The great GOP role-reversal gambit: No spending opportunity left behind

[paineinthearse]

The great Republican role-reversal gambit
No spending opportunity left behind

ANALYSIS
By Howard Fineman
MSNBC contributor
Updated: 1:11 p.m. ET March 16, 2005

WASHINGTON - Here’s a quick quiz on political labels for you junkies out there. Of the two major political parties, which one is spending money like water, creating new welfare entitlements, rapidly expanding the power of the federal government and launching idealistic wars of liberation around the globe? For 60 years – from the dawn of the New Deal in 1933 to the advent of Hillary Healthcare in 1993 – the answer was the Democratic Party. But 1993 also was the year George W. Bush launched his national career (by running for governor of Texas). Now, 12 years later, we see the result: the Republicans are the party of deficit spending, entitlement expansion, Washington aggrandizement and Wilsonian crusades. They are presiding over the most vigorous enlargement of federal power and military involvement abroad since Lyndon Johnson unfurled the Great Society and plunged headlong into Vietnam.

Maybe there’s a big-government growth hormone in the artesian wells of Texas. Or maybe, as the writer Flannery O’Connor said, everything that rises must converge: meaning that every American governing party ultimately operates the same way to amplify its own political reach. The corollary is that every party in eclipse operates the same way, too: crying havoc about deficits, threatening to shove sticks into the spinning spokes of government, waving the flag of states rights and attacking the ethics of leaders on the other side. That’s what Newt Gingrich’s GOP did when Bill Clinton was in power – and that is what Democrats are doing now. It didn’t really work for the GOP in the ‘90s, and I’m not sure it is going to work for the Democrats now because, to oversimplify only slightly, the GOP may not be conservatives anymore, but Democrats have lost their identity altogether.

Turning tradition on its head? Now for what we used to call the “to be sure” paragraphs. To be sure, some of the recent expansion of government is the unavoidable result of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Bush didn’t campaign in 2000 on a Patriot Act; he initially resisted creation of a Department of Homeland Security, which was a Democratic idea. And, to be sure, Bush is dedicating 2005 to something old-fashioned, small-government conservative love: a frontal attack on the biggest governmental edifice of the New Deal, Social Security. But that may well be one reason why he’s doing it: to assuage conservative purists, not because he expects to get it done. (Campaigning for Social Security “reform” has other political benefits, such as forcing the Democrats to defend their home turf, and distracting attention from the country’s immediate, and more urgent, balance-sheet problems.)

But step back for a minute and consider the breathtaking scope of what Bush and his ruling party have wrought. The Leave No Child Behind Act is a bold assertion of federal power in what had (except for racial matters) been one of the last domains of local control, elementary and secondary education. The president’s recently enacted “tort reform,” a pet item of his for years, in essence preempts state courts from acting on many civil law suits, forcing them to be tried in federal courts. His energy proposals, yet to be enacted, do essentially the same thing, preempting the authority of state utility commissions. The Patriot Act, which Bush wants to expand, drains away much of the independent power of local and state police in the name of national coordination. To take a campaign issue off the table in 2003, the president agreed to a create a costly new welfare entitlement – a prescription-drug benefit – that is going to cost, by conservative estimates, at least twice as much as originally thought. And now the government is expanding its role in the “news” business, doubling the amount even the often cynically manipulative Clinton Administration spent on video press releases and such. Talk about Big Government! If there is a cloakroom in Heaven, Senators Barry Goldwater and John C. Calhoun are livid that anyone is defending propaganda in the name of conservatism.

more.......

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7206305/

[meegbear]

1. Leave it to that douche Fineman

criticizing * but making sure to bitch-slap the Dems every chance along the way.

[denverbill]

2. Republicans have absolutely no clue what they support.

I swear if Bush came out with a plan to kill every newborn child in the US because he had a vision that told him to do it, tomorrow morning every Republican in the country would be demanding the same thing.

The same party that 4 years ago decried 'nation-building' now uses 'nation-building' as it's soul excuse for the invasion of Iraq, a war which has cost 1500 American lives and $300 billion. Clinton's intervention in the Balkans didn't cost any American lives, and didn't cost 1/10 of that much money, and it was done to stop an active war.