Winners of elections that shellack the losing side, to borrow from President Obama’s term for the election results, are prone to claim that their victory carries the mandate of “Americans” as a whole. Victorious Republican leaders quickly proved that, bragging that they would allow some bipartisan progress in the new, divided Congress so long as Democrats go along with their agenda.
The agenda “the American voters want,” they boasted, includes repeal of health care reform, a rollback of new regulations on banking, deep cuts in spending and renewal of all the Bush era tax cuts. The latter means, specifically, extending the tax cut for the top 2 percent of taxpayers whose average annual income is $8 million – the only Bush tax cut extension that Democrats and Obama haven’t endorsed.
More chutzpah than fact
The GOP’s deceptive rhetoric about what their victory means is chutzpah writ large, and their agenda is replete with contradictions. It would require fiscal magic, for example, to bring down the deficit and federal debt and cut taxes at the same time.
More importantly, at least half of Americans, voter exit polls and a raft of other polls confirm, want to keep or expand the health -care reform law. They are evenly divided over more stimulus spending to create jobs vs. cutting federal spending. Americans are also divided pretty evenly over whether to end the single top-tier tax cut that would cost more than $700 billion over the next decade.
Democrats, however, could take a lesson from the clever propaganda tactics that Republicans use to frame their agenda as “America’s” agenda. The two are not the same. The electorate remains as deeply divided as its been for two decades, and, in fact, a lot of independents who swung to the Republican side in this election still want much of the Democratic agenda. They just chose to vent their anger over the slow economy against the party in power, not the party than sunk the economy in the Great Recession in 2008.
A motivated base
Republicans, however, did do a much better job than Democrats at turning out their base. They got out the slice of voters, particularly older white men, that fell for their rhetoric, while too many Democrats, especially younger voters, sat it out.
Democrats, to be sure, bear responsibility for elevating health care reform over economic issues, and for misreading the depth of the recession’s broad impact. Still, what Republicans do very well, is robustly argue that their world view and their agenda constitute what “Americans” want, never mind the deep split on most issues.
Rep. John Boehner, the presumptive speaker of the House in waiting, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, have become hectoring virtuosos in hammering home the propagandist pitch that “Americans” want to ditch health care reform, and that tighter banking regulation and regulations that hold businesses responsible for the public safety of their products and pollution are hampering the economy.
Democrats, on the other hand, still haven’t learned how to communicate the public merits of their agenda effectively enough to refute the unfounded claims of Republican propagandists and their cable talk-show boosters.
It’s not likely, however, that a strong majority of Americans would embrace the GOP’s key agenda points once they know the specific actions that would be required to achieve their promises.
Cutting federal spending to reach a balanced budget, for example, would require sharp spending cuts and reductions in benefits over a number of years in the big ticket items of defense spending, Social Security and Medicare. The likely new chairman of the House Budget Committee, Rep. Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin, goes further. He proposes to partly privatize Social Security and Medicare, leaving seniors in the hands of Wall Street’s casino managers and greedy health insurance companies.
Debt reduction would also require a rollback of the Bush tax cuts for the middle class as well as the super-wealthy. These cuts combined will cost $3.7 trillion over the next decade. The national debt cannot logically be addressed without addressing these 2001-03 tax cuts. Measures to bring down federal spending would also have to slash the broad range of government aid for sustaining or training the unemployed and providing COBRA health care extensions.
A retreat from progress
Rolling back health care reform, moreover, would actually raise federal health care over the next decade, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. It also would let insurance companies punish Americans by reinstating all their exclusions, denials and policy recission powers for the ill and afflicted.
If Republicans want to make a dent soon on unemployment, they will have to go along with Obama’s tax credits for new hires by business, as well as additional stimulus spending to crank up consumer demand and big-ticket spending on infrastructure. Otherwise, most economists agree, the economy will limp along with high unemployment through 2011. That would taint Republicans’ promises to improve on the Democrat’s record (mainly hampered by GOP filibusters) as failed braggadocio.
If Republicans follow the hard-right social-value conservatives and anti-Obama wingnuts, on the other hand, they will bog down the GOP agenda in pursuit of more gun-rights, stringent abortion and public prayer measures, and Obama-chasing tactics. That would dilute the force of their economic agenda and turn off most swing-vote independents.
Democrats admittedly are in a bind in dealing with Republicans’ red wave. Their numbers in the House and state capitols have been slashed by historic proportions across the South, Midwest and West, and the GOP is ascendant. But Republicans still haven’t captured a majority for their contradictory agenda, and they won’t do so if they don’t proceed rationally.