Republican cuts would cost 700,000 jobs

In the March 1, 2009 article "Republican cuts would cost 700,000 jobs: Report," Zachary Roth reports that Mark Zandi, a prominent economic forecaster, suggests that the budget cuts proposed by Republicans will slow economic growth and reduce the number of jobs. The logic is that a primary determinant of the number of jobs is the overall demand for newly produced goods and services, which economists refer to as aggregate demand (AD). And a key source of demand, especially in economic downturns and their recoveries, is government purchases. Less government spending translates into less aggregate demand and fewer jobs.

According to Roth:

A new report by a leading economic forecaster finds that budget cuts passed by the House of Representatives would cost 700,000 jobs over the next two years if enacted.

"The House Republicans' proposal would reduce 2011 real GDP growth by 0.5% and 2012 growth by 0.2%," according to the study, by Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi. "This would mean some 400,000 fewer jobs created by the end of 2011 and 700,000 fewer jobs by the end of 2012."

Zandi is no left-wing ideologue. He was on the economic team for Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, and has advised members of both political parties. His findings point in the same direction as those of an even more pessimistic Goldman Sachs report, leaked last week, which concluded that the proposed cuts would reduce second- and third-quarter growth in 2010 by 1.5 to 2 percentage points.

Although the economy has been growing of late, it's not adding jobs fast enough to start significantly bringing down the unemployment rate, which stands at 9 percent. Writes Zandi: "Imposing additional government spending cuts before this has happened, as House Republicans want, would be taking an unnecessary chance with the recovery."

America already faces a jobs crisis, having lost around 8 million jobs since the start of the recession in late 2007.

Zandi argues that the government does need to cut spending--but that it should wait to do so until unemployment has come down further. "Significant government spending restraint is vital," he writes, "but given the economy's halting recovery, it would be counterproductive for that restraint to begin until the U.S. is creating enough jobs to lower the unemployment rate."

The House proposal cuts spending by around $60 billion from 2010 levels. The Senate and the Obama administration will weigh in before any cuts become law.

GOP, Democrats offer dueling governing plans

In the September 23, 2010 article "GOP, Democrats offer dueling governing plans," Associated Press Writer Julie Hirschfeld Davis outlines the alternative plans for how to run the country.

Newt Gingrich on the GOP's 'Pledge'

Newt Gingrich on the GOP's 'Pledge'

GOP 'Pledge' vows cuts, repeal of health care law

In the September 23, 2010 article "GOP 'Pledge' vows cuts, repeal of health care law," Associated Press writer Julie Hirschfeld Davis explains that the pledge is rhetoric designed to persuade undecided voters to side with Republicans, who vow to cut taxes, government spending, budget deficits, and the public debt without acknowledging the inherent flaws in their logic (or math).

REVENUES - EXPENDITURES = Budget Balance (SURPLUS if positive, DEFICIT if negative).

When recent deficits have exceeded $1 trillion, advocating reductions to both revenues and expenditures will do little to reduce the deficits and will continue to substantially increase the public debt. Significant INCREASES in revenues are needed as well as dramatic cuts in major federal government spending programs (such as defense, Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid) that neither Republican nor Democrats seem prepared to support.

The GOP Plot to Screw the Economy and the Middle Class

Bob Cesca comments on The GOP Plot to Screw the Economy and the Middle Class.

Obama rumbles with House GOP

In the January 29, 2010 Politico article "Obama rumbles with House GOP," Patrick O'Connor and Tim Grieve report on the verbal sparring between President Barack Obama and the House Republicans that invited him to their policy retreat:

BALTIMORE — President Barack Obama on Friday accused Republicans of portraying health care reform as a "Bolshevik plot" and telling their constituents that he’s "doing all kinds of crazy stuff that's going to destroy America."

Speaking to House Republicans at their annual policy retreat here, Obama said that over-the-top GOP attacks on him and his agenda have made it virtually impossible for Republicans to address the nation’s problems in a bipartisan way.

“What happens is that you guys don’t have a lot of room to negotiate with me,” Obama said, silencing the smattering of Republicans who had applauded when he said “Bolshevik plot.” "The fact of the matter is, many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable with your own base, with your own party because what you've been telling your constituents is, ‘This guy's doing all kinds of crazy stuff that's going to destroy America.' ''

Obama’s comments came in the midst of an extraordinary back-and-forth with Republican House members – a scene straight out of the House of Commons that played out live on cable TV.

Republicans invited Obama to appear at their annual conference; the president surprised them by accepting – and then by asking that cameras and reporters be allowed into the room.

Republicans immediately agreed to the request, but they may be regretting it now.

Obama was clearly energized by the exchange – and again and again, he turned the Republicans questions against the GOP, accusing the party of obstructing legislation for political purposes and offering solutions that won’t work.

"I've read your legislation. I take a look at this stuff. And the good ideas we take," Obama said. "It can't be all or nothing, one way or the other … If we put together a stimulus package in which a third of it is tax cuts that normally you guys would support, and support for states and the unemployed and helping people stay on COBRA, that certainly your governors would support … and maybe there are some things in there, with respect to infrastructure, that you don't like … If there's uniform opposition because the Republican caucus doesn't get 100 percent or 80 percent of what you want, then it's going to be difficult to get a deal done, because that's not how democracy works."

After Obama made opening remarks, House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind.) asked him whether he’d embrace “across the board” tax cuts as a way to revive the economy, and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) asked him to support a line-item veto to help achieve a balanced budget.

Obama pushed back backed hard, accusing Republicans of putting party before principle and voting against his 2009 stimulus plan but then attending “ribbon cuttings” for stimulus projects in their own districts.

If Republicans believe in both across-the-board tax cuts and a balanced budget, Obama said he’d like to see their math.

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) began the session by handing Obama a stack of Republican alternatives to his policies. The president then began speaking in a conciliatory tone telling the Republicans that he expects them to challenge his ideas – and that he understands that there are sometimes fundamental policy differences between the parties.

"Having differences of opinion, having a real debate about matters of domestic policy and national security, that's something that's not only good for our country, it's absolutely essential,” he said.

But he also criticized the Republicans for reflexively opposing his policies – even when, he said, they were in line with GOP principles. And the encounter got progressively more raucous from there.

Obama urged Republicans to come to the table and work with him on policy compromises, saying Americans "didn't send us to Washington to fight each other in some political steel cage match."

What voters don’t want, he said, is "for Washington to continue being so Washington-like."

The president asked the Republicans to support his proposal to provide small businesses with a $500 tax credit for each new employee they add — an idea Republicans panned before he even made the offer. He also asked them to support his plan to freeze non-military discretionary spending for three years.

"Join me," Obama asked. "Nothing in this proposal that runs contrary to the ideological predisposition of this caucus."

"We have seen some party-line votes that have been disappointing," he said, recalling the stimulus fight. "I didn't understand then, and I still don't understand, why we got opposition in this caucus for almost $300 billion in badly needed tax cuts for the American people" and other assistance and infrastructure projects.

Obama jabbed: "Let's face it, some of you have been at the ribbon-cuttings for some of these important projects in your communities."

Continuing on a confrontational tack, Obama defended key components of his agenda, including the proposed fee on bailed-out banks – telling Boehner: "If you listen to the American people, John, they’ll tell you they want their money back."

At the end of his remarks – before taking questions – Obama told Republicans it's time to make a choice between aiming for "success at the polls" or "lasting success" for the country. "Just think about it for a while," he said. "We don't have to put it up for a vote today."

Freshman Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) went after the president harder, accusing him of breaking promising about transparency, lobbyists and partisanship.

“I can look you in the eye and tell you we have not been obstructionists,” he said.

Obama acknowleged that Chaffetz had a “legitimate complaint” about not putting health care negotiations on C-SPAN – as the president had vowed they would be – but he also asked Chaffetz what he was doing within his own caucus to make sure that Republicans were working with him in bipartisan way.

Mid-way through the questions and answers, Pence said that there would be just a few more questions.

Obama said he wasn’t in any hurry to leave.

GOP seizes on terror issue - and the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy of logic

In the December 28, 2009 Politico article "GOP seizes on terror issue," Glenn Thrush and Martin Kady II explain that Republicans want to make defense against terrorism a political issue. They warn that the attacks may backfire because of the Republicans' own spotty record.

Critics should be especially careful if they want to argue that the Christmas Day security screening failures are the fault of the Obama administration because it was in power when the lapses occurred. By that logic, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks should be blamed on President George W. Bush and his Republican administration. The point of emphasis is the fallacy of logic known as post hoc ergo propter hoc in which one assumes that because one event precedes another, the first event caused the second one. In this case, the (erroneous) reasoning is that because the Christmas Day attempted bombing occurred after Obama became President, then his ascendency to power must be the cause of the security failure. That is likely to be no more accurate than an assertion that Bush's ascendency in 2001 caused the 9/11 attacks.

