GOP tastes the agony of defeat
MIAMI – This time it didn’t work. In fact, it failed miserably and the Republicans fell on their collective faces in front of the whole nation.
A few weeks ago I argued in Progreso that Republicans in Congress were deluding themselves into thinking they could blackmail the Obama administration yet one more time by threatening to shut down the government and default on the U.S. debt. That is, unless they got their way. They tried this trick once and it worked. They got their cruel cuts of already meager social spending as the price of continuing to fund the U.S. government. This time they wanted a bigger ransom, to kill an entire new program, the Affordable Care Act, the sole major social reform in a generation, one that is expected to go down as the main legacy of the Obama presidency. I predicted that Obama would answer with a firm and resounding “hell no!” It’s bad manners, I know, but sometimes to say I told you so is just too sweet to resist.
On all fronts, foreign and domestic, overreach has been the operating principle of the Republicans for some time now. There is no better example than the administration of George W. Bush, which scared Congress and the public into supporting the illegal, senseless, and obscenely expensive war in Iraq. As politics, this tactic too often has worked. Bush got the votes in Congress and the poll numbers to launch the Iraq war and won reelection even after it was shown the justifications for the war were all bogus.
As policy, however, overreach has brought disastrous results, notably the carnage and chaos in Iraq. Then there were times when GOP overreach was just too much for the American people to swallow, as when Bush II tried to privatize Social Security and got zilch support. A lucky break it was that he failed because had he succeeded the 2008 financial meltdown would have wrought havoc to the lives of millions of retirees.
More recently, the Republicans managed to shut down the government and bring the nation to the brink of default. Yet this time their brinkmanship brought them no policy concessions. It did “succeed” in a number of unintended ways, however. It succeeded in driving the American people’s approval of the Republican Party to the lowest level ever. It succeeded in causing substantial if temporary financial and economic disruptions and, more importantly, in eroding the previously ironclad faith of investors in U.S. debt, which will cost the Treasury and the country dearly in increased interest rates. It even succeeded in raising the hackles of the Chinese, who own a lot of the U.S. debt but avoid like the plague anything that could be construed as interference in the internal affair of another sovereign state. And the most ironic success of all, the showdown with the White House exposed and exacerbated the fault lines in the GOP.
Perhaps Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, best summarized the character of GOP success in the latest budget battle: “We shot ourselves in the foot, then we reloaded.” The allusion was probably to the shutdown engineered by Newt Gingrich and House Republicans in 1995, which Bill Clinton ably exploited and which did serious political damage to the Republican Party.
So what now? McConnell, for one, is getting a primary challenge from the insanity coalition in the Republican Party, otherwise known as the Tea Party. More importantly, the deal worked out last week to prevent the global economic calamity a U.S. default would have brought is extremely short-lived. Another faceoff over the deficit looms a few short weeks down the road. Will a chastened Republican Party realize that if they demand Obama give them the moon, they won’t get it and end up once more with pie on their face? Or will the bombastic rhetoric of Ted Cruz and the zealotry of the extremists prevail? I am not taking bets.
Finally, something needs to be said about the virtually pathological hatred of so many in the Republican Party for what they deride as “Obamacare.” The idea of risking a global economic crisis, raising questions about the word of the United States, and even gambling the political future of their party in order to prevent the government from helping millions of people access the health care system seems perverse and crazy to anyone outside the American mental muddle. Why for so many “Obamacare” represents the sum of all evils might be the subject of another column. For now what I can say is that that feeling is real, and really dangerous.
