alone: Earlier this year independents sympathized with Democrats two-to-one over Republicans, whereas they were evenly split five years ago; a slim majority of young voters voted for Sen. John Kerry in 2004, but nearly 70 percent chose Barack Obama in 2008, the widest margin in electoral history. Traditionally people shift rightward as their bank accounts expand and their flesh wrinkles, but my generation is seemingly the first to move leftward with age.
Actually, I was a passionate liberal when I entered college in September 2001, and I initially resisted the GOP's post-9/11 fury and propaganda. I decried the suspension of habeas corpus and the 2003 Iraq invasion and feared for our country when dissent was equated with treason in the popular imagination. And then a few things happened:
• A handful of my friends joined the College Republicans. As our drunken nights accumulated -- with Fox News always in the background and a stack of vitriolic books cracked open -- I found myself questioning my assumptions. Craving the acceptance of my peers like any other insecure college kid, I gradually accepted their self-reinforcing groupthink, slowly but surely inching toward the Dark Side.
• A handful of my fellow campus left-wingers appeared to excessively sympathize with right-wing Islamists, rationalizing the violence of suicide bombers, for example, but refusing to criticize (on multicultural grounds) heinous civil rights abuses across the globe. The starry-eyed George W. Bush acolytes who called for the expansion-by-explosion of worldwide freedom -- despite opposing countless domestic liberties -- seemed righteous in comparison.
• A handful of my professors injected their utopian and hypersensitive politics into the classroom, calling for a "socialist revolution" and grading me poorly for using "heteronormative" language. Rebelling against their authority, as they had rebelled against conservative professorial authority in their student days, felt as natural as doing a keg stand at a fraternity party.
• A super liberal girlfriend dumped me, sparking my testosterone-fueled bitterness toward everything that reminded me of her, such as left-wing politics and basically all human females.
Very few people in their late teens and early twenties seek justice in moderation. The hormone-soaked college years are a time of extremes, our changing identities often defined by dissent-quashing affiliations, leaving us to later cringe at our frenzied "Goldfish Liberation phase," "Castrate the Phallusocracy phase," "Noam Chomsky phase" or "Ayn Rand phase." (Yes, I spent a summer vacation trying to finish reading "Atlas Shrugged," ultimately throwing in the towel around page 75,000.)
Much like our previous chief executive, I should have seen the danger of sealing myself in an echo chamber to prevent contamination from outside viewpoints; I began only hanging out with conservative true believers, only reading conservative books, only getting my news from conservative media outlets. In order to avoid journalistic "left-wing bias," I embraced right-wing bias, foolishly confusing sensationalist entertainment with debate and truth-telling. Outrage became my drug of choice.
There was no single moment when I transformed into an unhinged, raving authoritarian; propaganda works in repetition -- in accumulation -- and worldviews rarely change overnight. However, as your skepticism weakens, a new understanding of history develops. Whereas Liberal Me viewed America improving over time with the progression of civil rights and sexual liberation, Conservative Me viewed history as an unfolding catastrophe: In my mind, "socialist" handouts threatened our laissez-faire way of life, as if public roads/schools/libraries were no different than Stalin's gulags, and hedonistic decadence -- facilitated and encouraged by scheming left-wing nihilists -- threatened individual self-control. I mistakenly came to believe that America had not progressed toward justice but fallen from grace.
I railed in conversation and on my website against "freedom-hating hippies," "activist judges who overturn the will of the people," "pro-abortion feminazis," "Marxist Democrats," "elitist, so-called intellectuals," "greedy welfare queens," "environmental whack jobs" and other perceived bogeymen. I lost sight of grayscale and instead saw the world in black and white; I labeled Terri Schiavo's husband a money-hungry murderer for pulling the plug on his comatose wife, lumped all Palestinians together with the few terrorists among their population, uttered racial/sexual/ethnic slurs with a little too much enthusiasm for simple prurience and approvingly repeated Michael Savage's book title "Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder." I even argued that women belong in the home, not the workplace! (Now a self-employed author, I cook dinner for my girlfriend nightly and perform household chores -- groceries, laundry, dishes -- when she heads to the office. Truly I am a domestic goddess.)
My sudden transformation mystified my friends and family, many of whom tried to talk sense into me when they didn't outright disown me. Even my conservative father said I was going overboard. For example: wondering if my 90-year-old grandmother was a Commie for cashing her Social Security checks. In order to heed your inner Joe McCarthy, you must first squelch your inner conscience.