Republicans have wasted no time in attacking Democrats on intelligence and screening failures leading up to the failed Christmas Day bombing of Flight 253 — a significant departure from the calibrated, less partisan responses that have followed other recent terrorist activity.

The strategy — coming as the Republican leadership seeks to exploit Democratic weaknesses heading into the 2010 midterms — is in many ways a natural for a party that views protecting the U.S. homeland as its ideological raison d’etre and electoral franchise.

President Obama’s GOP critics have been emboldened during the past 48 hours by the stumbling initial response of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who spent Monday retracting her Sunday claim that “the system worked” in the aftermath of Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab’s near takedown of a jet ferrying nearly 300 people from Amsterdam to Detroit.

“In the past six weeks, you’ve had the Fort Hood attack, the D.C. Five and now the attempted attack on the plane in Detroit … and they all underscored the clear philosophical difference between the administration and us,” said Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.

“I think Secretary Napolitano and the rest of the Obama administration view their role as law enforcement, first responders dealing with the aftermath of an attack,” Hoekstra told POLITICO. “And we believe in a forward-looking approach to stopping these attacks before they happen.”

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) went even further, telling FOX News that the Christmas attack proved President Obama’s talk-to-your-enemies approach might actually be encouraging terrorists.

“[S]oft talk about engagement, closing Gitmo, these things are not going to appease the terrorists,” he said. “They’re going to keep coming after us, and we can’t have politics as usual in Washington, and I’m afraid that’s what we’ve got right now with airport security.”

Obama didn’t address his critics during a brief appearance in Hawaii on Monday, saying only that "the American people should be assured that we are doing everything in our power to keep you and your family safe and secure during this busy holiday season. … As Americans, we will never give into fear and division."

A White House spokesman says the administration wants to avoid making the national security and terrorism a partisan issue.

“The president doesn't think we should play politics with issues like these. He hasn't. His response has been fact-based and appropriate and will continue to be as such,” said deputy White House press secretary Bill Burton.

But other Democrats say the GOP’s yuletide political offensive could backfire on Republicans, putting the spotlight on the party’s own less-than-spotless record on homeland security.

Exhibit A: DeMint’s controversial “hold” on Obama’s choice to lead the Transportation Safety Administration, Erroll Southers, which has left the agency leaderless during a critical period of reappraisal and potential reorganization.

“Considering that this group has been playing politics with the TSA for months, their new-found concern about safety seems a bit contrived,” said Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), who acknowledged “legitimate beefs” about lapses leading up to the Christmas Day bombing attempt.

DeMint says he’s blocking Southers because the top cop at Los Angeles International Airport hasn’t vowed to block TSA unionization. And spokesman Wes Denton said the agency is better off headless than with big labor running the nation’s airports.

“This is an important debate because many Americans don't want someone running the TSA who stands ready to give union bosses the power to veto or delay future security measures at our airports,” Denton said.

DeMint isn’t the only Republican raising concerns that Abdulmuttalab was allowed to board the plane despite being placed on a list of potentially dangerous foreign nationals and that he managed to escape detection despite carrying a large amount of explosive powder sewn into his underwear.

Early Monday morning, the House Republican Conference blasted an e-mail offering up a half-dozen GOP lawmakers to discuss national security — and to criticize the Obama White House.

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the top Homeland Security Committee Republican, criticized the Obama administration for not going public more quickly to reassure Americans that the skies are safe.

Hoekstra, for his part, blamed the president for “downplaying” the threat of terrorism and slammed the White House for failing to provide detailed bipartisan briefings.

Democrats, on the other hand, say they have plenty of ammunition for a homeland security counterattack.

Over the summer, 108 House Republicans voted against the final conference report of the 2010 appropriation bill for the Department of Homeland Security, which included funding for explosives detection systems and other aviation security measures.

The no voters cited a procedural dispute over the appropriations process. They included Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), Hoekstra and a who’s who of big-name House Republicans: Reps. Mike Pence, Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Joe Wilson (R-SC).

The conference bill included more than $4 billion for "screening operations," including $1.1 billion in funding for explosives detection systems, with $778 million intended for buying and installing the systems.

“It’s a base political calculation,” said one senior House Democratic aide. “It’s risky to play politics with something like this. The morning after [the attempted bombing], Republicans had already drawn a bright line on this.”

In June, both parties overwhelmingly backed Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who inserted an amendment into the House's massive Homeland Security appropriations bill barring the use of full-body image scans as "primary" screening tools at airports.

The amendment, which died in the Senate, passed the House on a bipartisan 310 to 118 vote, with conservative libertarians joining liberals, all decrying the scans as a major invasion of privacy.

It would also have given passengers the option of getting a pat-down — which might have also detected the Christmas bomb — while banning the storage and copying of the images, which show a virtual picture of a person's naked body.

The measure was little-noticed at the time, but it could have a big impact if the Obama administration follows through on its pledge to increase such imaging, which experts say could have detected the explosives hidden on the body of the would-be airplane bomber.
Chaffetz, for his part, doesn’t regret the amendment, telling the Salt Lake Tribune, "It's a difficult balance between protecting our civil liberties and protecting the safety of people on airplanes," adding, “I believe there's technology out there that can identify bomb-type materials without necessarily overly invading our privacy."

In the coming days, GOP criticism of the administration’s actions may give way to a louder, if more decorous din from Democrats questioning security procedures here and abroad.

A handful of key congressional chairmen have already scheduled hearings to see what did go wrong on that Northwestern Airlines flight.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, says his panel will investigate how the attempted bomber slipped through security and screening procedures.

"I view Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as a terrorist who evaded our homeland security defenses and who would have killed hundreds of people if the explosives he tried to detonate had worked," Lieberman said.

"What we know about the Abdulmutallab case raises two big, urgent questions that we are holding this hearing to answer: Why aren't airline passengers flying into the U.S. checked against the broadest terrorist database, and why isn't whole body scanning technology that can detect explosives in wider use?"

The Republican Party's red-ink argument

In the December 10, 2009 Politico editorial "The Republican Party's red-ink argument," Kevin Madden and Kristen Soltis argue the increased government spending, budget deficits, and public debt under the leadership of President Barack Obama may cost Democrats in the 2010 elections. The authors fail to acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of recent deficits is the result of policies implemented before Obama took office. For example, under President George W. Bush and a Republican Congress, tax cuts reduced government revenues (from what they otherwise would have been) and the federal government was expanded more than under any other President since Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. And the bailouts the authors criticize were designed and implemented under Bush (and continued under Obama). Much of the recent increased government spending is designed to stimulate the overall demand for newly produced goods and services and put the unemployed back to work. The authors (and critics of current fiscal policies, in general) give no credit to these policies in preventing the economic downturn from being worse (as most economists do) and provide no alternative plan, unless it is that by further enriching the wealthy they will open new business or expand existing ones. But businesses do not hire workers because the owners are richer. They do it when they believe that the worker will generate more revenues than the what the worker is paid in wages and benefits. Yet, to the extent that the public fails to understand Keynesian economic policies (or trust that they have been implemented correctly), the authors may be right that Democrats will lose positions of political leadership in upcoming elections.

According to the article:

As unemployment hovers in the double digits, the nation’s federal deficit continues to tick upward, with the Obama administration projecting a $1.8 trillion federal spending deficit for the 2009 fiscal year alone. That unrestrained spending of taxpayer dollars and piling federal debt has had an important political consequence: a potentially toxic political environment for Democrats heading into 2010.

While the everyday American confronts a sour economy with a sense of conservatism — cutting back on excess expenditures, doing more with less — congressional Democrats and the White House have confronted it liberally: a $787 billion “stimulus” targeted toward the public sector, a proposed trillion-dollar health care bill and billions upon billions more of federal taxpayer dollars directed at bailouts. What’s most troubling is there seems to be no end in sight.

Democrats have offered up a gift in the form of disgruntled independents, the growing and mobile political force currently in possession of both parties’ political fortunes. Both anecdotal and empirical evidence demonstrates these voters are highly concerned with the policies that have flooded the country with debt and red ink.

The red-ink argument against wasteful government spending and mounting deficits presents the Republican Party its best chance to rebuild a center-right coalition of voters. There are three pieces to the argument that the Republican Party should be cognizant of in order to gain momentum and voter support:

Restore credibility: During President George W. Bush’s two terms, government spending and deficits increased, leading to a popular Democratic retort to today’s GOP complaints about spending — “Where was this complaining when you were in charge?” Fair enough. But there’s nothing like a trip to the woodshed to help provide some much-needed perspective.

Yes, the deficits during Bush’s eight years were still lower than the deficit from President Barack Obama’s first year alone. But Republicans must accept responsibility for past negligence on spending, accepting the charge that the party could have and should have done more to reform institutional waste in government. Doing so combats efforts to level the hypocrite charge and is a first step toward restoring credibility with the American people.

