Wednesday, September 07, 2011

Tonight's Republican Debate: The 19th Century or the Stone Age?


I watched some of the GOP presidential candidate debate - or as much of it as I could stomach after a crazy day at the office and a non-profit board meeting after office hours. Suffice it to say, I was not overly impressed and the only candidate who seemed to want to discuss the bigger picture of the nation's future was Jon Huntsman. Most of the other seemed to be seeking to focus on pet issues of the Tea Party in the hopes that some of the looniest elements of the GOP base would be driven to orgasms by the effort. Some, like Rick Perry fluffed facts and figures so much that one almost expected him to say he could turn chicken shit into caviar. For the most part, I could not help but think "God help this country if one of these nutcases gets elected." Robert Reich has a column at Huffington Post which looks at the backward thinking that seems to predominate the GOP candidate slate. Here are some highlights:

Tonight a bevy of Republican presidential hopefuls hope to emerge as finalists. Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann will battle for the right-wing nut Tea Party finals. Mitt Romney and John Huntsman will position themselves for the moderate right-wing finals. The putative winners in both these rounds will take on each other in the months ahead.

Nonetheless, listen tonight, if you can bear it, for anything other than standard Republican boilerplate since the 1920s -- a wistful desire to return to the era of William McKinley, when the federal government was small, the Fed and the IRS had yet to be invented, state laws determined worker safety and hours, evolution was still considered contentious, immigrants were almost all European, big corporations and robber barons ran the government, the poor were desperate, and the rich were lived like old-world aristocrats.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, the Republican Party had a brief flirtation with the twentieth century. Mark Hatfield of Oregon, Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller of New York, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, and presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon lent their support to such leftist adventures as Medicare and a clean environment. Eisenhower pushed for the greatest public-works project in the history of the United States -- the National Defense Highway Act

But the Republican Party that emerged in the 1970s began its march back to the 19th century. By the time Newt Gingrich and his regressive followers took over the House of Representatives in 1995, social conservatives, isolationists, libertarians, and corporatists had taken over once again.

Some Democrats are quietly rooting for Perry or Bachmann, on the theory that they're so extreme that they'll bolster Obama's chances for a second term and make it easier for congressional Democrats to scare Independents into voting for a Democratic House and maybe even Senate.

I understand the logic but I'd rather not take the chance. A Perry or Bachmann wouldn't just take us back to the 19th century. They'd take us back to the stone age.

1 comment:

ayoha said...

Your analysis seems spot on to me Michael. I was an Independent voter for the longest time, always choosing the wiser and more moderate of candidates. I can no longer do that; the current Republican party leaders have demonstrated their disregard for the American people. Their interests seem to be ideological rather than practical, and a danger to our established freedoms. I'm voting "Democrat" on my ballot in 2012, donating money and working with various groups to elect and re-elect Democrats to the House, Senate and Executive. Unfortunately no Democrats run for office in my conservative Texas hometown, so in local elections I'll have to vote for the Green party.