Strangest of all, I developed a finger-wagging puritan bent, which made absolutely no sense for a 20-year-old guy who was getting laid and intoxicated on a steady basis. I blamed "the anti-family Left" for encouraging couples to divorce and youngsters to fornicate, as if liberals were all conspiring together to destroy the traditional family, as if liberal states do not have lower rates of divorce and teen pregnancy than their conservative counterparts. My hypocrisy is mystifying in retrospect -- why would I bash sexual liberation while having sloppy drunken unmarried sex whenever possible? -- but perhaps conservative politicians such as John Ensign, Mark Sanford, David Vitter, Larry Craig and Newt Gingrich can explain.
You might imagine my moralizing stemmed from our cultural anxiety about sexuality, but it actually came from a longstanding need to position myself as superior to others; I got off on presenting my fellow millennials as pleasure-seeking, unthinking/unfeeling animals while my life had Truth and Meaning. It was incredibly self-righteous and self-congratulatory, and it was only about 50 percent accurate.
None of this would haunt me so deeply if I did not have a national platform to air my histrionic, uninformed opinions. However, I was uncommonly lucky for my age. In 2004 MTV/Pocket Books published my book "Generation S.L.U.T.," which described the anonymous hook-up culture among contemporary American youth and unleashed a storm of publicity. Although I am proud of the book's emotional nakedness (apart from its amateurish didacticism), the book's promotion is another story: In Salon, the New York Times, and countless other interviews (newspaper, radio, TV, blogs) I blamed the psychological turbulence of modern teenagers -- from wrist-cutting to school shootings -- on the 1960s feminist revolution. I sounded like a bitter middle-aged man; I even flattered the ultimate bitter middle-aged man, Bill O'Reilly, whom I asked to "be my friend" during a Fox News Channel appearance. (O'Reilly appeared confused by the request. For the record: I am friends with every Irish person, minus the nondrinkers, who do not exist.)
I completely understand why conservatives-turned-liberals such as Arianna Huffington and David Brock and liberals-turned-conservatives such as P.J. O'Rourke and David Horowitz spend decades walking back their youthful ramblings. When millions upon millions of people remember you for something that you no longer represent -- if you think they remember you anyway, which they probably do not -- the shame is unbearable, the desire for a time machine pathological. The temptation is to become an extremist in the opposite direction -- LOOK how much I've changed, everybody! -- which is hardly an act of maturity. The dilemma remains: You have evolved, yet the perception of you remains stuck in a misguided past. (At a recent literary event someone asked me, "Aren't you the guy who thinks women shouldn't have sex?" I'm misanthropic, yes, but willing to concede that humanity should probably reproduce.)
However, I might have never recovered from my right-wing fever if not for the controversy I caused. Readers sent me hate mail following a Salon interview with Rebecca Traister, in which I bashed feminism and articulated such thoughts as: "Men don't see women as clean and pure but as a means to an end, a nice little fuck-hole." One Salon reader even threatened my physical safety.
But middle-aged liberal psychologist Steve Edgell took another approach: calmly and gently talking me back to earth. Over the course of many e-mails and phone conversations, Dr. Edgell -- who had been an Ayn Rand junkie at my age -- explained the reasons for his own political evolution and guided me through the myriad inconsistencies of my rabid philosophy. Just as I was beginning to understand how unbalanced I had become, Edgell died of a heart attack. He did not live to see me completely return to planet Earth but must have known he had planted the seeds of doubt. I never met the man, and I don't necessarily agree with everything he believed, but I owe him my sanity. (He was an atheist, but I hope he is looking down from the cosmic void with amused satisfaction.)
Just as morphing into an extremist took a couple years, un-becoming an extremist happened over time. One by one I saw the flaws in conservative orthodoxy: attempting to fight terrorism with torture, which only aided our enemies' propaganda efforts and thus created more terrorists; seeking to liberalize the Muslim world while curtailing rights for gay people at home; criticizing public schools for lackluster results and therefore cutting funds further; disdaining the weak while never analyzing why they are weak; always seeing the effect but never the cause, which on a mass scale perpetuates the effect.
The 2008 financial crash further proved to me the necessity of an economic safety net within the market system; tying health insurance to employment suddenly made no sense, for example, when millions of people lost their jobs due to conditions beyond their control. Capitalism with a few safety pads -- or a condom, I suppose, since the recession has fucked us all -- is a far cry from a Marxian worker's paradise.