Never tire of hammering Democrats on spending: One of the more relevant axioms in politics is the warning to “never tire of your own message.” In order to rebuild the Republican Party’s image on fiscal issues and reclaim the reform mantle, the party must relentlessly inform voters about the real-life consequences of Democrats’ spending policies.

The concerns and raw economic anxieties of everyday Americans are all, in some way, connected to wasteful spending practices. Unemployment, bailouts, the rising costs of health care and tuition and worries about future debt are the real consequences of spending policies that seem out of touch with the American public’s instinct on fiscal responsibility. Republicans running in 2010 must have a message that continuously demonstrates the undesirable outcomes of reckless spending.

Understand the anger, but be for something: Democrats may be falling out of favor, but it’s not enough to simply let them self-destruct — Republicans need to take steps to win back the trust of voters. Present ideas, present alternatives and present price tags that reflect the kind of conservatism that Americans are applying to their own household finances.

Republicans also need to take their arguments beyond simply saying they want to cut spending and explain why less spending creates better outcomes. Lower taxes and less spending aren’t ends in and of themselves; they’re a means to economic growth, personal freedom and job creation. Reconnect our policy ideas to the values that matter to voters, like their ability to provide for their families or the security of their children’s futures.

The Republican Party’s electoral descent in 2006 and 2008 was the result of a deterioration of the party’s standing as genuine reformers in the eyes of voters. The party was no longer viewed as being able to govern competently and responsibly, so any alternative looked attractive. The Republican Party absolutely must reclaim the fiscal responsibility trademark. Perhaps no item is more critical to a comeback in both the 2010 midterms and creating the long-term growth needed to gain a governing majority once again.

Kevin Madden is a former senior adviser to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign. Kristen Soltis is director of policy research at The Winston Group, a Republican strategic consulting and polling firm.

New poll shows 'Tea Party' more popular than Republican Party

In the December 7, 2009 article "New poll shows 'Tea Party' more popular than Republican Party," Brett Michael Dykes suggests that the popularity of the Tea Party movement may be bad for the Republican Party.

A new Rasmussen poll finds that the tea party movement's popularity is growing, so much so that it garners more support than the Republican party on a generic Congressional ballot. The poll hints that the burgeoning discontent among conservatives within the GOP threatens to splinter the party at a time when the popularity of President Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress are waning as we head into an election year.

The tea party movement was conceived out of antipathy for President Obama's economic stimulus plan and cultivated by groups like Freedom Works and conservative commentators such as Glenn Beck. Its guiding principals are centered around opposition to tax increases and the expansion of federal government spending. The movement rose to prominence when it organized highly-publicized protest gatherings across the country on April 15th of this year.

As reported by Talking Points Memo, the respondents to the Rasmussen poll were asked the following question:

"Okay, suppose the Tea Party Movement organized itself as a political party. When thinking about the next election for Congress, would you vote for the Republican candidate from your district, the Democratic candidate from your district, or the Tea Party candidate from your district?"

The response of all those who were polled was Democratic 36%, Tea Party 23% and Republican 18%. Further, the poll found that independents are more inclined to vote for a tea party candidate over Democratic or Republican candidates.

While some Republicans have expressed dismay over the emergence of the tea party movement, others have suggested that the GOP should embrace the group and its issues.

Tea party sympathizers recently proposed a resolution to make the RNC withhold its endorsement and funding unless candidates pass an "ideological purity test." The movement will hold its first national convention this January in Nashville, and Glenn Beck has indicated that he intends to stake out a more activist role in politics going forward by holding seminars across the country to educate conservatives on how to run for office without the support of a major political party.

But the Republican party has yet to determine whether or not they can harness the energy emanating from the right wing without being pulled out of the mainstream. This dilemma was highlighted by the GOP's November loss of a congressional seat it had held since the 1800s, after a tea party-supported candidate pressured the establishment Republican out of the race. That race suggested something rather striking: while the GOP may not be able to win without the support of the tea party movement, they might not be able to win with it running the show either.

GOP has little credibility on budget deficit

In the November 24, 2009 Nashua Telegraph editorial "GOP has little credibility on budget deficit," Froma Harrop points out the hypocrisy in Republican cries for greater fiscal responsibility since they created much of the current problems when they controlled the White House and Congress.

Nearly every Republican these days calls for tax cuts and lower deficits, and in the same sentence. Point out that these goals clash – that taxes pay for government and not paying for government causes deficits – and the Republican counters: “We must shrink government, instead.”

Sure. And you’re just the boys to do it.

There hasn’t been a balanced budget since the last Democratic administration. During the George W. Bush years of mindless tax cutting, the national debt doubled, and GOP claims to fiscal rectitude became a bizarre joke.

The last fig leaf fell off this summer when Republicans demagogued efforts to save more than $100 billion by ending subsidies for the private Medicare Advantage health plans.

Here was the lowest-hanging fruit in the fastest-growing government program. It was something most Medicare beneficiaries would barely notice was gone, yet Republicans hollered that Democrats were pulling the plug on grandma.

That dashed any residual Republican pretenses that Bush had led them astray on spending, and a lesson was learned. Clearly, they’re not changing a thing.

Bruce Bartlett, an economist in Ronald Reagan’s Treasury Department, has criticizing such inconsistencies for several years. Republicans could have embraced his 2006 book, “Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” as evidence that they truly regretted the fiscal wreckage of the Bush years. Instead, they turned Bartlett into a Republican pariah.

Bartlett has just come out with another book, “The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward.” It has received an equally chilly reception from the right-wing media and associated think tanks. That is, they’re making no mention of it.

I asked Bartlett whether he feels beaten up by former fellow Republicans. (He’s now an independent.) No, he said, “One of the funny things since ‘Imposter’ came out is the refusal of people on the right to even debate me.” One can’t entirely blame them for trying to smother his book sales.

Democrats would be hard-pressed to find better talking points anywhere else – though Bartlett does find fault with them, too.

Bartlett’s main point is there’s almost no place to cut domestic discretionary spending. Subtract money going for defense, entitlements (such as Medicare) and payments on the debt, and there’s precious little left.

Domestic discretionary spending in fiscal 2008 last year totaled $485 billion, while the deficit was $459 billion. You would have had to kill nearly every domestic program to balance the budget. That would have meant nothing for education, agriculture, housing, border patrols, the FBI, highways.

Taxes must go up, and on that subject, Bartlett takes issue with the current president.

“You have to look at some other broad-based revenue raising,” he said, “but then you run up against the problem that Obama has made the promise not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $200,000.”

He deems that approach “irresponsible.” The rich can’t bear all the costs of government.

The answer is a value-added tax, which is basically a national sales tax. The VAT would tax consum- ption, rather than income, and at low cost to economic growth. Europeans use a VAT to pay for their cushy benefits.

Bartlett thinks Congress should commit itself to a number, say $1 trillion, for deficit savings over 10 years. Then it should ask a commission to find a third of that money from higher revenues, a third from entitlement cuts and a third from discretionary spending.

Welcome to the world of grownups, where tax cuts don’t magically pay for themselves – and where middle-class people must pay more for middle-class benefits. When it comes to addressing deficits, Democrats may be lax adolescents, but Republicans are total babies.

Froma Harrop serves on the editorial board of The Providence Journal and is a syndicated columnist. E-mail her at fharrop@projo.com.

Republican Deficit Hypocrisy

In the November 2009 Forbes article "Republican Deficit Hypocrisy," conservative Bruce Bartlett reminds readers that the current U.S. budget problem was created by Republicans:

The human capacity for self-delusion never ceases to amaze me, so it shouldn't surprise me that so many Republicans seem to genuinely believe that they are the party of fiscal responsibility. Perhaps at one time they were, but those days are long gone.

This fact became blindingly obvious to me six years ago this month when a Republican president and a Republican Congress enacted the Medicare drug benefit, which former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker has called "the most fiscally irresponsible piece of legislation since the 1960s."

Recall the situation in 2003. The Bush administration was already projecting the largest deficit in American history--$475 billion in fiscal year 2004, according to the July 2003 mid-session budget review. But a big election was coming up that Bush and his party were desperately fearful of losing. So they decided to win it by buying the votes of America's seniors by giving them an expensive new program to pay for their prescription drugs.

Recall, too, that Medicare was already broke in every meaningful sense of the term. According to the 2003 Medicare trustees report, spending for Medicare was projected to rise much more rapidly than the payroll tax as the baby boomers retired. Consequently, the rational thing for Congress to do would have been to find ways of cutting its costs. Instead, Republicans voted to vastly increase them--and the federal deficit--by $395 billion between 2004 and 2013.

