Yeah, the GOP Is All About Bipartisanship and Country First and Stuff Like That
This quote is all over the blogosphere now:
“We will lose on legislation. But we will win the message war every day, and every week, until November 2010,” said Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., an outspoken conservative who has participated on the GOP message teams. “Our goal is to bring down approval numbers for [Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and for House Democrats. That will take repetition. This is a marathon, not a sprint.”
As many point out, the GOP’s legislative submissions and policy proposals are full of stupid, unworkable, and even disastrously bad ideas which sound good to an uneducated public, obviously designed not to be passed as laws but instead to be held up in front of the news cameras. A spending freeze might sound good to voters if you’re trying to paint the opposition as responsible for overspending, but it would be insane in today’s economy. So GOP politicians submit such proposals and then squawk all over TV about how the Democrats are big spenders (after Bush and the GOP ran up an $10 trillion-plus debt, creating more debt than all presidents before combined). Though on a certain level, you can understand their desperation–despite historical precedents of a party losing Congressional seats in the first midterm after winning the White House, Democrats are poised to actually pick up several seats in the Senate in 2010.
To combat that, the Republicans are literally following Rush Limbaugh’s marching orders. From his speech at GOP’s CPAC (boldface mine):
…there’s no reason to let them set all the premises and all the agendas to which we respond to. I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself here but everybody asks me and I’m sure it’s been a focal point of your convention: What do we do as conservatives? What do we do? How do we overcome this? Well, the one thing, and there are many, but one thing that we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat them is with better policy ideas right now. … Republicans and Democrats. Ladies and gentlemen of the United States of America, that’s exactly what your future is about, who wins, Republicans or Democrats, conservatives versus liberals. The notion of partisanship, false premise. Let me define bipartisanship for you. … To us, bipartisanship is them being forced to agree with us after we politically have cleaned their clocks and beaten them. And that has to be what we’re focused on.
This is not about bipartisanship for the GOP. It’s not about compromise. It’s not about ideas, or even what works. For Republicans, it’s about one thing, pure and simple: winning. Nothing else matters–not even America.
Just power.
I cannot begin to describe how much I wish I could disagree with you.
The Republican party is learning all the wrong lessons from the butt kicking Obama gave them. I am a pretty pure libertarian, and as such I generally disagree with Obama on most policy issues, but truth be told I have more respect for his integrity than any other politician I have ever seriously examined.
The Republican party will fail and continue to fail until they realize that the way you succeed is not to tear the other side doen, it is to improve yourself.
Obama won because he represents what is best about the Democrats… an honest desire to make the country and the world better, a civility and respect for other opinions that damn near every politician on both sides of the aisle should learn from. He won with what has to be the cleanest campaign in generations.
In my eyes, the Democrats are supposed to be the wild-eyed dreamers always looking for ways to fix everything. Obama delivers. The Republicans are supposed to be the calm, calculating stick-in-the-mud who makes sure that we understand all the costs of the changes and don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Not exciting, but they are supposed to play the wise grown-up to the idealistic college radical. Where are they? All we have is spite and noise.
Until they can produce a Republican who is the equal (or at least in the same league, heck, the same sport!) as Obama, they will be nothing but a footnote.
Jon – You ask where are they? …were they ever real? Who was the last Republican who was calm, calculating, and concerned with price, etc? To my mind we have to go back to at least Eisenhower… and he was a centrist. Hoover? (Does any conservative in their right mind want to be associated with Hooverism?… even though to my mind it was the ideal experiment – and failure – of conservative ideals in the market-place.) How about Teddy Roosevelt? Many Conservatives are proud to point out TR’s membership in the GOP… but do they realize that he was a progressive? Do they realize that the true conservatives of the day mocked him as “the Mad Messiah” – and thought he was a dangerous radical in many ways?
I think you missing what I mean a bit when you look for the big names. Almost by definition they will not be famous, they will never be the name that jumps to mind.
I do not know enough about Eisenhower or Hoover to speak of them. I am not certain the political landscape is similar enough now to what it was in T Roosevelt’s day to really make a serious comparison. My views are considered pretty conservative now, but put me back even thirty years I would be considered moderate/liberal. Go back another thirty and I would be a radical.
Of course the big name for Republicans is Reagan, but while much of what he did was interesting, he was not a conservative in a functional sense. He was an activist, pushing a cause, and the roles were reversed, with Democrats running containment to keep him (and his allies) from going too far.
Hmmm, another Reagan could bring back the Republicans big-time, but while it is popular to quote and imitate him, I do not think anyone in the party leadership understands him well enough to follow his path.
The core problem is that what started as a philosophy based on reason has become instead just a mindless mantra “cut taxes” and “government = bad”. They have forgotten what I think many Democrats have never understood ; a sizeable chunk of the right’s base does not vote for their own self interest. They vote for what they believe is right.
(If you have ever wondered why middle class conservatives would fight against raising taxes for the top bracket, it is because they believe it is wrong. Period. And the arguments you make to justify it just make it look more wrong to them. Phrased, explained and implemented differently, with a couple years to let the idea settle, more aggressive progressive taxes could be passed with substantial support from the right – well, the base at least.)
