Hullabaloo

Saturday, February 02, 2008

 
Ronnie's Playbook

by digby


I don't know if your gorge rose like mine did as you watched the Republicans deify Ronald Reagan the other night, but this piece by Michael Kinsley today speaks to the absurdity of it all:

In the GOP debate at the Reagan Library on Wednesday, Sen. John McCain repeated his story about how he and other prisoners of war used to discuss this exciting new governor of California, using tap codes through the walls of a North Vietnamese prison. Like many of the great man's own treasured anecdotes, it might be true. Unlike Reagan, McCain is a genuine war hero, so if he has over-polished this story a bit (it is almost word for word each time), he is honoring the great man by imitation if nothing else. In the debate, McCain repeatedly called himself a "foot soldier in the Reagan revolution." He declared that Republicans have "betrayed Ronald Reagan's principles about tax cuts and restraint of spending."

Mitt Romney, meanwhile, kept repeating, inanely, "We're in the house that Reagan built." Reagan "would say lower taxes"; "Reagan would say lower spending"; Reagan "would say no way" to amnesty for illegal immigrants; Reagan would never "walk out of Iraq." And, by the way, McCain's accusation that Romney harbors a secret timetable for withdrawal from Iraq is "the kind of dirty tricks that I think Ronald Reagan would have found to be reprehensible."

A problem: Reagan actually signed the law that authorized the last amnesty, back in 1986. Romney deals with this small difficulty by declaring: "Reagan saw it. It didn't work." He offers no evidence that Reagan had a change of heart about amnesty, and learning from experience was not something Reagan was known for. The proper cliche is McCain's: "Ronald Reagan came with an unshakable set of principles." And -- pointedly -- "he would not approve of someone who changes their positions depending on what the year is."

All of this is what Democrats these days would refer to as a fairy tale. There is no evidence that Reagan was bothered by the rough and tumble of political campaigns. Mischaracterization of an opponent didn't even qualify as a "dirty trick" to Reagan, because of his fantastic ability to believe anything helpful.

(McCain especially should really dial the Reagan worship back. He's older than Reagan was when he ran, and we now know that Reagan's delightfully optimistic daffiness was probably the result of early symptoms of Alzheimers.)

It's on the economy where Kinsley really makes the point:

When Reagan took office in 1981, federal receipts (taxes) were $517 billion and outlays (spending) were $591 billion, for a deficit of $74 billion. When he left office in 1989, taxes were $999 billion and spending was $1.14 trillion, for a deficit of $141 billion. As a share of the economy, Reagan did cut taxes, from 19.6% to 18.4%, and he cut spending from 22.2% to 21.2%, increasing the deficit from 2.6% to 2.8%. The deficit went as high as an incredible 5% of GDP during his term. As a result, the national debt soared by almost two-thirds. You can fiddle with these numbers -- assuming it takes a year or two for a president's policies to take effect, or taking defense costs out -- and the basic result is the same or worse. Whatever, these numbers hardly constitute a "revolution."

McCain's stagy self-flagellation, on behalf of all Republicans, for betraying the Reagan revolution when they controlled Congress and the White House is entirely misplaced. George W. Bush and the GOP Congress did precisely what Reagan did: They cut taxes, mainly on the well-to-do, but they barely touched spending.

I wonder when, or if, pundits or voters will internalize the fact that this is not an accident, but rather a conscious feature of conservative governance. They get into office, cut taxes on the rich and steal taxpayer money for their walthy contributors. Here's Henry Waxman last night on Bill Moyers:

BILL MOYERS: You turned over a lot of rocks last year. Was there a pattern to what you kept discovering?

REP. HENRY WAXMAN: I think what we found that was most dramatic to me was that there has been a huge increase in the amount of activities that the government has contracted out. I-

BILL MOYERS: We call that outsourcing?

REP. HENRY WAXMAN: Well, outsourcing. And there's nothing with it if we're getting a better deal. Often times we can contract out the work and pay a lower price and get good quality. But we're now at the point of four hundred billion dollars contracted out each year. Two hundred billion dollars of which goes to contractors without any competition.

BILL MOYERS: How can that happen? Why no competition?

REP. HENRY WAXMAN: Well, when we first asked that question about Halliburton's activities in Iraq, they said, "Oh, we didn't have time to have competition." We later found out that some of the potential competitors complained that they would have like to have bid. And they could've bid for the work. And if we had competition we would have had better price and better quality. But it got to the point where the government was contracting out the-- trying to figure what work should be done. And then they wanted to contract the work itself. Now, they needed to oversee whether the money was being used effectively. So, they wanted to get a private contractor to do that as well. Well, that's an invitation to a lot of fraud, waste and abuse of--

BILL MOYERS: Did you find fraud, waste and abuse in that process?

REP. HENRY WAXMAN: Yes. We found billions of dollars that cannot be accounted for. That cannot be justified. And it's a scandal.

Yes, but it's no longer logical to assume that it's not intentional. You know, fool me once ... won't get fooled again.

The Reagan Myth makes it difficult to make that connection and convince people that the so-called "failed" presidents are actually standard conservative politicians doing what conservative politicians always do. As long as he's seen as some sort of "special" politician whose sunny optimism and adherence to bedrock American values brought the country together, we're going to be fighting on their ground.

This is a lot closer to the truth than the Reagan Myth:





H/T to Jonathan Schwarz at ATR.


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digby 2/02/2008 03:14:00 PM |