Recognizing the Failure of Reaganomics

Nearly every presidential candidate in my memory has promised to change Washington for the better. Politicians need to do things differently, we're told. To work together, to find common ground, to put aside politics for the good of the nation. It all sounds good, but the problem with this promise is that you're promising to change someone else. If Washington doesn't want to change, Washington isn't going to change. And, as we've seen in recent years, if Washington actually wants to get worse, then there isn't a lot any one person can do about it. Barack Obama, like every candidate before him, promised to change the way Washington worked. The problem was that he meant it.

President Obama kept to this centrist, moderate path long after it became clear it didn't lead anywhere. Republicans became a jerking-kneed herd, obstructing anything Democratic, out of a fit of sore-loserism and the belief that political sabotage would pay off for them at the ballot box. Centrism should have died, but Obama seemed to believe there was still some hope. There wasn't. There can probably never be. Democracy is an adversarial system and fighting is built in. A system where one side wins and one side loses once every two years fosters competition, not cooperation. The basic argument behind centrism and moderation is deeply, deeply flawed; that cooperation is more important than the best ideas, that the process is more important than the result.

So it came as both a surprise and a relief when President Obama spoke at Osawatomie, Kansas yesterday. The centrist Obama was mostly absent. Instead, a partisan Obama stepped up to the podium.

Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes -- especially for the wealthy -- our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, well, that’s the price of liberty.

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GOP Insiders Panic Over Gingrich

Please excuse the above ante-meridian idiocy. I normally don't have a lot of use for talking heads and the worst are morning talking heads. Apparently, when you first get up, you're five years old. While MSNBC's Morning Joe never quite plums the depths that Fox and Friends reaches, it's clearly not for a lack of trying. Joe Scarborough and his merry band don't seem to have it in them to pretend to be quite so stupid as Fox's AM freak show, but that doesn't stop them from giving it the old college try.

The clip is brought to our attention by Taylor Marsh, who has this to say about it:

The Republican establishment has seen what their base is about to do and they’re in a panic and rightly so. The tipping point coming when Donald Trump reentered the fray with his Apprentice Debate, the optics and audio of which boiled down the Republican farce we’ve been watching all year.

This segment is delicious... really, watch it. At one point at then end of the opening segment of “Morning Joe,” Scarborough even served up that Republicans are talking about how to “broker a convention.” The Hill has a further report along the same lines, though it’s not just the “kingmakers” in a meltdown over the very real possibility of Newt Gingrich winning the nomination. It’s everybody in the entire conservative echelon.

If you can't bring yourself to watch the video, I can hardly blame you. Suffice it to say that Scarborough -- who served with Newt and knows him personally -- sees the possibility of a Gingrich nomination as a looming disaster. It's a meteor on a collision course with the GOP and would cause the party to lose bigger than Goldwater did in '64.

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The Average 'Deeply-Held Conservative Belief' Probably has a Shelf-Life of Six Months

Last week, I wrote about one of the hallmarks of modern Republican thought; believing what they want to believe. In that post, I focused mainly on a completely backwards economic philosophy that basically argues that if you put more bread on store shelves, more customers will magically appear to buy it. In the alternate reality that the GOP want so badly to inhabit, supply drives demand. Employers don't hire people because they need them, they hire people because they can afford them. In GOPWorld, if you hire someone you don't need, you're "growing your business" and customers will start beating down your door. Therefore, the road to universal prosperity is paved with tax cuts, so everyone can afford to hire a whole bunch of people that they currently don't need.

If that makes absolutely no sense at all to you, then congratulations; you're not stupid. Economic growth is consumer-driven, not employer-driven. And if you're hiring people to make bread for non-existent customers, that bread will rot on the shelves and you'll go broke. The supply-side fairy who waves a wand to create customers out of thin air doesn't exist, sorry. But Republicans don't want to hear that, so it's just not true at all for them.

But it's possible for a species to be unique for more than one trait. And Republicans also share another trait that separates them from you or me; shameless hypocrisy. It actually goes hand in hand with believing what you want to believe; the marriage results in cognitive dissonance.

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In Payroll Tax Cut Debate, GOP War on Facts Marches On

There are a lot of things to dislike about the modern Republican Party. There's the attitude they have toward what they consider "the other" -- i.e., gays, lesbians, non-Christians, etc. -- that casts nearly every person who doesn't look like they just stepped out of Normal Rockwell print as an obvious enemy of America. There's the authoritarian bent that would control who you love and what you say, that would listen in on your phone calls and torture you pretty much at whim, that would have even minor offenders in prison and loves the death penalty, and would mark every miscarried pregnancy as a potential murder scene and force women to give birth against their will. But the biggest problem with the Republican Party -- in fact, the problem from which almost all of the other problems stem -- is their hostility to plain, provable fact.

From climate to evolution to economics, we see Republicans believing what they'd like to be true, rather than what is true. When Michele Bachmann said that the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine (which reduces cervical cancer in women by preventing a very common STD) caused "mental retardation," it wasn't because she had any evidence of it, but because she wanted it to be true. Social conservatives oppose the HPV vaccine because they believe that protection increases sexual activity among teens. Not surprisingly, this isn't true either, for the exact same reason that airbags don't increase car crashes. But Bachmann believes whatever it is she wants to believe, because that's just what Republicans do.

Case in point:

Reuters:

In late-night votes, the Senate, as expected, defeated a Democratic plan that would have extended and expanded the payroll tax cut that is scheduled to expire on December 31.

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Strategist to GOP Governors: 'I'm so Scared of This Anti-Wall Street Effort'

One of my favorite arguments from the conservative side is that the wealthy deserve their wealth because they worked harder for it. While I don't doubt that a hedge fund manager puts in long hours, I do doubt that a single one of them anywhere in the world works harder than your average bricklayer on any given construction site. If the Republican formula of hard-work-equals-wealth were true, I'm guessing that construction workers, migrant farm workers, dock workers, soldiers, etc. would be at the top of every Forbes list and hedge fund managers, CEOs, mortgage company execs, money traders, etc. would be collecting food stamps.

Which is why this advice from conservative spinmeister Frank Luntz strikes me as so off-the-mark:

Republicans should forget about winning the battle over the 'middle class.' Call them 'hardworking taxpayers.'

"They cannot win if the fight is on hardworking taxpayers. We can say we defend the 'middle class' and the public will say, I'm not sure about that. But defending 'hardworking taxpayers' and Republicans have the advantage."

At least he's being somewhat realistic. But when a Republican says they stand for the middle class, I'm not thinking, "I'm not sure about that" -- I'm holding my sides and laughing. Think of Mitt Romney talking about "the 80 to 90 percent of us in this country," as if he's just some ordinary fella who decided to run for president and not a bona fide member of the 1%.

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