If you have ever wondered why we vote for these schmucks, it because even when they are just being mindlessly obstructionist, they are still doing at least some of their job. Some of the stuff the left comes up with is pretty crazy, and not all of them mean well. By providing resistance, they help balance things out so that the worst stuff doesn’t make it. It would be nice if they were intelligent instead of dogmatic about it, but the balance must be maintained.
Jon:
While I agree very much with your first comment and much of the second, I would take issue with this:
What I hear in this is that these people look at these policies, consider them rationally, and seriously believe that they’ll work; if that’s what is meant, then I would say that I think that so many in the right-wing base are not voting against their own interests for those reasons. That’s just not what I’m hearing and seeing. I think that there are many reasons, but a considered, rational analysis of what is wrong or right and deciding to do what is right but not in one’s own interest is not involved much here.
A big part of it has to do with simply buying everything the party says, acting on blind faith, following marching orders, etc. This is why Bush rarely fell below 30%, despite the clear and obvious fact that he was inept, corrupt, and actively harmful to the nation. The 30% would say he was a great leader almost no matter what. I think a good deal of this has to do with many of these people being religious fundamentalists, trained for their entire lives to accept dogma, accept on faith, respond to values, and ignore contradictions and faults with authority.
A lot of it also has to do with the false narrative, a key component in the neoconservative strategy. The idea is to create a false reality, a very real version of the so-called “Reality Distortion Field” people jokingly credit Steve Jobs for creating. Tell everybody that things are a certain way so they will buy what you’re selling. Fox News plays a big part in this, but it is applied in so many other places in the mass media. The tax cuts aimed predominantly at the rich have been represented as tax cuts for you, the “average Joe.” Any tax hike (by Democrats) is also painted as a tax hike on you, no matter how targeted it is on the richest of the rich. That’s the narrative of tax cuts for the rich, and so many on the right buy it completely. ANY tax cut, good, ANY tax hike, bad–because it is always supposedly aimed right at you. (Currently, you can witness the narrative at work trying to tell people that Obama is a socialist because he’s trying to even out taxes a smidge and wants to reform health care.)
Which brings us to the third reason, one many have spoken about: that many vote for benefits for the rich because they imagine they will be in that number one day and want to share in the goodies. So many have get-rich schemes, believe they’ll win the lottery, inherit some wealth, that their stocks will take off, that their dreams of opening that business will come–and they don’t want the spigot to turn off before they do. Personally, I think this is the much lesser of these reasons, but many believe it has a considerable effect. However, it is the primary reason that lower- or middle-class conservative voters would back such policies while actually understanding what they really are.
But the number of conservatives–particularly in the right-wing base–who vote against their interests simply because they look at the policy, understand what it really is and what it will really do, believe it is sound, and so vote in a way that harms themselves personally because they think it is the right thing to do… I don’t think the numbers on that are going to be all that high. I could be wrong, but I really don’t think so.
Now, maybe we agree here and I don’t see it–maybe you mean that they have been fooled into thinking it is right, or they think it is right simply because they are told. But what I got from the statement was that they believe that unlimited tax cuts for the wealthy, for example, truly do help the economy, that spending freezes in an economic free-fall will help somehow, and are willing to take the hit for the country in that way. But if that’s the case, we’re talking irrationality here.
Well, at least from my perspective.
If there is one thing I learn from visiting left leaning blogs, far beyond anything else, it is that you understand us as poorly as we understand you.
There is a core of true believers at the poles of the political spectrum who will indeed automatically follow whatever their prospective party says. This is true for both parties, and to take it a step deeper, it is true for the various points within the parties also. I am never certain if Democrats realize how much the Republican support is an uneasy coalition of the religous right and libertarians. I have been told there are similar divides within the Democrats, but I do not know what they are. And of course, within the various groups there are those who simply react automatically without any thought at all, and those who actually have an underlying philosophy that guides them.
The reasons you are giving for resistance to progressive taxes are twisted by your perspective. You are quite frankly missing the point… ( I think that one of the reasons it is hard to understand each others core motivations is that they are seldom mentioned – they are understood within the group. Cute little talking points, straw arguments, snark, and what I generally think of as preaching to the choir are over-represented because the true basis is just… understood. After doing a tour of left blogs and being struck by the odd leaps in conversation, I went back and looked at the gun blogs. The amount of shorthand we use when talking without ever noticing is surprising.)
Consider this closely, because this is what it is about:
“You deserve what you earn, no more, no less. You have no right to others earnings, others have no right to yours.”
The notion that the wealthy owe the rest of society for their success, or that they don’t need the money, or deserve it, is fundamentally immoral to us. I cannot stress this clearly enough.
This is not based on practical considerations, personal gain, or anything else. As long as a progressive tax plan is based on the notion that we have the right to take from others, we will fight it. Many arguments will be made, snark will be spoken, but at the end of the day the reason is that it is just plain wrong in our eyes.