Grover Norquist's work on Ronald Reagan's legacy

From Crooks and Liars:

One of the more down-to-earth tributes was written by Norquist, who said: “Every conservative knows that we will win radical tax reform and reduction as soon as we elect a president who will sign the bill. The flow of history is with us. Our victories can be delayed, but not denied. This is the change wrought by Ronald Reagan.” Norquist all but revealed one of his missions in the coming two years — finding a presidential candidate who would assume the Reagan mantle in a way that neither Bush 41 nor Dole ever could — but not the other. His second big push was practically a guerrilla marketing campaign to make sure that the less-engaged Middle America would get the message that Reagan belonged in the pantheon of all-time greats right next to Lincoln, Washington and FDR. Norquist had learned the lessons of Normandy and of the Brandenburg Gate, which was that powerful symbols can mean a lot more than words (especially in a little-read policy journal), that a motorist under the big Sunbelt sky of Ronald Reagan Boulevard will absorb the message of the Gipper’s greatness without ever pondering if ketchup should be a vegetable in federally funded school lunches or if “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers” in Central America were drug-dealing thugs, the kind of stubborn things that popped up in those newspaper articles ranking the presidents.

I've never understood the 'worship' of Saint Ronnie, but now I can see who was force feeding the public the load of tripe about him.

How many times are we going to let this happen?

Until we finally learn they aren't on our side? In fact, the Republicans aren't on anybody's side but their own.

Bob Herbert of The New York Times:

It may seem like ancient history, but in the first few decades following World War II, the United States, despite many serious flaws, established the model of a highly productive society that shared its prosperity widely and made investments that were geared toward a more prosperous, more fulfilling future.

The American dream was alive and well and seemingly unassailable. But somehow, following the oil shocks, the hyperinflation and other traumas of the 1970s, Americans allowed the right-wingers to get a toehold — and they began the serious work of smothering the dream.

Ronald Reagan saw Medicare as a giant step on the road to socialism. Newt Gingrich, apparently referring to the original fee-for-service version of Medicare, which was cherished by the elderly, cracked, “We don’t get rid of it in Round One because we don’t think it’s politically smart.”

The right-wingers were crafty: You smother the dream by crippling the programs that support it, by starving the government of money to pay for them, by funneling the government’s revenues to the rich through tax cuts and other benefits, by looting the government the way gangsters loot legitimate businesses and then pleading poverty when it comes time to fund the services required by the people.

The anti-tax fanatic Grover Norquist summed the matter up nicely when he famously said, “Our goal is to shrink the government to the size where you can drown it in a bathtub.” Only they didn’t shrink the government, they enlarged it and turned its bounty over to the rich.

Now, with the economy in free fall and likely to get worse, Americans — despite their suffering — have an opportunity to reshape the society, and then to move it in a fairer, smarter and ultimately more productive direction. That is the only way to revive the dream, but it will take a long time and require great courage and sacrifice.

The right-wingers do not want that to happen, which is why they are rooting so hard for President Obama’s initiatives to fail. They like the direction that the country took over the past 30 years. They’d love to do it all again.

If we don't address the causes for this economic collapse, the Reagan conservatives will be back again in a few years, talking seductively, trying to sell us deregulation and self-oversight and unquestioned access to the hard earned savings of the working class. Pots of unpilfered money make them rise like vampires in the dead of night which is why we need to stake down the truth, hang the facts like garlic around their necks, and shine the brilliant light of day into the Republican philosophy.

Because not all of them will disappear. Even through the smoke of this economic disaster, they are moaning about tax cuts for the rich, more deregulation, less government by the people, less restrictions. So we need to be forever vigilant, cynical, suspicious. We need to put these facts into every history book, every economic discussion, every civics lesson so our children are forewarned about these succubi.

And teach them how to drive a stake.

Mandate to tax the super rich?

David Sirota At Blog for Our Future:

I went on to make the point that I've often made in the past - the point that conservatives simply want everyone to forget: Namely, that President Clinton faced down a recession in 1993 by raising taxes on the wealthy in order to finance an economic stimulus package, and the economy subsequently boomed.