However, the Bush administration knew this figure was not accurate because Medicare's chief actuary, Richard Foster, had concluded, well before passage, that the more likely cost would be $534 billion. Tom Scully, a Republican political appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services, threatened to fire him if he dared to make that information public before the vote. (See this report by the HHS inspector general and this article by Foster.)

It's important to remember that the congressional budget resolution capped the projected cost of the drug benefit at $400 billion over 10 years. If there had been an official estimate from Medicare's chief actuary putting the cost at well more than that, then the legislation could have been killed by a single member in either the House or Senate by raising a point of order. Then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., later said he regretted not doing so.

Even with a deceptively low estimate of the drug benefit's cost, there were still a few Republicans in the House of Representatives who wouldn't roll over and play dead just to buy re-election. Consequently, when the legislation came up for its final vote on Nov. 22, 2003, it was failing by 216 to 218 when the standard 15-minute time allowed for voting came to an end.

What followed was one of the most extraordinary events in congressional history. The vote was kept open for almost three hours while the House Republican leadership brought massive pressure to bear on the handful of principled Republicans who had the nerve to put country ahead of party. The leadership even froze the C-SPAN cameras so that no one outside the House chamber could see what was going on.

Among those congressmen strenuously pressed to change their vote was Nick Smith, R-Mich., who later charged that several members of Congress attempted to virtually bribe him, by promising to ensure that his son got his seat when he retired if he voted for the drug bill. One of those members, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, was later admonished by the House Ethics Committee for going over the line in his efforts regarding Smith.

Eventually, the arm-twisting got three Republicans to switch their votes from nay to yea: Ernest Istook of Oklahoma, Butch Otter of Idaho and Trent Franks of Arizona. Three Democrats also switched from nay to yea and two Republicans switched from yea to nay, for a final vote of 220 to 215. In the end, only 25 Republicans voted against the budget-busting drug bill. (All but 16 Democrats voted no.)

Otter and Istook are no longer in Congress, but Franks still is, so I checked to see what he has been saying about the health legislation now being debated. Like all Republicans, he has vowed to fight it with every ounce of strength he has, citing the increase in debt as his principal concern. "I would remind my Democratic colleagues that their children, and every generation thereafter, will bear the burden caused by this bill. They will be the ones asked to pay off the incredible debt," Franks declared on Nov. 7.

Just to be clear, the Medicare drug benefit was a pure giveaway with a gross cost greater than either the House or Senate health reform bills how being considered. Together the new bills would cost roughly $900 billion over the next 10 years, while Medicare Part D will cost $1 trillion.

Moreover, there is a critical distinction--the drug benefit had no dedicated financing, no offsets and no revenue-raisers; 100% of the cost simply added to the federal budget deficit, whereas the health reform measures now being debated will be paid for with a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, adding nothing to the deficit over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. (See here for the Senate bill estimate and here for the House bill.)

Maybe Franks isn't the worst hypocrite I've ever come across in Washington, but he's got to be in the top 10 because he apparently thinks the unfunded drug benefit, which added $15.5 trillion (in present value terms) to our nation's indebtedness, according to Medicare's trustees, was worth sacrificing his integrity to enact into law. But legislation expanding health coverage to the uninsured--which is deficit-neutral--somehow or other adds an unacceptable debt burden to future generations. We truly live in a world only George Orwell could comprehend when our elected representatives so easily conflate one with the other.

Of course, there are good reasons conservatives oppose expanding the government, as the pending health legislation would do, even if it adds nothing to the deficit. But anyone who voted for the drug benefit, especially someone who switched his vote to make its enactment possible, has zero credibility. People like Franks ought to have the decency to keep their mouths shut forever when it comes to blaming anyone else for increasing the national debt.

Franks is not alone among Republicans for whom fiscal responsibility never consists of anything other than talk. The worst, undoubtedly, is DeLay, who actually went so far as to attack Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., last year for his principled vote against the drug benefit, one of only nine Republican senators to do so. (By my count, there are still 24 Republicans in the Senate who voted for the drug benefit, including such alleged conservatives as Jim Bunning and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, John Cornyn of Texas, Mike Crapo of Idaho, Orrin Hatch of Utah and Jon Kyl of Arizona.)

Amazingly, leading Republicans still defend the drug benefit. Just the other day, former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., celebrated its passage, and at a recent American Enterprise Institute forum, former House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas, R-Calif., berated me for criticizing it. In each case, their main argument was that it ended up costing a little less than originally projected. Somehow, I doubt that Frist or Thomas would feel the same way if their wives thought it was OK to buy a closet full of expensive new shoes just because they were on sale.

I don't mean to suggest that Democrats are any better when it comes to the deficit, although they have a better case for saying so based on the contrasting fiscal records of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The national debt belongs to both parties. But at least the Democrats don't go on Fox News day after day proclaiming how fiscally conservative they are, and organize tea parties to rant about deficits, without ever putting forward any plan for reducing them. Nor do they pretend that they have no responsibility whatsoever for projected deficits, at least half of which can be traced directly to Republican policies, according to Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag.

It astonishes me that a party enacting anything like the drug benefit would have the chutzpah to view itself as fiscally responsible in any sense of the term. As far as I am concerned, any Republican who voted for the Medicare drug benefit has no right to criticize anything the Democrats have done in terms of adding to the national debt. Space prohibits listing all their names, but the final Senate vote can be found here and the House vote here.

Bruce Bartlett is a former Treasury Department economist and the author of Reaganomics: Supply-Side Economics in Action and Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. Bruce Bartlett's new book is: The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.

Contrary to Popular Opinion, Democrats made Government Smaller, Republicans made it Bigger

Click on the table above to enlarge it.

Contrary to its claims and popular perception, the modern Republican Party has been the true practitioner of big government in recent decades. Democrats reduced the relative size of the U.S. federal government in the 1990s and Republicans expanded it in the 2000s. Under President Bill Clinton's leadership, Congress reduced the size of U.S. federal government expenditures from 22.1% of gross domestic product in 1992 to 18.4% of GDP in 2000. Under President George W. Bush, public expenditures increased to 20.5% of GDP in 2008.

Politicians are adept at deception by telling only part of the story.

Politicians are adept at deception by telling only part of the story. A good example is provided by the redesigned website for the Republican National Committee that portrays baseball legend Jackie Robinson as a Republican hero:

Jackie Robinson

In 1947, Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to play major league baseball in the United States, as a first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Not only was he a great athlete, Jackie Robinson was also a great Republican. He campaigned for Richard Nixon's presidential campaign in 1960 and then supported Nelson Rockefeller (R-NY) for the Republican nomination in 1964. Robinson worked as a special assistant in Governor Rockefeller’s administration.

The general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Branch Rickey, who hired Jackie Robinson, was also a Republican. The Missouri Republican Party later offered Rickey the nomination for Governor and Senator, but he preferred baseball to politics.

The Framingham (Massachusetts) Democratic Town Committee provides a more complete perspective of Robinson's political views in its excerpt from his autobiography:

JACKIE ROBINSON, Political life after baseball

Below is an excerpt from baseball great Jackie Robinson's autobiography.

Jack Roosevelt "Jackie" Robinson turned a page in history when he became the first African American player to cross baseball's "color barrier" and play in the Major Leagues in 1947. Robinson played 10 stellar seasons for the Brooklyn Dodgers before retiring from a Hall of Fame career.

After baseball Robinson went to work for Chock Full O' Nuts as a spokesman then continued his efforts to advance civil rights. He became actively involved in the campaign for Republican candidate Richard Nixon in the 1960 Presidential elections. Robinson opted to support Nixon over John F. Kennedy because he liked the work that Nixon had done in the area of civil rights during Nixon's years as Vice President. However Robinson later described his regret on having supported Nixon.

Two incidents during the 1960 campaign were quite disillusioning to Robinson. In one incident Nixon was asked to comment on a statement by running mate Henry Cabot Lodge who stated that in a Nixon Administration a black would be named to the Cabinet; Nixon commented that Lodge was speaking on his own behalf. Later during the campaign Nixon refused to speak out when civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was locked in a full-security prison for a minor motor vehicle infraction.

Further Nixon refused to campaign in Harlem (while Kennedy did). These incidents drew Robinson a great deal of criticism from the African American community for his support of the Nixon campaign. By the end of the campaign the Kennedy ticket was looking more attractive to Robinson, but he had already committed to Nixon.

Jackie Robinson did establish good ties with New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller (who later became Gerald Ford's Vice President). Robinson supported Rockefeller's bid during the 1964 Republican Primiaries. However after the GOP ticket went to Barry Goldwater, Robinson was disgusted at what he saw during the 1964 Republican National Convention.

Chapter XV of Robinson's autobiography I Never Had It Made has been transcribed below. This chapter, titled "On Begin Black Among The Republicans" describes the eye-opening experiences of Robinson within the Republican Party. Many of the sentiments he expressed in 1964 were heard again some four decades later following the 2004 Republican convention.


