The Republican dilemma

This was a great quote from Peggy Noonan’s editorial Mere Presidents dealing with the quandary that the GOP finds itself in as the Anointing…er, the Coronation…um, the Inauguration of Barack Obama looms in one week from today.

Soon after the speech, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reacted with caution. He was low key. He didn't attack. He said the current projected deficit of $1.2 trillion is "an eye-popping number," and said he liked the part of Mr. Obama's program that includes reducing tax rates for the middle class. "We intend to work with the new president . . . to try and get this right," he said. The Republicans in the Senate are like swimmers ten feet offshore. They're going to let the Obama wave roll over them, wait for the water level to even out, and then make a move. Who would believe them claiming to be the party of fiscal responsibility and smaller government now anyway? They need more time to pass between the high-spending Bush years and an eventual—and one hopes principled—opposition to Obamanomics.

That is exactly right. We are on the precipice of an enormous deficit. ONE TRILLION DOLLARS. This is what that looks like: $1,000,000,000,000. That is a lot of zeros. If I am doing the math right (keep in mind I managed a Bachelor of Arts degree from a real university and have zero credit hours of math at the university level), that means that given approximately 300 million Americans, that number works out to something like $3000 of Federal debt for every man, woman and child in this country. For my family, that means we have a $30,000 share of the Federal debt. However since we, like MANY families, don’t pay Federal income tax that means that the real burden is on those families that do pay, so their relative proportion of that debt is much, much higher than $3000/person. Thanks to all of our double income, no children, tax-paying fellow citizens for shouldering the burden for all of the rest of us! That figure is even scarier when you realize that we are already in for a trillion dollar deficit before Obama even starts getting his hand in the cookie jar in a serious way.

Fiscal irresponsibility like what is being proposed needs a counteragent, a voice of sanity to say “Whoa Nellie!” That voice should be conservatives and by default the Republican party. Unfortunately, the GOP in power more or less for the last decade plus has been on a pork barrel spending spree akin to a drunken sailor on shore leave. The American public will swallow a lot, but the hypocrisy of the GOP calling for restraint now, once they are out of power, is like Bill Clinton appealing for traditional moral values or Rod Blagojevich calling for responsible government. It rings false.

The GOP is powerless, leaderless and rudderless and they find themselves in this state at the worst possible time, a time in our nation’s history that cries out for fiscal discipline and sound judgment, for some sanity and level headedness. What is worse is that their wounds are all self-inflicted. Barack Obama should have been easy to beat: hyper-liberal, unqualified, too young, too coldly cocky, too much baggage in personal acquaintances, etc. Instead he cleaned McCain’s clock, yet another GOP candidate who was chosen by default or because it was his turn (see: Bob Dole). The potential saving grace of Sarah Palin was squandered by hiding her away and then having her utterly unprepared when she did face the media. Instead of a media blitz after the convention, she disappeared into Vice-President Cheney’s “undisclosed location” and in doing so her handlers and the McCain campaign gave liberals and their allies in the media time to recover from the stomach punch she gave them at the GOP convention, regain their footing and go on the attack. If you have the ball third and long deep in your own end of the field and then uncork a long pass that takes you to the opponents one yard line, you don’t call timeout and let them regroup. What the GOP did was the equivalent of that followed by eight successive penalties for delay of game and false start. Next thing you know, instead of first and goal on the one, it is fourth and goal from the fifty yard line. Governor Palin is no fool, she certainly is not stupid but her handlers might be and now she is potentially fatally crippled, a future rock star for the GOP relegated to being the attractive female version of Dan Quayle. Possibly our strongest candidate for 2012 has become an almost sure loser in the general election unless she can put together an unprecedented extreme makeover in the next two years before the 2012 campaign really starts in earnest. I can't see the media letting her do that, since they know she is a major threat.

What we are left with is the perfect storm of an almost irresistible liberal majority in both houses of Congress, a uber-liberal President, a public that is so scared that they will go along with anything they think will save their skins and an self-emasculated Republican party that is unable to say anything to stop the madness. If you think a trillion dollar deficit is huge, you ain’t seen nothing yet! It is times like these that make me glad to be a Calvinst, because if I didn’t believe in a sovereign God I would be in utter despair right now.