The lead editorial of June 16th was a very thoughtful and thought-provoking articulation of why the republican
party, all laughs aside, doesn't support the democratic agenda as articulated by Howard Dean. I loved the line,
"this... isn't your father's Democratic Party". It almost made me laugh out loud. How could I not read on?
Well, first of all, it's laudable of the WSJ to admit that conservatives have gone even further right of the paper.
But you can't blame the democrats for causing it by going further left. They simply haven't. It's not liberals'
fault that congressional republicans tried to do everything the opposite of Clinton as soon as he left, and
that the results then turned out to be against the best interests of the republican party itself! Liberals weren't
the ones so blinded by hatred of Clinton that they decided to go opposite of center! How do you even
do that? Well, the conservatives did it and unfortunately their policies have been terrible for the entire country.
The WSJ explanation of how democrats lost so many votes among middle-income voters of the south(the huge decrease of southern moderate democratic congresspeople) in 2004 might be true. I don't know, but my understanding of it is that conservatives won the south by stirring up a lot of hot-button social issues many of them weren't even worried about themselves, like 1)gay marriage, 2)abortion, and 3)the assumption that a true patriot must say or do only what the administration says, whether it's right or wrong, about the War on Terror. But here's why none of the following claims hold water:
I. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are the main touchstones democrats have for the war on terror.
What about NYC not getting the full amount voted to it post-September 11? Why did Wyoming, a state that had never been attacked, get so much more for homeland security than NYC?
What about John Kerry's call for more extensive checks of shipping containers at our ports? What about liberals' worries that
nuclear sites like Indian Point, NY aren't adequately protected? Why is airport security still lax?
II. Liberals want to raise taxes and that's bad.
As Clinton once said, tax-cuts "feel good" in the short term, but circa 2004, they aren't in the long-term interests of the country! Of course everyone would like simpler taxes, but the progressive tax has been shown to be fairer. With a flat tax,
the rich are paying a smaller proportion of their income than the poor, who would be paying an enormous percent.
Conservatives always assume that tax-cuts are "pro-growth", a buzzword that assumes a premise which is not necessarily agreed by everyone to be true, nor is it necessarily true). Agreed, there are plenty of buzzwords coming from all sides!
Sidebar on Growth and Prosperity:
Let's assume though, that growth is good. Recently(7/01/05) WSJ cited our present era of prosperity, because the GDP was up 4% for the sixth quarter in a row. Alarms in my head go off: "How can you SAY that?" What's the discrepancy? Well throughout much of the 20th century, growth in the U.S. meant more job creation, and we could truthfully say that that was good growth. But if the job situation is so bad, as it is today, that many people have given up looking for work and are no longer reflected in the official unemployment roles, you can't point to these drops in the figures as job creation!
Myself, I agree in theory with free-trade agreements, but because of such an acceleration in the increase of out-sourcing of jobs to other countries, including computer programming as well as manufacturing, most of the jobs being created today
are the sort of job you might find if you applied to be a cashier at Wal-Mart, for $8 an hour.
How can we call it prosperity, when so many either work two or three jobs, or simply don't get by on the low wages being
offered to most people today? Could you possibly attract more readers if you appealed to the opinions and reflected the experiences of those below the top 1% in income?
End of Sidebar: Back to Clinton on tax-cuts:
Says, John F. Harrris in The Survivor, "The 1993 spending cuts and tax increases, over which he(Clinton) agonized for months, ultimately reduced the federal deficit, reassured financial markets and set in motion the prosperity of the second half of the decade." Of course, not all economists agree that a single president can affect the economy.
III. Only five democrats voted for the Central American Free Trade Agreement.
First of all, CAFTA doesn't change much that isn't already present de facto, says the Economist.
Here I am out of my depth, but I think the problem might be that while NAFTA was good, agreements like WTO, NAFTA
and CAFTA need proper regulation so that the loosening up of trade by eliminating international tariffs is accompanied by
lasw that are humane to labor and not noxious to the environment. The Fair-Trade coffees you hear about in Seattle are
simply aspiring to that. As for the environment, I think conservatives and business are finally beginning to see the money
in incentives for emissions cutbacks, and the similarities between cost-cutting and fuel-efficient planning.
I can't speak for Felix Rohatyn, of course, but I think he would probably agree that manufacturing jobs lost due to the
trade agreements, have to be addressed by trying to get our country's labor force to focus on new markets. But there has to be money for re-training people for that, many people needed to be re-trained yesterday, and it's a problem with these treaties.
IV. "Democrats conspire every day to gut work-to-welfare requirements and prevent the renewal of welfare reform by Congress".
Historically, lots of democrats were indeed unhappy about the welfare-to-work program at the time it was passed. Clinton had reservations but Gore pushed for it, partly because he thought it was politic. Part of the trouble may be that it is hard for mothers on welfare to leave their kids at home to go to work. There hasn't been enough respect for some of the problems of child-care in this country. What could be more important than raising human beings?
V. Democratic know-nothing-ism on social Security.
Again, if you want me to believe you sincerely think liberals are "know-nothings" about anything, you've got to stop with
the buzzwords(see above), one of which IS "know-nothing-ism".
First of all, if Social Security defaults big-time, it will be because the government defaulted, and if it does default it will probably be because of that black-hole of spending, the Iraq War. Democrats don't want to propose anything as long as Bush's plan for private accounts is still on the table(they've been fooled before). But of course democrats see the need to adjust the system. They happen to think private accounts in place of social security would be a disaster for people's retirement funds, to say nothing of the trillion-plus it would cost, a trillion we really don't have. It's not
obstructionism; it's refusing to abandon ship!
Now the main reason I'm writing: WSJ doesn't think the democratic party, as run by Howard Dean has the right to call itself
the party of individual freedom and personal responsibility. I'm glad they addressed this because think it is really a crucial debate for our time.
WSJ writes that they don't share the enthusiasm of some conservatives who love to see the rise of Dean because they think the country will hate his policies and then crush the democrats further. I agree about this. I don't love to see someone rise
whose policies I hate, not if I hate those policies.
But conservatives themselves no longer represent the party of individual freedom or fiscal responsibility.
New Rule; If you want to complain about federal regulations possibly interfering with big business, you can no longer call it, "big government"! "Big government" as a conservative complaint is dead. You don't stop the business of Congress for Terry Schiavo, try to go into people's bedrooms to legislate gay marriage, tell people's families what they can do about abortion, and prosecute a huge drug war, of which the wages is even more crime, and then tell the government to step back when you want to do something as a corporation with more freedom than you'd afford private citizens. Is a corporation a person, subject to the rule of law, or isn't it? Bush's government is pretty big.
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