I NEVER HAD IT MADE
Jackie Robinson

Chapter XV: On Being Black Among The Republicans

My first meeting with Nelson Rockefeller occurred in 1962 during a public event at which we were both speakers. The Nelson Rockefeller personal charm and charisma had now become legendary. It is almost impossible not to like the man. He gives two distinct impressions: that he is sincere in whatever he is saying and that, in spite of his fantastic schedule, power, and influence - at that specific moment of your contact - he has shut everything else out and is focusing his complete and concentrated attention on you.

While I admired his down-to-earth manner and outgoing ways instantly, I was anything but overwhelmed at our initial meeting. I am aware that the enormously wealthy have time to spread charm as they like. They have their worries, but survival is not one of them. I wasn't about to be taken in instantly by the Nelson Rockefeller charm. After all, Richard Nixon had turned the charm on me too (although his is a bit brittle compared with Rockefeller's) and look how that had turned out.

I knew that Rockefeller's family had given enormous sums to black education and other philanthropic causes for black people and that at that time (nearly twenty years ago) a significant number of black college presidents, black professionals, and a significant number of leaders of national stature had received a college education, financed by Rockefeller gifts. While I have no need to detract from the contributions of the family to black education, I felt it certainly must be weighed in terms of what went into amassing one of the world's greatest fortunes.

As for Nelson Rockefeller himself, I knew little or nothing about his politics. As far as I was concerned, he was just another rich guy with politics as a toy. Our first chat had nothing to do with politics. In fact, the governor took advantage of the occasion to tell me about a private problem. Since I was an officer of the Chock Full O'Nuts Restaurant chain at that time, he thought I might be able to help him. It seemed the Rockefeller family was unhappy about one of our advertising jingles which assured the public that our coffee was as good as any "Rockefeller's money can buy." Representations about the family's feeling in the matter had been made through legal and diplomatic channels, but the offensive jingle was still being aired on radio and television commercials. I promised to mention the matter to Bill Black, Chock's president. I was surprised at Mr. Black's reaction. When I reported the Rockefeller concern, he snapped, "Good! Let them sue. We can use the publicity."

As far as I was concerned, that was the end of that. As far as I knew, I'd probably never be in contact with the governor again. However, I began to change my mind about Rockefeller, when I learned that the extent of his support for a man I admired deeply, Martin Luther King.

When student sit-ins began in the South and many so-called liberals criticized them, Governor Rockefeller told the press that he believed the protesting youngsters were morally justified. I also learned that, unlike Richard Nixon, who failed to speak out about the Georgia jailing of Dr. King, the governor had promptly wired the President asking for his protection.

I also learned of some of the governor's unpublicized actions. Before Rockefeller became governor, the world was stunned by the attempted assassination of Dr. King by a black woman in a Harlem department store. Rushed to Harlem Hospital, Dr. King, who had been wounded by a letter opener plunged into a spot just below the tip of his aorta, immediately was put in the care of a team of crack surgeons headed by Dr. Louis Wright. The newspapers gave intensive publicity to the fact that the then-Governor Harriman had sped to the hospital escorted by police convoy with shrieking sirens. Harriman ordered every available facility utilized to save Dr. King. He then stayed at the hospital for several hours, keeping vigil and awaiting word of the civil right's leader's condition. Governor Harriman deservedly got credit for his concern about a beloved black leader. But it was Nelson Rockefeller who quietly issued orders to have the hospital bill sent to him.

I learned that the governor had made frequent gifts to Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I was on the scene a few hours after hate-crazed bigots burned Georgia churches to the ground. Dr. King asked me top head a national fund-raising drive to restore the churches. Two of the first substantial donations were made by my then-boss Mr. William Black and by Governor Rockefeller. We did rebuild those churches.

Yet with all his goodwill gestures and philanthropies, there was one fact which bothered me deeply about the Rockefeller Administration in 1962. Although New York has, for many years, enjoyed a reputation as a liberal state, the higher echelons of the state government were all white. There were no blacks at top-level, policy making positions. There was not even one black man or woman who had a direct line to the governor and who could alert him to the concerns and grievances of black people. I wondered if Nelson Rockefeller's generosity to black causes was a compartmentalized activity of his private life, and I was sufficiently curious to write him a letter.

My letter to the governor was a harshly honest letter. I said I felt no self-respecting black man could respect an administration that had no blacks in significant jobs. Governor Rockefeller met my honesty head on. He telephoned me personally and told me how much he appreciated my truthfulness. He admitted that things were not as they should be for blacks in state government and that he wanted to take steps to correct this; he suggested we meet and talk things over within the next few days.

In the course of that telephone call, I bluntly said, "If you don't want to hear the down-to-earth truth about how you are thought of in the black community, let's just forget about it."

He assured me that he wanted and needed unbiased advice. The meeting, unadvertised in the press and unreported after it took place, was held in a private room at the top of Radio City Music Hall. About a dozen to fifteen people whom I had invited attended. For some three hours we told the governor our grievances about the failure of his administration to include blacks in the political and government action. The people there didn't hesitate to recite harsh facts. He was aware of some of the facts we gave him; other facts seemed to shock him. He accepted our criticism, our recommendations for change, and he acted to bring about reforms. He did not bring any apologists or token black leaders into the meeting to justify himself. He brought an open mind and someone to take notes.

Within a few months after that meeting, the governor had implemented virtually all the recommendations that the ad hoc committee had made. Out of that one meeting came some sweeping and drastic changes, some unprecedented appointments of blacks to high positions, ensuring influence by blacks in the governor's day-to-day policy decisions. Some of the governor's top-level people were very unhappy about these changes.

In 1964 Governor Rockeller asked me to become one of six deputy national directors of his campaign. I had spent seven years at Chock Full O'Nuts. I decided to resign from my job rather than ask for leave. The knowledge I had acquired about the business world, I considered invaluable. I had been criticized by some of my fellow officers in the company who genuinely felt I took the part of the employees to often, that I was too soft on them. Even so I had been given generous raises and benefits, allowed to purchase a healthy bundle of stock, and been elected to the board. I was becoming restless; I wanted to involve myself in politics as a means of helping black people and I wanted my own business enterprises. I had been increasingly convinced of the need for blacks to become more integrated into the mainstream of the economy. I was not thinking merely of job integration. A statement Malcolm X made was more impressive. Referring to some college students who were fighting to be served in Jim Crow restaurants, Malcolm said he wanted not only the cup of coffee but also the cup and saucer, the counter, the store and the land on which the restaurant stood.

I believed blacks ought to become producers, manufacturers, developers, and creators of businesses, providers of jobs. For too long we had been spending much too much money on liquor while we owned too few liquor stores and were not even manufacturing it. If you found a black man making shoes or candy or ice cream it was a rarity. We talked about not having capital, but we needed to learn to take a chance, to be daring, to pool capital, to organize our buy power so that the millions we spent did not leave our communities to be stacked up in th downtown banks. In addition to the economic security we could build with green power, we could use economic means to reinforce black power. How much more effective our demands for a piece of the action would be if we were negotiating from the strength of our own self-reliance rather than stating our case in the role of a beggar or someone out for charity. We live in a materialistic society in which money doesn't only talk - it screams. I could not forget that some of the very ballplayers who swore the most fervently that they wouldn't play with me because I was black were the first to begin helping me, giving me tips and advice, as soon as they became aware that I could be helpful to them in winning the few thousand more dollars players receive as world champs. The most prejudiced of the club owners were not as upset about the game being contaminated by black players as they were by fearing the integration would hurt them in the pocketbooks. Once they found out that more - not fewer - customers, black and white, were coming through those turnstiles, their prejudices were suppressed.

When Governor Rockefeller invited me on board his campaign ship, I had no idea of any long-term relationship in politics. I saw this as a sign that now was the time for me to enter into a new world of political involvement with a man I respected. At the same time I could be free to pursue some business endeavors that had been proposed to me. I had been approached about becoming a key organizer in a projected, new insurance company, an integrated firm that, I hoped, could be a force in correcting some of the unjust practices of some insurance firms that treat blacks unfairly. At this time the group organizing a new bank in Harlem - Freedom National - had asked me to help put it together and to become chairman of the board, and there were other business ventures in which I felt I might be able to play a vital role. When I submitted my resignation to Bill Black, he understood my aspirations. He didn't want me to leave, and he was genuinely concerned as to whether I was making the wisest move. He tried to persuade me to stay. I appreciated his attitude, but my mind was made up. I joined the Rockefeller headquarters.

One of the first things that became clear to me was that I had not been called on to be the black adviser to the campaign. Often white politicians secure the services of a black man and slot him only for appearances and activities within the black community. Sometimes they do this to avoid letting whites know that they are making a strong pitch for black support. During the Rockefeller campaign I met with groups and made appearances before audiences which were sometimes predominately black, and other times mainly white. On several occasions, when the governor came into town for a meeting with politicians or community people, I would accompany him. At some of the larger meetings, I would be asked to introduce the governor.