That simple, undeniable bit of history undermines the entire structure of conservatives claim that raising taxes on the super-rich will hurt the economy. And as you'll see from Norquist's response, they simply cannot deal with that truth. Indeed, Norquist actually goes all the way back to the 1920s as his example that raising taxes on the wealthy impedes economic growth - somehow ignoring the history from 15 years ago. He then goes on to claim with a straight face that Franklin Roosevelt created the Great Depression (this, along with the "center-right nation" propaganda, seems to be the right's new talking point).

The question now is whether the Obama administration buys into Norquist's fact-free nonsense, or whether it musters the same courage President Clinton mustered in prudently raising taxes on the super-rich to responsibly finance an economic stimulus package. Sure, temporary deficits are acceptable right now - there's no arguing that. But doing what's necessary to minimize those deficits is also important.

In terms of policy, if, as Congressional Quarterly reports, Obama wants to enforce budget discipline on a necessarily large economic stimulus package, it will require generating additional revenue from the wealthy. In terms of raw politics, if Clinton's 43 percent of the vote gave him enough political capital to come into office during an economic downturn and do that, I'd say Obama and his 53 percent gives him enough political capital to do the same today. And I would argue that if Obama backs off his promise to raise taxes on the wealthy, he will effectively validate the false conservative frame that claims tax increases on the wealthy endangers an economy.

While I certainly agree with the CNBC reporter that the 2008 is different than the 1990s, it isn't different when it comes to taxes - we have very recent history that proves raising taxes on the wealthy in order to raise revenues for economic stimulus, if done prudently, helps an economy recover. That is the argument that nobody during this debate was able to undermine - and it is the argument conservatives fear most, because they know it is accurate.

If George Bush claimed a mandate which he intended to 'spend', Obama clearly has one to implement his progressive agenda:

A mandate for progressive change exists. In a memo released today, the Center for American Progress Action Fund writes, “Obama ran on the most progressive platform of any presidential candidate in at least 15 years, including a promise of universal health care coverage, a dramatic transformation to a low-carbon economy, and a historic investment in education.”

And:

President Bush was re-elected in 2004 with 286 electoral votes, the smallest popular-vote margin since 1976 (excluding the 2000 election) and the lowest electoral vote count for an incumbent president's re-election since 1916. Nevertheless, many in the media were quick to echo Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion that "the nation" gave Bush "a mandate." It remains to be seen whether the media will apply the same standard in assessing the results of the 2008 election.

We knew the neocons were going to blame Bush

For fucking up their wonderful and brilliant Project of the New American Century. So let the smearfest begin:

But Norquist did have harsh parting words for President George W. Bush who, by any political measure, has left the conservative movement in a more perilous situation than when he came to office.

Arguing that every president has a certain amount of "bandwidth" with which to work, the head of American's for Tax Reform chastised Bush for "deciding to take five years to be the mayor of Baghdad instead of the United States."

"The idea that you are Winston Churchill because you picked a fight with a country with 25 million people in it, come on," said Norquist. "Ronald Reagan would do that before breakfast and then go have lunch. Ronald Reagan was smart enough to realize quickly that he would not go and manage the next Lebanese civil war for the next 20 years."

Norquist's forte is in areas of spending and taxes. And on the first of these fronts, Bush has taken a lot of heat. But in an discussion with the Huffington Post, Norquist was far more critical of Bush's foreign policy ventures, which he said simply decimated the capital and time the administration had for domestic priorities.

"How were you going to get stuff done if your time, your focus, your energy -- however useful -- is spent setting up Baghdad's infrastructure and not on the FCC," he asked. "If you are sitting there deciding who should be viceroy of Iraq rather than head of FEMA?"

So... Bush and Cheney's neocon agenda would have worked in drowning the rest of our government in the bathtub but Iraq got in the way?

Why elect to government those who hate government?

Remember. We have seen what Republicans have tried to do to our country when they have their hands on the steering wheel. Republicans have stated over and over again that they hate government:

“My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” – Grover Norquist, The Nation, 10/12/2004

So why on earth elect them?



Update:


(both videos stolen from Atrios at Eschaton.)