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Still Strange

Since I apparently haven’t talked enough about the stimulus bill, I’ll say a few words about it in connection with a topic I find to be interesting. Andrew cites a Gallup poll showing broad approval for Obama’s handling of the stimulus. Republicans receive very negative marks on the same question, which is consistent with being […]

Since I apparently haven’t talked enough about the stimulus bill, I’ll say a few words about it in connection with a topic I find to be interesting. Andrew cites a Gallup poll showing broad approval for Obama’s handling of the stimulus. Republicans receive very negative marks on the same question, which is consistent with being a wildly unpopular party that was just trounced in a second consecutive election and is loathed by more than half of the country. This brings me back to my initial reaction to the House Republican vote on the stimulus.

Suppose for a moment that all observers of the debate agreed that the House Republicans were right that the stimulus bill isn’t fast or effective enough and that it is larded down with all sorts of unnecessary spending, and let’s go one step beyond that and grant for the sake of argument that, say, a payroll tax cut alternative is far superior to what is being offered. Voting against the stimulus bill would still make no sense politically unless you believe two things: 1) the public is hostile to vast increases in spending; 2) the public judges these matters based on a high degree of wonkish detail. The first assumption is appealing to those of us who are hostile to vast increases in spending, but we make up a small portion of the electorate and are unrepresentative of the rest of the country. For that matter, such people make up a small portion of the GOP itself, which is why the sudden return of the GOP’s anti-spending enthusiasm seems so bizarre to me. Of all the times to acquire zeal for austerity, which is rarely popular in the best of times and risky even for popular majority parties, they have chosen the middle of a recession after having taken two huge electoral drubbings. This is something like discovering antiwar scruples only in the middle of an invasion. The second assumption about how the public judges the debate is simply fantastic. At most, these measures are judged by the parties’ stated priorities and their rhetoric.

During the bailout debate, the House Republican leadership voted for creating the TARP, which was also bad policy, and they were oblivious to the political toxicity of that measure among their own constituents. It’s not as if the leadership had some deep reservoir of populist credibility before the bailout. Even if the TARP had been a good idea and even if it had already had some success, it would still be perceived as nothing more than the scam and the giveaway to banks that it actually was. Even though the stimulus bill will probably have no desirable effects and will add vast sums to the debt, the stimulus and its supporters are going to continue to be perceived as acting on behalf of the public. Boehner and Cantor have twice managed to put themselves on the wrong side of public opinion on major pieces of legislation in the last five months, so again I have to wonder why it is they remain in the leadership. I have to assume it is because the members of the conference are as politically clueless as they are.

This brings me to an interesting survey of former Republicans from Pennsylvania who switched their registration last year (via Antle). Of course, most of them (54%) cited the war as a major reason, and many cited foreign policy generally and environmental issues, but 44% of those surveyed also gave taxes as their reason and 46% said their views on taxes were closer to the Democrats. That is, this 44% left the GOP in Pennsylvania because they thought it reduced taxes too much and not because it spent too much. To the extent that the GOP followed economic conservatives, it lost more voters in Pennsylvania because of that than it did because of social conservative positions. (Naturally, even though hawks and economic conservatives appear to be alienating more voters than social conservatives, the latter continue to be the scapegoats.) Most of the party-switchers identify as moderate and liberal, and just 26% defined themselves as conservative or very conservative, which on the one hand seems baffling to me given how much farther to the left of me the GOP has moved in just the last few years, and on the other it makes perfect sense considering the self-destructive embrace of Bush mainstream conservatives engaged in for most, if not all, of his Presidency.

Update: Commenting on FoxNews’ recent ratings bump, Dave Weigel says of the GOP:

They’re still losing, but now they’re doing it with more people watching.

Sounds like a recipe for success to me!

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