I was not as sold on the Republican party as I was on the governor. Every chance I got, while I was campaigning, I said plainly what I thought of the right-wing Republicans and the harm they were doing. I felt the GOP was a minority party in term of numbers of registered voters and could not win unless they updated their social philosophy and sponsored candidates and principles to attract the young, the black, and the independent voter. I said this often from public, and frequently Republican, platforms. By and large Republicans had ignored blacks and sometimes handpicked a few servile leaders in the black community to be their token "niggers". How would I sound trying to go all out to sell Republicans to black people? They're not buying. They know better.

I admit freely that I think, live, and breathe black first and foremost. That is one of the reasons I was so committed to the governor and so opposed to Senator Barry Goldwater. Early in 1964 I wrote a Speaking Out piece for The Saturday Evening Post. A Barry Goldwater victory would insure that the GOP would be completely the white man's party. What happened at San Francisco when Senator Goldwater became the Republican standard-bearer confirmed my prediction.

I wasn’t altogether caught of guard by the victory of the reactionary forces in the Republican party, but I was appalled by the tactics they used to stifle their liberal opposition. I was a special delegate to the convention through an arrangement made by the Rockefeller office. That convention was one of the most unforgettable and frightening experiences of my life. The hatred I saw was unique to me because it was hatred directed against a white man. It embodied a revulsion for all he stood for, including his enlightened attitude toward black people.

A new breed of Republicans had taken over the GOP. As I watched this steamroller operation in San Francisco, I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.

The same high-handed methods had been there.

The same belief in the superiority of one religious or racial group over another was here. Liberals who fought so hard and so vainly were afraid not only of what would happen to the GOP but of what would happen to America. The Goldwaterites were afraid – afraid not to hew strictly to the line they had been spoon-fed, afraid to listen to logic and reason if it was not in their script.

I will never forget the fantastic scene of Governor Rockefeller’s ordeal as he endured what must have been three minutes of hysterical abuse and booing which interrupted his fighting statement which the convention managers had managed to delay until the wee hours of the morning. Since the telecast was coming from the West Coast, that meant that many people in other sections of the country, because of the time differential, would be in their beds. I don’t think he has ever stood taller than that night when he refused to be silenced until he had had his say.

It was a terrible hour for the relatively few black delegates who were present. Distinguished in their communities, identified with the cause of Republicanism, an extremely unpopular cause among blacks, they had been served notice that the party they had fought for considered them just another bunch of “niggers”. They had no real standing in the convention, no clout. They were unimportant and ignored. One bigot from one of the Deep South states actually threw acid on a black delegate’s suit jacket and burned it. Another one, from the Alabama delegation where I was standing at the time of the Rockefeller speech, turned on me menacingly while I was shouting “C’mon Rocky” as the governor stood his ground. He started up in his seat as if to come after me. His wife grabbed his arm and pulled him back.

“Turn him loose, lady, turn him loose,” I shouted.

I was ready for him. I wanted him badly, but luckily for him he obeyed his wife.

I had been very active on that convention floor. I was one of those trying to help bring about a united front among the black delegates in the hope of thwarting the Goldwater drive. George Parker had courageously challenged Goldwater in vain and Edward Brooke had lent his uncompromising sincerity to the convention. I sat in with them after the nomination as they agonized about what they should do. Some were for walking out of the convention and even out of the party. Others felt that, as gloomy as things looked, the wisest idea was to remain within the party and fight. Throughout the convention, I had been interviewed several times on network television. When I was asked my opinion of Barry Goldwater, I gave it. I said I thought he was a bigot. I added that he was not as important as the forces behind him. I was genuinely concerned, for instance, about Republican National Committee Chairman William Miller, slated to become the Vice Presidential candidate. Bill Miller could have become the Agnew of his day if he had been elected. He was a man who apparently believed you never said a decent thing in political campaigning if you could think of a way to be nasty, insinuating, and abrasive. What with the columns I had written about Goldwater, The Saturday Evening Post article, and the television and radio interview, I had achieved a great deal of publicity about the way I felt about Goldwater.

Although I know it is the way of politicians to forget their differences and unify around the victor, it disgusted me to see how quickly the various anti-Goldwater GOP kingpins got converted. Richard Nixon, who hadn’t really fought Goldwater and had in fact been an ally, naturally became one of his most staunch supporters. You could expect that. Governor Romney, who had fought the Goldwater concept so vigorously, got religion. The convert who around the most cynical feelings in my mind was Governor William Scranton. When Governor Rockefeller had withdrawn from the race, during the primaries, Rockefeller supporters turned to Scranton because he had become the governor’s choice. At the request of the governor I had a meeting with Scranton in his beautiful home in Pennsylvania.

Governor Scranton welcomed me graciously, introduced me to his family, and conducted me to a veranda where we sat and sipped iced tea. The governor pledged that he was going to put up a terrific fight against Goldwater. He expressed his gratitude for Governor Rockefeller’s support and for my agreeing to come to see him. For at least ten minutes he orated about Barry Goldwater, what a threat Goldwaterism is to the country and the party. I didn’t ask him for it, but he gave his solemn oath that even if Goldwater won the nomination, he, Bill Scranton, could never conceivably, under any circumstances, support him. Even if he wanted to, which he said he didn’t, it would be political suicide in his state for him to join a Goldwater bandwagon. He was unequivocal about this, and months later, when I saw on television how quickly Governor Scranton pledged his loyalty to nominee Goldwater, how eagerly he engaged in some of the most revolting high-level white Uncle Tomism I’ve ever seen – fawning on Goldwater and vigorously campaigning for him around the country – I had to wonder if this was, indeed, the same man who had nearly sworn on the Bible that he could never do what he was doing.

In marked contrast to the Scranton flip-flop, there were some Republicans who proved themselves true to their principles, party loyalty not withstanding. Senator Jacob Jarvits stated flatly that he could not support Goldwater; Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, who had sounded off early about the Goldwater threat, announced that he would be running his own campaign in that same states where Bill Scranton had had a change of heart. Scott, whom I had admired for years because of his liberal words and legislation, took his chance of letting it be known he was snubbing the head of his party’s national ticket. As for Governor Rockefeller, while he did not publicly reject Goldwater, it was no secret that he didn’t break his back to try to help elect him. No doubt, the Senator and his campaign manager, Bill Miller, had things more comfortable for the governor symbolically to go fishing by not going down on their hands and knees to beg for his participation. There was a great business of calling unity meetings of all prominent Republicans. Unity, it appeared, meant to Goldwater and Miller, “Let’s cooperate. You do it my way.”

Apparently, I was one of the preconvention opposition who Senator Goldwater thought he could unify into his campaign. Although I had let it be widely known that I intended to do all I could for LBJ, Candidate Goldwater sent me an invitation early; in August to come to Washington to have breakfast with him. He suggested that I really didn’t know him well enough to condemn him and that he felt we might be able to learn something from each other.

Some people will say I should have accepted the invitation. I did not reject it in hasty anger. My instinct simply told me immediately that the only way the Senator could sell me his candidacy was if he repudiated the John Birchers, the dirty campaign tactics of Bill Miller who was his running mate, and some of the basic standards he and his crowd had set. I knew he wasn’t about to do all that simply to get my support.

I resolved that I should not allow myself to get boxed into the image of being a hothead, unwilling, for no good reason, to talk things over. Consequently, I released the text of my reply to the Goldwater invitation to the press. In that letter I told the Senator I was releasing my reply to the national press. The letter said in part:

“You say to me that you are interested in breaking bread with me and discussing your views on civil rights. Senator, on pain of appearing facetious, I must relate to you a rather well-known story regarding the noted musician, Louis Armstrong, who was once asked to explain jazz. “If you have to ask,” Mr. Armstrong replied, “you wouldn’t understand.”

What are you going to tell me, Senator Goldwater, which you cannot or do not choose to tell the country – or which you could not have told the convention which you controlled so rigidly that it booed Nelson Rockefeller, a distinguished fellow-Republican?

What are you going to say about extremism now? You called for it and the answer came in the thudding feet and the crashing store windows and the Molotov cocktails and the crack of police bullets and the clubbing of heads and the hate and the violence and the fear which electrified Harlem and Rochester and Jersey. I am solidly committed to the peaceful, non-violent mass action of the Negro people in pursuit of long-overdue justice. But I am as much opposed to the extremism of Negro rioters and Negro hoodlums as I am to the sheeted Klan, to the sinister Birchers and to the insidious citizens’ Councils.

If, in view of these questions, which I raise in absolute sincerity and conviction, you still think a meeting between us would be fruitful, I am available at your convenience.”