I am not an extreme leftist by any means -- I still dream of swimming in a vault of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck, I would die to protect the First Amendment from censorial progressive overreach (the same goes for theocratic conservative overreach), and I would consider voting for moderate Republicans if any still existed -- but I've learned to see the big picture. It doesn't matter whether you are liberal or conservative, but it's dangerous to always think with exclamation points instead of question marks. Your stance on any particular issue is far less important than whether your worldview is a product of inquiry or incuriosity, whether you feel more comfortable questioning the crowd or blindly marching with it. No ideology has a monopoly on reality -- including my rediscovered left-wing politics.
No longer drunk on jingoism and bloodlust, I feel like a German in 1946, wondering what the hell happened to me, what the hell I supported when I harbored no doubt that we should "nuke 'em all" and measured people by standards other than their character. The years pass, but I cannot reconcile my former and present selves; in my early 20s I made the worst mistake of my life --injecting poison into a world that desperately needed the antidote -- and while it's impossible to undo that error, perhaps my penance is remembering and therefore not repeating it. Just as Dr. Edgell steered me back to the shores of lucidity, I can encourage mellowness in others -- no matter their cause -- and discourage the inevitable craziness that resentment and overgeneralization breed.
Paul of Tarsus, the most famous convert in history, commented long ago: "Even though I was once … a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief." I don't know if anyone, deity or human, will show mercy on me, but I will try to have mercy on myself, and -- even if I continue to fail -- maybe that's enough.
WASHINGTON -- Republicans haven't exactly been shy about bashing the stimulus bill that passed last year. "This is spending, not stimulus," Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said about it. "Rather than create jobs or stimulate the economy, this massive spending bill was a laundry list of programs that focused on states with big-city urban communities," wrote Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., in his local newspaper last October.
As it turns out, they haven't exactly been shy about grabbing cash from the stimulus programs for their districts, either. An investigation in Tuesday's Washington Times turned up letters from more than a dozen fierce critics of the stimulus to the Department of Agriculture, requesting money for local projects. Three days after Aderholt's letter was published, accusing the stimulus of focusing on big cities, he wrote Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, seeking help from a stimulus program to expand broadband services in his (mostly rural) district. Not long after Alexander bashed the law as "spending, not stimulus," he told Vilsack he wanted money for a Tennessee project that would "create over 200 jobs in the first year and at least another 40 new jobs in the following years."
That's exactly what President Obama chided House Republicans for at their retreat in Baltimore a couple of weeks ago. "A lot of you have gone to appear at ribbon cuttings for the same projects that you voted against," Obama told them. Now the Democratic campaign apparatus in Washington is determined to remind voters -- and Republican lawmakers -- that the stimulus doesn't look so bad after all when it's delivering cash to their own area.
"Not only have nearly 70 House Republicans been caught trying to take credit for recovery funding that's brought the economy back from the brink of collapse, but now it's come to light some were writing private letters lobbying for projects in their districts while trashing the Recovery package publicly," Ryan Rudominer, spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, wrote reporters Tuesday morning. The Democratic National Committee also sent the Times story around, as did some progressive interest groups allied with the administration.
Aides to Republicans whose letters the Times turned up told the paper they were just trying to make local lemonade out of the stimulus' lemons. "If the funds are there, Senator Grassley's going to help Iowa, rather than some other state, get its share," a spokeswoman for Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who voted against the stimulus, told the paper. Still, the discovery could take some of the political punch out of GOP attacks on the "wasteful" stimulus bill -- not to mention irritate some of the most driven tea party activists in the Republican base. Expect Democrats to keep pushing this storyline as long as they can.
Who said the Republican Party lacks a bold vision for governing America in the 21st century? Sarah Palin and Republican congressman Paul Ryan prove that Republican conservatives are bold to a fault.
On "Fox News Sunday," where the former Republican vice-presidential candidate is now a paid commentator, Palin suggested that Obama might be likely to win reelection if he "played the war card."
The AP reports:
Palin says that declaring war on Iran or showing stronger support for Israel might convince voters that Obama is tougher than they think on national security and doing all he can to protect the U.S. Otherwise, according to Palin, Obama won't be re-elected if he continues on his current path.
As if.
As if the Obama administration were not escalating the war in Afghanistan against the Taliban, who aided and abetted the al-Qaida attacks on the U.S., while continuing the war in Iraq, which had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11.
