Of course, at some level, why would Republicans be trying to drive the country off a cliff? Well, not pretty to say, but they see it in their political interests. Yes, the DeMints and Coburns just don't believe in government at all or have genuinely held if crankish economic views. But a successful Stimulus Bill would be devastating politically for the Republican party. And they know it. If the GOP successfully bottles this up or kills it with a death of a thousand cuts, Democrats will have a good argument amongst themselves that Republicans were responsible for creating the carnage that followed. But the satisfaction will have to be amongst themselves since as a political matter it will be irrelevant. The public will be entirely within its rights to blame Democrats for any failure of government action that happened while Democrats held the White House and sizable majorities in both houses of Congress.

While re-reading old journalism by Tom Geoghegan, I found myself riveted by a piece of his from the New Republic in November of 1972, the same month George McGovern's landslide loss to Richard Nixon marked a major lurch in the long, slow slide of liberalism away from ideological hegemony. The piece was a profile of Wisconsin senator William Proxmire. Reading it, I began to reflect whether Bill Proxmire wasn't the most influential politician of the last 40 years—as the grandfather of the Clinton-era Democratic fetish for fiscal austerity.

Proxmire, who left public service in 1989 and died in 2005, may be best remembered—it's what I remember—for a monthly publicity stunt called the "Golden Fleece Award," bestowed upon what he would claim was the month's most wasteful and ridiculous pockets of government spending. The pundits fell in love with the notion's good-government pretensions, and for all I know the stunt did the nation some good paring the federal budget of waste, fraud, and abuse.

I suspect, though, the exercise was largely a silly waste of time. One of my professors in graduate school won a Golden Fleece award. Senator Proxmire awarded it for a supposed grant to fund her "mountain climbing hobby." Actually, she's one of the nation's most distinguished anthropologists. She has never climbed a mountain in her life, but used her field work among the Sherpas of Nepal to arrive at some of the most incisive theorizing extant on how societies work. Second-guessing the peer-review process of National Science Foundation grants made for nifty headlines. But it was also numbingly reactionary. According to the Wikipedia entry on Proxmire, the prizes sometimes "went to basic science projects that led to important breakthroughs." [...]

Indeed it's not hard to imagine how during the high tide of no-one-shoots-santa-claus-ism, things might have become rather decadent. The moral hazard is plain: If spending is good in itself, the door opens to boondoggles. The field was ripe, in other words, for Golden Fleeces.

Enter William Proxmire, filled with liberal good intentions, introducing a new story into the American political culture: We can do better. That the problem wasn't spending as such, but the misdirection and corruption of spending. Proxmire would quote his hero, the late liberal senator Paul Douglas, chastising their fellow liberals: "Say 'spend,' and they salivated." The source of the quote is significant: Even Paul Douglas,—who, in his days as an an academic economist, had done much the work establishing that it was sound fiscal policy to stimulate consumer spending—understood that things could go too far.

And, of course—this is where the "Santa Claus" idea transformed itself from a witty little metaphor to literal Republican principle—"conservatives" didn't cut spending at all. They ballooned it. Here were some contrasts between Reagan and Proxmire: His most useful Golden Fleece awards went to Pentagon expenditures. When Richard Nixon, in the spirit of Republican fiscal responsibility, proposed to lower the federal government's debt ceiling to $250 billion, Proxmire did him one better, saying it should be only $240 billion. Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush after him, provide the plain contrast: Make the idea of reigning in Pentagon spending anathema, utterly unpatriotic, and ignore responsible debt ceilings altogether. They did away with fiscal responsibility, under cover of the rhetoric of fiscal responsibility, only changing government spending into a channel for private pilfering instead of a function of the public good.

Alack and alas, William Proxmire: like it or not, your "critique of pork barrel Keynesians" greased the skids for this big con. You and your enlightened Dem budget-hawk comrades made the usual mistake: presume good faith on the part of the modern Republican Party. "One of Proxmire's favorite statistics," Geoghegan reported in 1972, "compares the rate of return on government investment with the rate of return on private investment. (The public sector falls short by five percentage points.) Rather than spend tax money to reach a social goal, he urges the use of tax policy to the same end." Sound familiar? Says today's well-dressed wingnut: tax cuts are the only responsible stimulus. Thought Proxmire: "Neither the Executive nor Congress is organized to make spending 'cost effective.' That rankles him." He convinced a nation. Now, concludes the well-dressed wingnut, government spending is inherently irresponsible. And the well-dressed Democrat half believes he must be right.

This is a story that has put liberals—"responsible" ones, "populist" ones, all of them—into a terrible bind. At this late date, decades since anyone in Washington would admit to believing that any government spending is useful spending, when flesh-and-blood Democrats in the White House like Bill Clinton proved themselves such responsible stewards of the public purse that the federal payroll went down under their watch, Barack Obama wants to do some spending. He wants to do it in a way Proxmire the liberal budget hawk would surely have signed off on: targeted, responsible, scientifically—sophisticated spending, on public-service jobs, spending that starts fast and automatically tapers off as the economy recovers.

And what is his reward? Republicans are able to parade themselves before our supposedly most responsible media commentators and proclaim, "Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job."

In the past few days, I've heard criticisms that this [stimulus] plan is somehow wanting, and these criticisms echo the very same failed economic theories that led us into this crisis in the first place, the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems, that we can ignore fundamental challenges like energy independence and the high cost of health care, that we can somehow deal with this in a piecemeal fashion and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.

I reject those theories. And so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change.