My letter to the Senator did not receive any response from him. It did get a response from many people who read it in the newspapers. The fan mail ran about half and half, with some people giving me a hard time for not accepting Senator Goldwater’s invitation and other declaring that I told him off.

I joined the national headquarters of Republicans for Johnson, based in New York, and accepted speaking assignments wherever I could to tell black and white and mixed audiences how deeply I felt that Goldwater must be overwhelmingly repudiated. It was during the Johnson-Goldwater campaign that I had one of my confrontations with the articulate, eyebrow-raising William Buckley, owner of National Review magazine and star of the controversial Firing Line television show.

I was booked on a television Conservatism panel which included Bill Buckley, Shelley Winters, and myself. When my friends and family learned I had consented to participate, they were aghast.

“Send a telegram and say you can’t make it”, one friend told me. “Bill Buckley will destroy you. He really knows how to make people look foolish.”

I was glad to receive these warnings. I didn’t have the slightest intention of backing out, although I already had a healthy respect for Buckley’s craft as debater. These apprehensions of my friends made me create an advance strategy which I otherwise might have not employed. I lifted it strictly out of my sports background. When you know that you are going to face a tough, tricky opponent, you don’t let him get the first lick. Jump him before he can do anything and stay on him, keeping him on the defensive. Never let up and you rattle him effectively. When the show opened up – before Buckley could get into his devastating act of using snide remarks, big words, and the superior manner – I lit right into whim with the charge that many influential Goldwaterites were racists. Shelley Winters piled in behind me, and Buckley scarcely got a chance to collect his considerable wit. A man who prides himself on coming out of verbal battle cool, smiling, and victorious, he lost his calm, became snappish and irritated, and, when the show was over and everyone else was shaking hands, got up and strode angrily out of the studio.

It was a small victory, but an important one for me. There didn’t seem to be much to win in those days on the political scene but I have always believed in fighting, even if only to keep the negative forces back. That is why I had some measure of satisfaction in helping Johnson win in ’64.

Republican Solutions Handbook

Republican Solutions Handbook

Does the Republican Party have a proposal for health insurance reform?

So just exactly what does the Republican Party stand for these days? Health care costs are skyrocketing. Rising premiums for health insurance reduce what employers could otherwise give workers as a pay raise. Corporate profits remain high as health insurers actively deny legitimate claims. Administrative costs for corporate health care are about 20%, compared to 3% for government run Medicare. Even ignoring the millions of people with no health insurance, is there not still a need for reform of the health insurance industry?

Joe Klein argues the Republican Party is focused on acquiring and maintaining power - not doing what is best for the citizens it allegedly represents. So in the health care debate, they are obstructionists. Even when conservatives have helpful contributions, they are silenced by pressure from those who do not want the current administration to accomplish anything of benefit to the American people.

In his August 20, 2009 TIME magazine column "The GOP Has Become a Party of Nihilists," Klein argues:

In one of those awful collisions between public policy and real life, I was in the midst of an awkward conversation about end-of-life issues with my father when Sarah Palin raised the remarkable idea that the Obama Administration's attempt to include such issues in its health-care-reform proposal would lead to "death panels." Let me tell you something about my family situation, a common one these days, in order to illuminate the obscenity of Palin's formulation and the cowardice of those, like Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, the lead Republican negotiator on the Senate Finance Committee, who have refused to contest her claim.

Both my parents are 89 years old. They have been inseparable, with the exception of my father's service in World War II, since kindergarten. My mother has lost her sight and is quite frail. My father takes care of her and my aunt Rose, lovingly, with some — but not enough — private help at their home in central Pennsylvania. One night in early August, I had a terrible scare. I called home and Aunt Rose was freaking out; she didn't know where my father was. All the worst possibilities crossed my mind — it turned out he was just getting the mail — as well as a very difficult reality: if he'd had a stroke, I would have had no idea about what he'd want me to do. I had lunch with him the next day to discuss this.

It wasn't easy. My dad is very proud and independent. He didn't really want to talk about what came next. He was pretty sure, but not certain, that he'd signed a living will. He was very reluctant to sign an enduring power of attorney to empower me, or my brother, to make decisions about his care and my mom's if he were incapacitated. I tried to convince him that it was important to make some plans, but I didn't have the strategic experience that a professional would have — and, in his eyes, I didn't have the standing. I may be a grandfather myself, but I'm still just a kid in my dad's mind. Clearly, an independent, professional authority figure was needed. And this is what the "death panels" are all about: making end-of-life counseling free and available through Medicare. (I'd make it mandatory, based on recent experience, but hey, I'm not entirely clearheaded on the subject right now.)

Given the heinous dust that's been raised, it seems likely that end-of-life counseling will be dropped from the health-reform legislation. But that's a small point, compared with the larger issue that has clouded this summer: How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists? And another question: How can you maintain the illusion of journalistic impartiality when one of the political parties has jumped the shark? [Watch Fonzie jump the shark.]

I'm not going to try. I've written countless "Democrats in Disarray" stories over the years and been critical of the left on numerous issues in the past. This year, the liberal insistence on a marginally relevant public option has been a tactical mistake that has enabled the right's "government takeover" disinformation jihad. There have been times when Democrats have run demagogic scare campaigns on issues like Social Security and Medicare. There are more than a few Democrats who believe, in practice, that government should be run for the benefit of government employees' unions. There are Democrats who are so solicitous of civil liberties that they would undermine legitimate covert intelligence collection. There are others who mistrust the use of military power under almost any circumstances. But these are policy differences, matters of substance. The most liberal members of the Democratic caucus — Senator Russ Feingold in the Senate, Representative Dennis Kucinich in the House, to name two — are honorable public servants who make their arguments based on facts. They don't retail outright lies. Hyperbole and distortion certainly exist on the left, but they are a minor chord in the Democratic Party.

It is a very different story among Republicans. To be sure, there are honorable conservatives, trying to do the right thing. There is a legitimate, if wildly improbable, fear that Obama's plan will start a process that will end with a health-care system entirely controlled by the government. There are conservatives — Senator Lamar Alexander, Representative Mike Pence, among many others — who make their arguments based on facts. But they have been overwhelmed by nihilists and hypocrites more interested in destroying the opposition and gaining power than in the public weal. The philosophically supple party that existed as recently as George H.W. Bush's presidency has been obliterated. The party's putative intellectuals — people like the Weekly Standard's William Kristol — are prosaic tacticians who make precious few substantive arguments but oppose health-care reform mostly because passage would help Barack Obama's political prospects. In 1993, when the Clintons tried health-care reform, the Republican John Chafee offered a creative (in fact, superior) alternative — which Kristol quashed with his famous "Don't Help Clinton" fax to the troops. There is no Republican health-care alternative in 2009. The same people who rail against a government takeover of health care tried to enforce a government takeover of Terri Schiavo's end-of-life decisions. And when Palin floated the "death panel" canard, the number of prominent Republicans who rose up to call her out could be counted on one hand.

A striking example of the prevailing cravenness was Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia, who has authored end-of-life counseling provisions and told the Washington Post that comparing such counseling to euthanasia was nuts — but then quickly retreated when he realized that he had sided with the reality-based community against his Rush Limbaugh-led party. Mitt Romney, the Republican front-runner for President according to most polls, actually created a universal-health-care plan in Massachusetts that looks very much like the proposed Obamacare, but he spends much of his time trying to fudge the similarities and was AWOL on the "death panels." Why are these men so reluctant to be rational in public?

An argument can be made that this is nothing new. Dwight Eisenhower tiptoed around Joe McCarthy. Obama reminded an audience in Colorado that opponents of Social Security in the 1930s "said that everybody was going to have to wear dog tags and that this was a plot for the government to keep track of everybody ... These struggles have always boiled down to a contest between hope and fear." True enough. There was McCarthyism in the 1950s, the John Birch Society in the 1960s. But there was a difference in those times: the crazies were a faction — often a powerful faction — of the Republican Party, but they didn't run it. The neofascist Father Coughlin had a huge radio audience in the 1930s, but he didn't have the power to control and silence the elected leaders of the party that Limbaugh — who, if not the party's leader, is certainly the most powerful Republican extant — does now. Until recently, the Republican Party contained a strong moderate wing. It was a Republican, the lawyer Joseph Welch, who delivered the coup de grâce to Senator McCarthy when he said, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" Where is the Republican who would dare say that to Rush Limbaugh, who has compared the President of the United States to Adolf Hitler?

This is a difficult situation for the President. Cynicism about government is always easy, even if it now seems apparent that it was government action — by both Obama and, yes, George W. Bush — that prevented a reprise of the Great Depression. I watched Obama as he traveled the Rocky Mountain West, holding health-care forums, trying to lance the boil by eliciting questions from the irrational minority that had pulverized the public forums held by lesser pols. He would search the crowds for a first-class nutter who might challenge him on "death panels," but he was constantly disappointed. In Colorado, he locked in on an angry-looking fellow in a teal T shirt — but the guy's fury was directed at the right-wing disinformation campaign. Obama seemed to sag. He had to bring up the "death panels" himself.

