Whatever happened to the GOP?

My column in the Sky Hi News March 6, 2012
For a political junkie like me, this Republican contest for the presidential nomination has been like watching a hard fought game to determine who goes to the Super Bowl, yet the players do not resemble any team members I recognize. I wonder whatever happened to the GOP I used to know.

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) concluded there is no middle road and has announced she will not run again. It appears the Senate has no room for a moderate Republican. Republicans are not my late father's party, either. There are new meanings attached to the GOP, the Grand Old Party's initials.

To my father, the Republican party was indeed Grand and that was his team. To him conservatism was looking at any extreme deviation from a policy he perceived had been successful, with skepticism and a “show me the policy will make things better” attitude. He supported the interests of private enterprise and promoted fiscal and self-responsibility, but not to the extent that he failed take into account societal and national needs. He voted for FDR twice and accepted Medicare as a necessity. He was solidly pro choice and he resented religion using the political process to advance theological missions.

Compromise was not a dirty word; it was what a rational democracy should do. Sen. Snowe and he would have been mostly on the same page.

The Grand Old Party is no longer constructively working with opponents to solve the nation's problems in the most economical and rational way. It has become the “Get Obama Party.” After all, the GOP opines, Obama alone is responsible for the size of the debt and he has failed to fix the worst crash since the Great Depression that George W Bush left him. The answer to all is to repeal Obama.

The reason they give is that the Obama future is causing the present woes. Their irrational position: We need to roll back the future to solve our current problems. They blame high unemployment and the faltering economy on Obama's health care plan, which will be implemented in 2014-2020, and Wall Street reform, which also not yet been implemented. The low tax structure carried over from the prior administration is not yet revamped and the Keystone pipeline (which Obama signals future approval) is years away. Funny: Somehow the jobs and GDP are mysteriously improving in spite of a president who the GOP claims is clearly a failure.

Mitt Romney, who sees himself as the Good Ol' boys Party standard bearer, just threw fiscal responsibility under the bus in his rush to dominate the Get Obama Party. His retooled tax plan is a tax cut chicken for every income bracket's pot. Unfortunately he failed the “show me” test of what government programs would be cut to pay for it, which loopholes would be closed, or how much revenue would be generated.

The rest of Romney's proposals are changes for the worst, not for the better. His panacea for 30 million unable to afford health care: Shove the responsibilities to states, which have not even the wherewithal to pay for traditional responsibilities of education, crime or infrastructure. To deal with the excesses of Wall Street that led to the biggest financial sector failure since the Great Depression, Romney wants to gut our protections provided us in Obama's reform legislation and to return to the practices that caused the crash of 2008. Like gas prices now? He advocates aggression and intervention in Iran, jeopardizing the straits of Hormuz, and most of the world's oil supply.

At least Romney is not trying to change the GOP into God's Own Party, as Rick Santorum wants, nor is he rocking the boat as Ron Paul proposes in his version of the GOP as Go On-Your-Own party with wacky economics, nor does he share the nihilism underlying mischiefmaking Gingrich's Ornery Party.

Nonetheless, I liked my father's version of the GOP better.

Romney and the real pious baloney

Column in the Sky Hi News Jan. 18 2012
The world of politics should be forever grateful to Newt Gingrich for introducing to the English language “pious baloney,” or how to call an opponent a hypocrite without using words not suitable for primetime.  

I recall another primary that gave birth to an icon of political speech, “Where's the Beef.” Walter Mondale in 1984 fired away at Presidential nomination contender, Gary Hart, for sloganeering his “New Ideas” without explaining its substance. The phrase was a play on a hamburger business' ad that was dramatized by a feisty senior complaining about a competitor's miniscule patty in a big bun.

This year's icon is the 1 percent (or the 99 percent, depending how it is used in context). Thanks to Occupy Wall Street, it is shorthand for either class warfare or “fairness.” 

Most politicians are guilty of pious baloney, some to a greater degree, some to a lesser degree, shorting the beef, and appealing to a class or special interest. To paraphrase George Orwell's “Animal Farm,” “all politicians are equal; some are more equal than others,” and this year Mitt Romney qualifies for the “more equal” category.

Gingrich attacked Romney for trying to appear as something that he was not. Such posturing happens when a campaign consultant looks at the polls to see how best their candidate could position him/herself, and then attempts to cram the client into a costume that does not cover the body. In the game planning for 2012, a poll must have shown voters wanted a non-DC insider, probably because they were disgusted with the gridlock antics of politicians within the Beltway.

To use Bill Clinton's 1992 iconic phrase, the top concern of voters this year? “It's the economy, stupid,” so drawing on Romney's business background, his advisors saw a good match. A successful businessman, even a cold-hearted “vulture capitalist,” was a person who knew how to cure the slow recovery. Exclusively accenting his business background served more purposes, too, helping the GOP overlook some of his less than conservative record as a governor and his fatherhood of Obamacare. As Gingrich pointed out, Romney had been an aspiring candidate for office throughout much of his life, anyway, and was hardly the non-politician he portrayed himself.

Others in the Republican field are or were not as vulnerable. Rick Santorum is mostly “pious.” Ron Paul is true to an ideology of every person on his/her own and for his/her self regardless of wordly realities, fair or not. Rick Perry's less than intellectual astuteness could not have been invented by any campaign consultant.   Less said about Herman Cain the better, but his 999 flat tax proved to be unfair to the 99 percent. Former candidate Michele Bachmann's frequent gaffes that did not pass the fact checkers substituted some baloney for the beef. Ron Huntsman failed to qualify as a politician since his support was nearly none. 

Romney is not out of the woods, yet. In an era of populist anger at whatever is big (government, corporations) and with 50 percent of America poor or nearly poor,  he is an icon of the 1 percent, of, by and for Wall Street, while Obama is from a struggling middle-income family and genuinely gets the fairness factor. 

Last week Romney tried to convince us that “he is concerned about the middle class,” while at the same time condemning “class warfare” and defending his questionable job-creation record. More pious baloney. Romney's balm to middle class pain is to kill Obamacare that would make health insurance affordable in all 50 states for even those without employer insurance. He promises to kill Wall Street reform with its protection bureau empowered to save consumers from predatory credit practices. His tax proposal would increase average taxes on many poor and would decrease taxes on the rich, per an analysis in the current “Atlantic Monthly.” With friends like him, the middle class does not need enemies.