Time - "Can the Republican Party's Opposition Strategy Pay Off?" - Contract With America II?

[TomCADem]

I guess what is old is new again, and with Bush's trickle down, big business policies being sold as populism by the mainstream media, tax cuts and deregulation will be the Republican mandate in the 2010 elections. Heck, with recent Republicans victories, the media is already advocating that Republicans dust of the Contract with America to do away with Medicare, lower taxes, and reduce regulation and Big Government. Afterall, by the time November rolls around, I am sure that even liberals will be brainwashed into thinking that the recession was caused by too much government, too much regulation, to much taxes, and too many Democrats in D.C.

Trickle down economics has been recycled as populism in 2010!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20100201/us_time/08599195796400

But outright opposition to the stimulus was a huge risk: after all, if the bill worked - and many independent economists believe it did manage to stave off a far worse recession - they could be seen as having been on the wrong side of history. As members wandered in and out of Cantor's conference room on the third floor of the Capitol that Monday, a consensus began to form. "The lesson learned from the stimulus vote was our members felt comfortable in taking that political risk against a popular President if we had a credible alternative, and we did," Cantor says. Critics will surely debate just how credible those alternatives really were - their budget proposal, for instance, would have done away with Medicare. But the GOP came up with enough proposals of their own to give Republicans cover to vote nearly unilaterally against the stimulus, the budget, the climate-change bill and, of course, health care reform. (See a review of Barack Obama's first year in office.)

Republicans still chafe at being labeled as the party of no; House Republican Conference chairman Mike Pence claimed last Friday that Obama's visit to talk to the GOP caucus had validated their contention that they have legitimate policy ideas of their own. But there is no doubt that the obstructionist strategy helped bolster the beleaguered fiscal-conservative arm of the Republican Party. After eight years of growing the government under the Bush Administration, creating new entitlements and funding bridges to nowhere, their reputation was in shreds. "It was a very dangerous strategy because, if the stimulus worked, the Republicans would have been very vulnerable," says John Feehery, a Republican strategist. "But it didn't work, and that gave the GOP some needed credibility."


Their message, that the Obama Administration has been pushing job-killing legislation on everything from health care to global warming, seems to have resonated with independent voters who helped win Republicans the Virginia and New Jersey governors' mansions and, in a surprise upset, Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat in Massachusetts. "The President isn't having trouble because Republicans oppose his job-killing agenda -he's having trouble because the American people oppose his job-killing agenda," says Michael Steel, a Boehner spokesman.

* * *

Congressional observers like Ornstein believe that the GOP has to do more to emphasize the positive and - in the tradition of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who won the House for Republicans in a surprise wave in 1994 - introduce some version of a new Contract with America. "The approach to oppose Obama's agenda was clearly set by the leaders to try to jump-start a moribund and dispirited party, and with the idea that if they could do what their Gingrich-led predecessors did in 1993-94, they could return to majority status on the back of a failed President with a divided majority party," Ornstein says. "It works less well, ironically, when there are 59 Democrats in the Senate and the GOP loses the excuse that the Dems have enough members to do it themselves. The burden to join in governing is greater - and the risks of opting out are greater yet." Indeed, health care reform, if it fails, will have been brought down not by Democratic divisions as it was in the early '90s but by the loss of their 60th seat - and with it, their filibuster-proof majority. No wonder that Obama, in his State of the Union speech, also addressed Republicans directly, telling them, "The responsibility to govern is now yours as well."

[opihimoimoi]

1. Pub Brains prempts any viable solution for the Nation...they are into rape, plunder, pillage, and

Spoils

[depakid]

2. 1994 was hardly a surprise win- a lot of us saw it coming a mile away

just as we see Democrats making many (most?) of the same mistakes and setting up many of the same dynamics in 2010- which, considering the Republicans' past 9 years' worth of track record, is pretty damn impressive.

I mean, what does it take for some folks to learn not to pander to the right? Apparently, an economic collapse, a disastrous set of wars, and an environmental disaster in New Orleans isn't enough.

[KharmaTrain]

3. The Manipulation Of The Media At Work...

While many were euphoric when President Obama was elected (and I was very happy as well), I knew it wouldn't take long until the powers that be inside the beltway would go after him and his supporters. Divide, obstruct, distort, lie...never give the guy a chance. It didn't take long for the corporate media to fall "out of love" with President Obama as quickly as they fell "in love". The right wing hate machine cranked up big time and with the "excuse" that it's all the Democrats that created the messes...playing to the short attention span and escaping having to assume any responsibility for 8 years of corruption in the White House and 12 in running Congress. It's like boooosh never existed or DeLay...it's "Obama's recession". It's reinforced within the beltway where massive amounts of corporate money are spent to take down anyone whose a threat to their money and that all that "change" jazz was all well and good, but enough is enough.

I knew that the rushpublicans would use their time in the back rows doing all they could to destroy and discredit this President and the corporate media, led by Faux and hate radio are pumping their propaganda full tilt with little, if any pushback. Yes, some of the problem is that we have weak-kneed Democrats...blue dogs and otherwise who are surrounded by this negativity and capitulate rather than fight. We have party leaders (Reid) who believe that "bipartisanship" means avoiding confrontation and running for cover when the attack dogs go on the prowl.

The framing is set, the corporate media is falling "in love" with morons like Mooselini and Brown...as though the rushpublicans, who were rejected by the voters have somehow transformed themselves. And there are plenty of frustrated people who buy into it. They don't blame boooosh and his drunken sailor spending and "deregulation" that collapsed the economy or cost them their job, it was Obama. In his attempts to "reach across the aisle", this was shown as weakness by the corporate media...and led to wasting a year in trying to create a true "new atmosphere" inside the betlway...a place that doesn't want new, they profit best when the country is divided and the populace is distracted.

So here we go again...1994 all over again. It doesn't help that the Democratic party is slating a lot of weak candidates, either.

[tanyev]

4. Contract ON America II