Talking Out of Both Sides

The Republicans talk out of both sides of their mouths, and they think the American public is too dumb to notice or too stupid to look up the facts. From one side of their mouths they say that they long for the days of Reagan's Republicans and conservative agenda. They point to history and say how Reagan led America out of an economic downturn and back to prosperity. They cite his great works and his Reagan-onomics.

From the other side of their mouths, they decry what Mr. Obama is doing as President and they dismiss his objectives. They call him a socialist (they should look up the term before wrongly using it). They claim that spending money and bigger government never solved any problems for the middle class. They claim that prosperity will somehow just magically appear if we take all the restriction and government away.

But the truth is, and I have mentioned this in multiple posts in the past, that Mr. Obama is following the Reagan playbook almost step-by-step. Reagan spent more to help the middle class, and it worked. He spent more to get people working on the infrastructure, and it worked. He made government bigger and put in place regulations in various areas that helped reign in a runaway economy and inflation, and then eased those restrictions in his second term. He taxed the richest among us to help the poorest and the middle. Does any of this sound familiar??

In Mr. Obama's speech last night, he mentioned that he wants to do some things that the Republicans, over the last 18 months or so, have strongly espoused, like closing the tax loopholes. Not every idea he presented was original to him, yet those that were first brought up by Republicans and strongly espoused by them during the debates and the election cycle, they refused to clap for, to stand for, and said would not work in their rebuttal. Er, what? The plans you pushed for for almost two years you now think is flawed? You can't have it both ways -- you can't simply say this is the way America will solve its debt crisis and help get middle-class Americans more money and then claim, when a Democrat uses the exact same idea and even gives you credit for it, that it is now flawed and without merit. Which is it? There are a number of areas where similar ideas were cherry-picked from the Republicans agenda that they are now claiming are flawed or bad.

If Ronald Reagan were alive today and espousing the exact same policies and procedures that today's Republicans keep pointing to as their guiding light, he would be considered a Democrat, and a fairly liberal one at that. Today's Republicans have moved so far to the conservative right that they do not even recognize one of their great leader's more moderate, bipartisan stances, nor do they see how he built bridges to the Democrats of the time to solve problems, something that these Republicans seem unwilling to do.

There are issues with some of what Mr. Obama has proposed. Much of it requires the Republicans to buy-in (not going to happen) and work with Democrats (equally unappealing to them) in order to get the balanced approach he discussed. Also, he doesn't actually write the policy. He sets the framework and the vision, and it is up to the Nancy Pelosi's of Congress to write the laws and try to get them passed. However, Ms. Pelosi has proven utterly incompetent at doing that, ignoring her President's directives to work with Republicans, not to raise taxes or spending (at least without offsetting it with cuts elsewhere), and pushing for bigger government and pork when her President expressly said not to. It is no wonder the Republican leadership doesn't want to help or work in a bipartisan fashion.

However, I have listened to every one of Mr. Obama's State of the Union speeches. In every single one of them he has asked for bipartisanship, he has asked for the Republicans to weigh-in on plans and make sure they have support. He has a weekly meeting with John Boehner and other Republican leaders. And, for most of his career as President, they have said one thing and then turned around and done either nothing or the opposite of what they have said. The President asks for their help and their buy-in, and then they poo-poo all over the idea and claim that the President doesn't want bipartisan help or Republican input.

I think Mr. Obama's win in the last election was a sign that the American people are tired of the lies. The Republicans can only get away with outright lying for so long before it all catches up to them. At some point, they will be left holding the bag and will be voted out of office. The last election was the start of that and, unless they wise up and start working for the good of the American people, more and more of them will find themselves looking for work in the next election cycle, too.