This may tell us something about the actual state of play on health care: the nutters are a tiny minority; the Republicans are curling themselves into a tight, white, extremist bubble — but there may be enough of them raising dust to render creative public policy impossible. Some righteous anger seems called for, but that's not Obama's style. He will have to come up with something, though — and he will have to do it without the tiniest scintilla of help from the Republican Party.

GOP unifies against any more stimulus spending

According to Associated Press writer Philip Elliott in a July 12, 2009 article "GOP unifies against any more stimulus spending":

WASHINGTON – Republicans lined up Sunday in opposition to a second economic stimulus package, a rare demonstration of unity from an out-of-power political party in search of a rallying cry against President Barack Obama.
Republicans called Obama's $787 billion spending plan a "flop" and said it hasn't fulfilled its hype. They criticized the White House for increasing the federal deficit and doing little to combat an unemployment rate that hit 9.5 percent in June.
"The reality is it hasn't helped yet," said Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. "Only about 6.8 percent of the money has actually been spent. What I proposed is, after you complete the contracts that are already committed, the things that are in the pipeline, stop it."
Obama urged patience with his spending program, which administration officials acknowledge was designed with incorrect or incomplete economic data.
"The stimulus package is working exactly as we had anticipated," Obama told CNN in an interview from Ghana that aired on Sunday.
"We always anticipated that a big chunk of that money then would be spent not only in the second half of the year, but also next year. This was designed to be a two-year plan and not a six-month plan," he said.
Republicans, though, were not willing to sit by idly.
"I do think it is fair to say that the stimulus is a flop," said Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va. "The goal that was set when we passed it was unemployment wouldn't rise past 8.5 percent, and what we see now is businesses just aren't hiring. Even the best projections have us losing 750,000 more jobs this year."
Congress passed Obama's economic stimulus plan over the objection of out-of-power Republican lawmakers. Since then, GOP aides on Capitol Hill and officials alike have seized on the spending's shortcomings and unfilled promises.
"A lot of it has been spent on ridiculous projects," said Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who was his party's presidential nominee last year.
Obama's allies defended the spending they helped usher into law.
"It's a two-year plan and we're four months into it," said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.
Some, including billionaire Warren Buffett, have called for a second round of spending to steady the economy. Obama and his allies have said it's too early to make that decision; his critics, though, pledged to redouble their opposition to any second spending bill.
"I think that would be the biggest mistake we could ever make," McCain said.
Kyl and Durbin appeared on ABC's "This Week." Cantor spoke with "Fox News Sunday." McCain was interviewed on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Joe Scarborough says GOP has chosen Republicanism over conservatism.

During a Meet the Press interview with conservative commentator Joe Scarborough on June 14, 2009, host David Gregory read from Scarborough's new book, The Last Best Hope, which is "a real thoughtful examination of where the Republican Party is and where it should be going. This is what you write, page 234:"

"I told [2006] Republican candidates that if they wanted to remain in the majority, they would have to admit to voters that the [Bush] White House had been reckless with taxpayer dollars. ... Our president was wrong to believe that the United States could fight two wars, cut taxes, and increase federal spending, all at once. Once again, Republican candidates choose Republicanism over conservatism. They chose instead to remain silent. The result was a political and economic disaster we will be paying for over the next generation."

Like former Congressman Mickey Edwards (the author of Reclaiming Conservatism), Joe Scarborough is another long-time conservative who is very critical of the modern Republican Party

Reagan wouldn't recognize this GOP

In a January 24, 2009 editorial in the Los Angeles Times, former Republican Congressman Mickey Edwards argues:

In my mind's eye, I can see Ronald Reagan, wearing wings and a Stetson, perched on a cloud and watching all the goings-on down here in his old earthly home. Laughing, rolling his eyes and whacking his forehead over the absurdities he sees, he's watching his old political party as it twists itself into ever more complex knots, punctuated only by pauses to invoke the Gipper's name. It's been said that God would be amazed by what his followers ascribe to him; believe me, Reagan would be similarly amazed by what his most fervent admirers cite in their desire to be seen as true-blue Reaganites.

On the premise that simple is best, many Republicans have reduced their operating philosophy to two essentials: First, government is bad (it's "the problem"); second, big government is the worst and small government is better (although because government itself is bad, it may be assumed that small government is only marginally preferable). This is all errant nonsense. It is wrong in every conceivable way and violative of the Constitution, American exceptionalism, freedom, conservatism, Reaganism and common sense.

In America, government is ... us. What is "exceptional" about America is the depth of its commitment to the principle of self-government; we elect the government, we replace it or its members when they displease us, and by our threats or support, we help steer what government does.

A shocker: The Constitution, which we love for the limits it places on government power, not only constrains government, it empowers it. Limited government is not no government. And limited government is not "small" government. Simply building roads, maintaining a military, operating courts, delivering the mail and doing other things specifically mandated by the Constitution for America's 300 million people make it impossible to keep government "small." It is boundaries that protect freedom. Small governments can be oppressive, and large ones can diminish freedoms. It is the boundaries, not the numbers, that matter.

What would Reagan think of this? Wasn't it he who warned that government is the problem? Well, permit me. I directed the joint House-Senate policy advisory committees for the Reagan presidential campaign. I was part of his congressional steering committee. I sat with him in his hotel room in Manchester, N.H., the night he won that state's all-important primary. I knew him before he was governor of California and before I was a member of Congress. Let me introduce you to Ronald Reagan.

Reagan, who spent 16 years in government, actually said this:

"In the present crisis," referring specifically to the high taxes and high levels of federal spending that had marked the Carter administration, "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." He then went on to say: "Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it's not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work." Government, he said, "must provide opportunity." He was not rejecting government, he was calling -- as Barack Obama did Tuesday -- for better management of government, for wiser decisions.

This is the difference between ideological advocacy and holding public office: Having accepted partial responsibility for the nation's well-being, one assumes an obligation that goes beyond bumper-sticker slogans. Certitude is the enemy of wisdom, and in office, it is wisdom, not certitude, that is required.

How, for example, should conservatives react to stimulus and bailout proposals in the face of an economic meltdown? The wall between government and the private sector is an essential feature of our democracy. At the same time, if there is a dominant identifier of conservatism -- political, social, psychological -- it is prudence.

If proposals seem unworkable or unwise (if they do not contain provisions for taxpayers to recoup their investment; if they do not allow for taxpayers, as de facto shareholders, to insist on sound management practices; if they would allow government officials to make production and pricing decisions), conservatives have a responsibility to resist. But they also have an obligation to propose alternative solutions. It is government's job -- Reagan again -- to provide opportunity and foster productivity. With the nation in financial collapse, nothing is more imprudent -- more antithetical to true conservatism -- than to do nothing.

The Republican Party that is in such disrepute today is not the party of Reagan. It is the party of Rush Limbaugh, of Ann Coulter, of Newt Gingrich, of George W. Bush, of Karl Rove. It is not a conservative party, it is a party built on the blind and narrow pursuit of power.

Not too long ago, conservatives were thought of as the locus of creative thought. Conservative think tanks (full disclosure: I was one of the three founding trustees of the Heritage Foundation) were thought of as cutting-edge, offering conservative solutions to national problems. By the 2008 elections, the very idea of ideas had been rejected. One who listened to Barry Goldwater's speeches in the mid-'60s, or to Reagan's in the '80s, might have been struck by their philosophical tone, their proposed (even if hotly contested) reformulation of the proper relationship between state and citizen. Last year's presidential campaign, on the other hand, saw the emergence of a Republican Party that was anti-intellectual, nativist, populist (in populism's worst sense) and prepared to send Joe the Plumber to Washington to manage the nation's public affairs.

American conservatism has always had the problem of being misnamed. It is, at root, the political twin to classical European liberalism, a freedoms-based belief in limiting the power of government to intrude on the liberties of the people. It is the opposite of European conservatism (which Winston Churchill referred to as reverence for king and church); it is rather the heir to John Locke and James Madison, and a belief that the people should be the masters of their government, not the reverse (a concept largely turned on its head by the George W. Bush presidency).

Over the last several years, conservatives have turned themselves inside out: They have come to worship small government and have turned their backs on limited government. They have turned to a politics of exclusion, division and nastiness. Today, they wonder what went wrong, why Americans have turned on them, why they lose, or barely win, even in places such as Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina.

And, watching, I suspect Ronald Reagan is smacking himself on the forehead, rolling his eyes and wondering who in the world these clowns are who want so desperately to wrap themselves in his cloak.

Mickey Edwards is a former U.S. congressman, a lecturer at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School and the author of "Reclaiming Conservatism."

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