Fairy tales and the Republicans who tell them
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky with Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn of Texas, right, and Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyoming, left, talks with reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2015, following their first GOP policy meeting since Congress reconvened the day before. Credit: AP / J. Scott Applewhite
The fairy-tale dream of the Republican far right has shattered. Here's the evidence:
Republicans told us that the Obama administration's policies would send the deficit skyrocketing. They were wrong; the deficit has been shrinking.
They told us that the Obama administration's policies would increase unemployment. They were wrong -- unemployment is decreasing.
They said Obamacare would drive medical care costs through the roof. They were wrong: The once-spiraling rate of increase in health care costs has slowed sharply, even as more of the uninsured are covered.
Republicans trumpeted that cutting taxes on the wealthy would cause jobs to increase and the economy to prosper. They but could never produce even one historical case that supported that assertion. And the two states that have recently tried just that under Republican governors -- Louisiana and Kansas -- have tumbled into fiscal distress.
And the looniness stretches much further. Last week, Republicans presented another in a long list of hallucinatory set of figures-and-footnotes as an alternative to the president's budget. The spending plan jettisons the budget caps Republicans once championed. Sounds like tooth fairy and kindergarten stuff, and it is.
Republicans won control of both houses of Congress in the fall, which means they have to share in governing. But the irresponsibility of their economic ideas are becoming clearer to Americans, who are feeling some of the positive effects of the recovery. So as Republicans attempt to capture the presidency in 2016 some of them are inching, others running, away from what up till now has been mindless doctrine for the Grand Old Party.
In 1932, in the depth of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for president on a fairly conservative, traditional economic platform. He won and the Democrats swept to victory in both houses of Congress. Roosevelt then did a 180-degree turn and introduced the New Deal, meant to get the economy moving and give work and opportunity to many families displaced and thrown into poverty by the Depression.
Could the Republicans pull off a startling about-face like that? It's hard to imagine Republican presidential hopefuls like Sen. Ted Cruz, former Gov. Mike Huckabee, Sen. Rand Paul, Sen. Marco Rubio or Gov. Scott Walker doing that. They all appeared to be vehement apostles of right-wing economic doctrines that lie in tatters around them. Could former Gov. Jeb Bush? Not impossible; clearly he is more moderate.
Does all this mean that the path for a Hillary Clinton presidency is more open than we have understood? Possibly. But it also means that the ground is ripe for the emergence of serious third party candidates. We forget that it was Ross Perot's presidential candidacy that helped get Bill Clinton elected in 1992.
We're a year and a half from the 2016 election. We will see a lot more squirming by Republican candidates as they try to "redefine" what they stand for without appearing to run for cover from the wreckage of the economic doctrine they once espoused.
Peter Goldmark is former budget director of New York State and publisher of the International Herald Tribune. He headed the climate program at the Environmental Defense Fund.