As if invading two countries that did not attack the U.S., Iran and Iraq, would be more statesmanlike than merely invading and occupying one.
As if the public, sickened by the cost of the Iraq war in American dead and maimed and trillions of dollars in the long run, had not turned against wingnut militarism and tossed Palin's party out of Congress back in 2006.
As if singing "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann" helped Palin's running mate John McCain win the White House in 2008.
As if swing voters were concerned, not about the highest levels of unemployment since the Great Depression, but about what they considered to be too few American military deaths abroad.
But the contemporary right's claim to intellectual dynamism is not limited to Sarah Palin's suggestion that another unnecessary, unprovoked war in the Middle East might be good policy as well as a a good idea. In domestic policy, Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, recently unveiled an alternative budget that would deal with the long-term deficit problem (about half of which was caused by Bush's and the Republican Congress's wars and tax cuts) by privatizing Social Security and turning Medicare into a voucher system.
As Michael Myers' Doctor Evil might say: .......R....r......r.....right.
That's what Americans are demanding, Rep. Ryan. Millions of Americans are not content to have lost much or all of their 401K and other private retirement savings in the stock market in the last decade, with nothing but Social Security remaining to rescue them in their retirement years. No, Americans are angry because they weren't allowed to lose all of their Social Security money, as well, in the stock market. Clearly they are angry because Wall Street brokers aren't able to rake in commissions from middle-class and working-class retirees by flipping stocks bought with diverted Social Security funds. The bailouts to Wall Street were not enough. We need to give the rent-seeking bankers the vast funds of Social Security as well and let them charge us fees for "managing" it with the legendary expertise we all know and admire.
Bomb Iran and privatize Social Security now! There's a chant for the tea partiers.
These ideas are not going to bring the Republican Party back to power in Congress in 2011 or into the White House in 2013. Which is not to say that the Republicans can't come back to power. In a two-party system, frustrated voters could vote the out party back in, while ignoring the out party's message, even if the message is as crazy as "Bomb Iran and privatize Social Security."
If they came back in, would the Republicans bomb Iran and privatize Social Security? Almost certainly not. Bush talked tough about Iran but didn't do anything. (Correction: He accidentally promoted a major goal of Iranian foreign policy, by deposing the minority Iraqi Sunnis detested by Iran and bringing the Iran-supported Shia to power in Iraq. Oops).
Nor are the Republicans likely to privatize Social Security. A few years back, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House and a freshly reelected Republican president made partial Social Security privatization a major part of his second-term agenda. Result? The very idea of channeling Social Security savings into the stock market was so unpopular with Republican voters -- forget Democrats -- that the central domestic policy initiative of the conservative movement for the last 30 years was not even brought to a vote in either house.
So there is little or no chance that even under a Republican president the U.S. will declare war on Iran or privatize Social Security. These are not serious policy proposals. They are just lollipops for the Limbaugh listeners. Boob bait for Bubba.
The Republicans have specialized for a generation now in running as radical right-wing revolutionaries and then, once in power, governing on behalf of their K Street lobbyist friends, until the next election, when, for a few weeks, they are leading the American Revolution or World War II all over again until Election Day.
Eric Hoffer observed that movements tend to turn first into businesses and then into rackets. The racket side of the Republican machine is illustrated by a New York Times story about Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Cornyn visits New York twice a month to take advantage of Wall Street's "buyers' remorse."
Buyer's remorse is what the voters should feel when they vote for a party that promises a bold reform agenda and then acts between elections as though it were a lobby for the financial industry. But wait -- which party are we talking about here?
Michael Lind is policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation.
WASHINGTON -- There was one ad during Sunday night's Super Bowl that drove a lot of Republicans completely crazy -- and no, it wasn't the one about the guy whose girlfriend removed his spine, though it probably should have been. Between the Doritos and Bud Light spots, the U.S. Census Bureau dropped in for a visit with football fans. And as far as the GOP was concerned, that was among the dumbest things government has ever done. (Which, considering how many of today's Republicans view government, is saying quite a bit.)
"We spend a couple million dollars on irritable bowel syndrome, and we spend a couple of million dollars on an ad in the Super Bowl Sunday, and we continue the practices that infuriate our citizenry because they're hurting so badly," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told Fox News's Greta Van Susteren on Thursday. "They're having to tighten their belts. This is what feeds the tea parties. This is what feeds the anti-incumbency mood that's out there, an out-of-touch Congress and an out-of-touch administration." Smelling budget blood in the political water, other Republicans chimed in, as well. "Given the difficult economic times our nation is facing, I am very concerned with the amount of money spent by the Census Bureau for the production and airing of these commercials," Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., wrote Census officials last week, demanding a detailed explanation of just how much money the ad would be wasting and whether a similar campaign during the 2000 Census yielded any improvement in response rates.
