Why do Obama, Reid and other Democrats keep claiming that they believe they will be able to work with Republicans in Congress after the Midterm elections? Indeed, Obama and Reid have stated that they expect the Republicans to compromise on important issues for the good for the country.
Heh guys, it’s not going to happen. Rachel Maddow last night explained why its nuts to think that a Republican majority filled with faith based Tea Partiers and Republicans scared to go against their base will seek to find common ground to work with the President on anything.
Seems pretty clear to me. The only Republican goal the GOP will be focusing on like a laser is making Obama a one term President. And if that means shutting down the government in the worst economic crisis of our times and endangering any hope for job growth, so be it.
As Paul Krugman explains, this is not 1994-2000 all over again, and Obama is not standing in Bill Clinton’s shoes:
In the late-1990s, Republicans and Democrats were able to work together on some issues. President Obama seems to believe that the same thing can happen again today. In a recent interview with National Journal, he sounded a conciliatory note, saying that Democrats need to have an “appropriate sense of humility,” and that he would “spend more time building consensus.” Good luck with that.
After all, that era of partial cooperation in the 1990s came only after Republicans had tried all-out confrontation, actually shutting down the federal government in an effort to force President Bill Clinton to give in to their demands for big cuts in Medicare.
Now, the government shutdown ended up hurting Republicans politically, and some observers seem to assume that memories of that experience will deter the G.O.P. from being too confrontational this time around. But the lesson current Republicans seem to have drawn from 1995 isn’t that they were too confrontational, it’s that they weren’t confrontational enough.
Another recent interview by National Journal, this one with Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, has received a lot of attention thanks to a headline-grabbing quote: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
If you read the full interview, what Mr. McConnell was saying was that, in 1995, Republicans erred by focusing too much on their policy agenda and not enough on destroying the president: “We suffered from some degree of hubris and acted as if the president was irrelevant and we would roll over him. By the summer of 1995, he was already on the way to being re-elected, and we were hanging on for our lives.” So this time around, he implied, they’ll stay focused on bringing down Mr. Obama.
Kruigman goes on to list the reasons why this isn’t going to be the Clinton era redux:
1. The Tea Party. Any Republican with an itch to “do the right thing” and work with Democrats on any issue to reach a consensus is going to have his or her Tea Party colleagues and their rabid base breathing down their necks. Establishment Republicans will think twice before making happy talk with President Obama for that reason alone.
2. The Economy. In the mid-90’s the economy was booming thanks to the hi tech sector. Stimulus spending wasn’t needed to provide jobs. Today, however, with the incentives in the Tax Code for corporations to outsource jobs to countries with cheaper, better educated work forces, and no attempt by Republicans to change that benefit for multi-national corporations, job growth in America doesn’t exist.
Couple that with higher personal consumer debt levels, than we had in the 90’s and massively higher rates of unemployment and you have a significantly lower demand for goods and services. And while the original Obama stimulus was partly beneficial it was too small to truly reverse the effects of the black hole eight years of the GOP’s Bush-o-nomics created. Unless the government can jump start demand, companies won’t invest here in the US of A in new facilities and will not hire any new employees.
Supply-side economics has proven it is a failure. Supply follows demand. If there is insufficient demand for goods and services her in the US, the wealthy and large corporations companies will take their investment surpluses to places where their is a growing demand: East Asia and Europe, where many governments are actively involved in stimulating the private sector through government stimulus spending. See, for example, the Chinese government ‘s investment in fostering high speed rail technology and green technologies for just one instance of where this is occurring).
3. Deflation v. Inflation. In the 90’s an overheated economic boom risked inflation, but that was a job the Federal Reserve could handle without much assistance from the government. Today, because of the massive levels of consumer debt and joblessness brought on by the bursting of Wall Street’s artificially created real estate bubble in 2007-2008, deflation is the concern. The Fed isn’t created to deal with deflation all by its lonesome. It needs help from the government to stimulate demand to pull us out of this particular “economic trap” as Krugman calls it.
However, government intervention to stimulate the economy and prevent deflation is not a policy option for Republicans. Such policies would go against what they’ve told their base we must do, and after seeing many of their colleagues lose primaries to the most radical tea party candidates that is unlikely to happen. No, they would rather see the country fail so they can defeat Obama in the 2012 election. That is their only plan. And once they assume control of the presidency again we will see massive corruption in favor of corporations and their lobbyists, the further reduction of civil liberties and the promotion of a radical fundamentalist Christian religious agenda, just as we saw during the Bush era.
So we have great reasons to fear Republican gains in this election. We have no reason to expect them to “compromise” or work with Democrats. None at all.