After Obama beat the Republicans in 2008, people began to ask, why don’t the Republicans have any ideas of their own, other than the notion that beating up on Democrats is fun? The GOP tried several times to relaunch itself as a laboratory for policy innovation, with disastrous results; what few ideas they've presented, involve either (a) undoing everything Obama has done, or (b) reheating their old, discredited hash of deregulation and tax cuts for the rich.
Many thanks to the Washington Independent for tracking the multiple GOP marketing efforts to repackage the same old junk as something new.
Rebuild the Party, November. Mission: “Set in motion the changes needed to rebuild our party from the grassroots up, modernize the way we run campaigns, and attract different, energetic, and younger candidates at all levels.”
The Center for Republican Renewal, December. Mission: “identifying the most innovative ideas and policies from across the nation.”
Young Conservatives Coalition, February. Mission: “To implement a new conservative agenda for the 21st century".
The Tea Party movement, February. Mission: cut taxes on the rich and slash spending, no matter how much damage it all does.
Renewing American Leadership, March. Mission: Unite social and economic conservatives to survive a “crisis in which the secular state, if allowed, will fundamentally and radically change America against the wishes of most Americans.”
Resurgent Republic, April. Mission: “Promote market-oriented policies, lower taxes and economic growth, and strong national security policies.”
The National Council for a New America, April. Mission: Bring together Republican leaders to “engage with and empower the American people to develop innovative solutions that meet the serious challenges confronting our country.”
Here's a clue, boys: when your party has actual leaders and a message that people want, you don't need to repackage your garbage in a fancy new box every month.
Some of these ideas are not only pointless but counterproductive for the GOP. House Speaker John Boehner put out yet another manifesto, Pledge To America, while Eric Cantor, a key Boehner deputy and rival, put out YouCut, a website inviting voters to vote for the government programs they’d like to cut; some of the ideas submitted were truly destructive but Cantor tried to get the House to vote on them anyway. Boehner’s team reportedly was furious with Cantor because Cantor’s effort drew attention away from Boehner’s.
By late 2009, the Republicans became a bit more frank about their program: beating Democrats. The RNC was openly working on a purity test for candidates, which was bad enough, and terribly stifling to any original thinking. But the elements of the test were mostly about opposing anything Obama and the Democrats did, rather than maintaining simon-purity on specific issues.
Soon the American people caught on. In a number of polls the American people said that the GOP obviously has no actual plan for the future and cannot be counted on to make good decisions. Eric Cantor came out with a jobs plan which called for cutting taxes and regulations, and not much else: reheated Reagan. During the health reform debate, the GOP clearly had no coherent health plan of their own, and later when they were chanting “repeal and replace” they never made any coherent effort to explain what they would replace the Obama plan with. In spring 2011 their budget plan, intended to slash spending, actually increased it by $3 billion. And then Paul Ryan, fatally, came up with his plan for balancing the budget by destroying Medicare.
Even Gingrich, who portrays himself as the intellectual giant of the GOP, is an empty bag, devoid of ideas. He bases his claim to giant-hood on his education: to get his doctorate, he wrote an entirely unreadable thesis on the Congo forty years ago, and he hasn’t learned a thing since: what little he thinks he knows is twenty years out of date. He is still entranced by the entirely discredited Laffer Curve, the economic theory which Reagan used to justify his titanic deficits; no matter how many times it doesn’t work, he still wants to cut taxes for the rich and corporations, cut regulation, and eliminate the estate tax.
When Newt disclosed his purported nine-point jobs plan, it turned out to be a reheated version of the discredited Bush plan: cut taxes for the rich and corporations, cut deregulation, and a few extra bits about repealing health reform, “reforming” (“destroying”) Social Security and Medicare, and turning the oil companies loose to drill wherever they see fit.
When Gingrich went down in flames in the fiasco over the Ryan budget, he could have saved himself by proposing a constructive alternative, but his thing is knocking down barns, not building them. Even Fox News condemned the intellectual barrenness of Newt’s attack on Ryan: “That would be fine if he actually had a plan or conviction of his own. He doesn't. Gingrich is so starved for attention and smitten with the sound of his own voice that he merely talks as long as anybody will listen.”
Only in today’s GOP, averse to facts, logic, history and perspective, dominated by intellectual pygmies like George Bush and Palin and Bachmann, could Gingrich be seen as an intellectual giant. Only in today’s GOP does “gravitas” mean being old and mean.
The Wall Street Journal argued that the GOP does have idea men, but they’re not running for president. Their ideal man of ideas? Paul Ryan.
Sometimes the Republicans get defensive about all this, and sneer at the notion that we need new ideas in the political arena. Regularly they ridicule the smart kids who actually know what they’re talking about. Palin ridiculed Obama for actually understanding the Constitution, if you can believe it.
Sometimes the media even help them along: once Obama went to a town hall, and a member of the audience asked him about health care and finance. Obama gave a very long but very well-reasoned answer addressing health reform, the tax structure, the works. And what did the Washington Post do? Ridiculed him for the length of his answer. We expect that sort of Philistine grammar-school beat-up-the-smart-kid nonsense from Fox and Rush, but the Post?
No comments:
Post a Comment