As it happens, the Census Bureau had all that information ready to go by kickoff. "Facing a three-decade decline in the national mail response rates 10 years ago in the 2000 Census, the Census Bureau launched its first ever paid advertising campaign to increase public awareness levels about the once-a-decade and Constitutionally mandated population count," Census officials said in a press release Sunday. "The end result was a 2000 Census that turned around the three-decade decline in response rates and exceeded the 1990 Census mail response rate of 65 percent... Because of the higher response rate the Census Bureau saved at least $305 million and returned that money to Congress following the census. The advertising campaign in the 2000 Census cost about $100 million, a $205 million return on investment."
In case anyone didn't get that message during the game, the Census also posted some math on its Twitter feed in the middle of the second half. "If 1% of folks watching #SB44 change mind and mail back #2010Census form, taxpayers save $25 million in follow up costs," officials wrote. That would be a 10-fold return on the $2.5 million the ad cost -- which, even using Republican arithmetic, is a pretty good government savings.
Watch the ad here:
Since President Obama’s agenda ground to a halt in Congress, everyone’s been popping with theories of how he could get it moving again, particularly on healthcare. He should scrap the basic bill already passed by both houses and restart bipartisan talks, say Republicans, surely in full good faith. Mainstream liberals seem to hold out some hope that the White House can broker the House and the Senate to a tractable middle ground. Politico thinks the president should stop telling people what to do already. And his progressive allies want him to force the GOP to filibuster, and to call them out for their obstruction.
As usual with this administration, the working strategy seems to be to give a little bit to everybody. Obama announced yesterday that he would call for a televised half-day bipartisan meeting at the White House to try to reach a breakthrough on healthcare. Echoing his State of the Union address and his "question time" with the House Republican caucus, the president said, "I want to come back and have a large meeting, Republicans and Democrats, to go through systematically all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward."
It’s not, of course, actually likely that the White House and congressional Democratic majorities are going to hear some revelatory and brilliant new proposal from the GOP -- especially when the Republicans, as a relatively tiny legislative minority, are insisting the president and majority meet their demands. Says Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., "We know there are a number of issues with bipartisan support that we can start with when the 2,700-page bill is put on the shelf."
If the last eight months have shown anything systematically, it’s that there isn’t really any ground on which the parties can meet for compromise. Republicans are uninterested in letting Democrats pass a bill and claim success. McConnell’s point is clearly Republican orthodoxy; House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, tells the New York Times almost exactly the same thing as his Senate counterpart. "The best way to start on real, bipartisan reform would be to scrap those bills and focus on the kind of step-by-step improvements that will lower health care costs and expand access."
For its part, the White House clearly has no intention of scrapping the bill and rebooting negotiations, not after watching Max Baucus and his "Gang of Six" fritter away a half a year in fruitless talks.
Clearly, this televised session idea would be some kind of kabuki theater. What’s happening here is a part of the administration’s ongoing effort to claim the center. The idea is that another on-air, face-to-face encounter will help the president to hold Republicans accountable with the public for abdicating shared responsibility for governing. They’ll be revealed for the do-nothing obstructionists they are.
But you have to think the GOP probably isn’t going to get caught off guard as it did with Obama’s "question time." Republican negotiators won’t just show up unprepared. They’ll do their homework, and they’ll have lots of proposals. You can bet that they will have ideas that sound perfectly good to the layperson but are actually completely infeasible in any compromise, for fairly complicated and wonky reasons. They won't suggest these ideas because they want the president to actually enact them; they'll just try to make him the one saying "no."
Obama and the Democrats want to go on TV to reveal the opposition as uninterested in genuine compromise. But really, it’s not hard to imagine how Republicans maneuver the Democrats into spending this half-day televised session rejecting all of the minority’s ideas. It sounds something like a replay, in miniature and on-air, of the whole painful process so far.
If President Obama's recent face-to-face meeting with congressional Republicans had been a prizefight, they'd have stopped it: Obama by TKO. It was such a mismatch that Fox News, unofficial network of the GOP, basically conceded defeat by cutting away 20 minutes before it ended. Other networks showed it all.
