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Monday, March 16, 2009

Shorter Republicans: It's Our Job to be WATBs
Posted by Jill | 5:19 AM
I'm beginning to think the Republicans may start liking being the minority party. This gives them the right to whine and kvetch without coming up with any answers of their own. They're screaming bloody murder about the Democrats' budget, but have zero plans to come up with a counterproposal:
Breaking with the House, Senate Republicans say they do not intend to offer a full counterproposal to Mr. Obama’s sweeping $3.6 trillion spending blueprint, a decision that will spare them from outlining potentially painful decisions required to bring federal books more in line with their call to hold down spending, cut taxes and reduce the deficit.

“The responsibility of the majority is to produce the budget,” said Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, senior Republican on the Budget Committee, “and we think it is more constructive to point out how we would improve their budget.”

With a month to go before Congress is supposed to pass a budget resolution, Democrats say the absence of a competing Senate Republican plan makes Republican complaints about the Obama approach ring hollow. Would Republicans, they ask, continue to keep the costs of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan off the books? Account for the costly annual change to protect middle-class taxpayers from the alternative minimum tax? Set up a disaster fund to prepare for emergencies?

“They are long on criticism and short on a plan,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. “They have a communications strategy instead of an economic one.”

House Republicans said they intended to deliver a comprehensive alternative to the Obama plan to show how they would respond to the federal government’s deepening fiscal difficulties but were not ready to provide details.

As they try to reassert themselves as guardians of fiscal discipline after their own years of deficit spending, Republicans have been providing a steady stream of complaints depicting Mr. Obama’s plan as spending too much, taxing too much and borrowing too much.

The effort is being made with more than the usual level of cooperation between House and Senate Republicans, with Republican leaders of the two chambers appearing in tandem and lawmakers repeating their antibudget criticism almost as a mantra.

In contrast to the first weeks of the Obama presidency, the attacks are aimed squarely at Mr. Obama, whose popularity initially shielded him from Republican criticism.

“Republicans in the House and Senate, with some degree of cooperation and collaboration, are going to attempt to both challenge the assumptions and the content of the president’s budget,” said Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, the No. 3 Republican in the House.

Democrats are trying to exploit the absence of a Republican alternative, creating a Web page with a clock counting the hours since the Obama budget was introduced on Feb. 26 with no Republican alternative put forth. It lampoons Republicans as the “Party of No.”

Some Republicans acknowledge that the constant repetition of their budget message could turn it stale in Washington, but they say such persistence is required to break through with the general public.

With their majorities in the House and Senate lost, Republican leaders say that an effective communications strategy is their best hope. They say they have little ability to influence the legislative debate, particularly in the House, if Democrats are determined to press ahead with Mr. Obama’s plan to take on health care, climate change, education, transportation and other major issues.

“As I told my colleagues, we don’t have enough votes to legislate,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader. “We are not in the majority. We are not kind-of in the minority; we are in a hole. They ought to get the idea out of their minds that they are legislators. But what they can be is communicators.”

These people just don't get it. They don't get it that Americans now understand that no, we don't get to create our own reality; that "Who you gonna believe, me or your lyin' eyes" is an easy choice to make and "me" isn't the answer. The Republicans are still stuck in the early days after 9/11, when a frightened population wanted desperately to believe an incompetent and malevolent president because there was really no choice -- it was believe the spin or realize that our nation had been hijacked by crazies (and not the crazies with the Arabic names, either). So today, all the Republicans have is pages from the Bush Book. Lie and spin, and if you do it long enough people will believe you.

I'm not sure that's going to cut it anymore. I hope I'm right.

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