Opinion A party without adults
Todays Republicans have lost all pretentions to maturity.
Watching todays Republicans being led around by an extremist Tea Party faction,with no adult supervision,I find my mind drifting back to the late 1980s when I was assigned to cover the administration of George H.W. Bush,who I believe is one of our most underrated presidents. I came to admire him for the fact that he believed that math and science were not matters of opinion a view increasingly rare in todays GOP.
Despite having run on the promise of Read my lips: No new taxes, when the deficit started spiralling to dangerous levels under his presidency,Bush agreed to a compromise with Democrats to raise several taxes,along with spending cuts,as part of a 1990 budget deal that helped to pave the way for the prosperity of that decade. It definitely hurt his re-election,but he did it anyway. Bush also believed in science. How many Republicans know that he and his aide Boyden Gray pioneered the use of cap-and-trade to deal very effectively with the problem of acid rain produced by power-plant emissions?
George H.W. Bush also believed that to be a conservative was to act with prudence, one of his favourite words and a philosophy he demonstrated in foreign policy by deciding,once he defeated Saddam Hussein in Kuwait,not to follow him to Baghdad.
I find it hard to look at todays GOP without thinking how far it has drifted from the kind of balanced conservatism the elder Bush brought to politics. They have gone from espousing cap-and-trade to deal with pollution to espousing the notion that all the worlds climate scientists have secretly gotten together and perpetrated a hoax, called climate change,in order to expand government all of this at a time of record heat waves and climate disruptions.
On the economy,they have gone from the magical thinking of Dick Cheney who argued that Reagan proved deficits dont matter and used this argument to help run up the deficit to its current astronomical levels with huge tax cuts to an anti-tax cult that spurned a Grand Bargain with President Obama because it would have not only cut $3 trillion in spending over the next decade but also involved $1 trillion in tax increases. Where have all the adults in this party gone? Where is John McCain,Colin Powell,Hank Paulson and Big Business? Are you telling me that they are ready to fall in line behind Michele Bachmann,Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin? Are these really the pacesetters of modern conservatism?
I wish President Obama had embraced the deficit reduction plan when it was announced last November,added his own long-term investment plans on top of it,and then built a national mandate for this Grand Bargain before we got to this point. But the president has now embraced such a deal,which is important and constructive.
Because it is the only long-term solution and it is coming. Either the market will impose a Grand Bargain on us in a haphazard way or we can do it rationally by a Democratic and Republican consensus. The president says that he is ready and that his party is behind him. I hope so. But without a Republican Party that returns to the sane conservatism of the likes of George H.W. Bush which accepts that both spending and tax increases are,reluctantly,needed to fix our budget and maintain social stability were not going to get even a minibargain,let alone a grand one. It is time for a counterrevolution in the GOP.
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