Republicans appeared to make the elementary mistake of believing their own ... um, propaganda. Believe it or not, Obama's use of Teleprompters has convinced GOP stalwarts that he's kind of thick. I get frequent e-mails to that effect from people who marveled at the wit and wisdom of George W. Bush.
I know, I know. That's what they think, is all I'm saying.
House Republicans shouldn't have allowed the encounter to be televised. But then believing their own disinformation is basically what makes them Republicans.
So anyway, up jumps freshman Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas.
"You are soon to submit a new budget, Mr. President. Will that new budget, like your old budget, triple the national debt and continue to take us down the path of increasing the cost of government to almost 25 percent of our economy? That's the question, Mr. President."
Hensarling appeared to think he'd posed a real zinger. Obama's runaway spending is an article of faith among the Rush Limbaugh/Glenn Beck crowd. Karl Rove, Bush's cynical political guru, pushes it the way Lenin pushed "the withering away of the state."
Obama jumped on it. "With all due respect," he said, "I've just got to take this last question as an example of how it's very hard to have the kind of bipartisan work that we're going to do, because the whole question was structured as a talking point for running a campaign ...
"The fact of the matter is, is that when we came into office, the deficit was $1.3 trillion. $1.3 trillion. So when you say that suddenly I've got ... a monthly deficit that's higher than the annual deficit left by Republicans, that's factually just not true, and you know it's not true.
"And what is true is that we came in already with a $1.3 trillion deficit before I had passed any law. What is true is, we came in with $8 trillion worth of debt over the next decade.
"(That) had nothing to do with anything that we had done. It had to do with the fact that in 2000, when there was a budget surplus of $200 billion, you had a Republican administration and a Republican Congress, and we had two tax cuts that weren't paid for, you had a prescription drug plan -- the biggest entitlement plan, by the way, in several decades -- that was passed, without it being paid for, you had two wars that were done through supplementals [i.e., off-budget appropriations] and then you had $3 trillion projected because of the lost revenue of this recession."
Read it and weep, because those are the facts. Two weeks before Obama was inaugurated, the Congressional Budget Office projected the 2009 deficit at $1.2 trillion, adding that due to the economic crisis the new administration also inherited, "collections from corporate income taxes are anticipated to decline by 27 percent and individual income taxes by 8 percent; in normal economic conditions, they would both grow." Mandated spending on unemployment insurance, food stamps, etc., increased.
A year later, little had changed. A December 2009 analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded that the Bush administration's fiscal legacy "explain(s) virtually the entire deficit over the next 10 years."
Economic stimulus and all, new spending by the Obama administration amounts to roughly 10 percent of this year's deficit.
The GOP response to these incontrovertible facts amounts to boo-hoo-hoo. Republicans who stayed focused on Bill Clinton's zipper from 1998 until Bush's failures made necessary the promulgation of a new rule of Washington etiquette, now whine that decent people simply don't resort to arithmetic. The world began anew last January.
Obama promised miracles, they say, and he hasn't delivered. My view is that in pursuit of illusory bipartisanship, he's let congressional Republicans pout like children too long. Fiscally speaking, the GOP keeps promising voters an excursion to Big Rock Candy Mountain: lower taxes, higher revenue, prosperity all around.
Except it never happens. Multimillionaires get tax cuts, we get the bill. Virtually the entire national debt was run up by President Reagan and the two Bushes. Meanwhile, job creation under George W. Bush was the lowest since World War II. Then when Democrats take office, they style themselves "deficit hawks," and caterwaul about runaway spending.
It's like a carnival sideshow act. Except that it plays. Many readers know these things. Obama's political challenge, however, is that millions of ordinary voters don't have a clue. So he's got to find ways to tell them over and over again until they do. Republicans seem unlikely to furnish him another platform.
© 2010, Gene Lyons. Distributed by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.
WASHINGTON -- President Obama's trip Friday to the House Republican conference retreat in Baltimore still has political types talking a few days later. Asked this morning at a briefing sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor why Obama was having a hard time "getting traction" with the House GOP, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood didn't hesitate to bring up his new boss's visit with his former colleagues.
"I went with him over to the Republican retreat in Baltimore," said LaHood, who served in the House for 14 years before joining the Obama administration. "I think he was in 4-wheel drive at that meeting. I think he got a lot of traction with them."
The Medium and the Message
Living in a Democracy means learning to take your lumps
I Blame The Independents
