Muscular Liberalism

The marathon buildup to Mitt Romney’s apparent nomination to the Republican ticket revealed through more than 25 debates one very clear thought the candidates wanted Republican primary voters to understand; they planned to run the federal government just like their political deity Ronald Reagan ran things.

 Low taxes. Small government. Freedom & flags as far as the eye can see.

The fact that the Gipper grew government to huge levels and raised more middle class taxes on more Americans than any other president were, like so many facts in the distorted reality of the Fox and friends era, irrelevant to these proceedings.

The ghost of Reagan permeated the debates. A January Washington Post analyses of the Republican debates revealed that Republican candidates mentioned the Gipper 221 times at that point. Newt Gingrich was, by and far, the most anxious to associate himself with Reagan, though he was a huge critic of the man when Reagan was president.

And yet through all the debates; from 9-9-9 to the Department of…uh…oh well…, to Newt’s constant proclamations of the Holocaust like horror if Obama continues his reign of terror, we didn’t really hear the names of two people who came long after Ronald Reagan retired his presidency to sunny California.

George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney. While Reagan garnered those 221 mentions in those debates Bush was only mentioned 56 times.

Can anyone remember any of the candidates saying, “I want to return America to the days of “W”? Or, “remember the wise words of that great leader, Dick Cheney…”

I certainly don’t.

And yet when it comes to policy, if Mitt Romney succeeds in defeating President Obama and the Republicans take over all of Congress, we will likely see a very clear look at a Bush/Cheney III term on steroids and something quite different than a Reagan presidency. After all Reagan raised taxes a lot, negotiated with terrorists and the Soviet Union and said often that he believed in a progressive tax code.

Romney’s announced economic plans are far different. They reflect the deepest of movement conservatives’ commitment to the idea that when all benefits go to the very top of the pile—the wealthiest individuals and the biggest corporations—then those entities would take their tax cuts and newfound regulatory freedom and shower it on the people with jobs and economic expansion.

First and foremost Romney wants to extend the Bush-Cheney tax cuts including those for the very wealthiest and make them permanent. Those tax cuts added more than $1 trillion to the debt at the beginning of the century and another $800 billion when Obama reluctantly signed a 2 year extension into law in the December of 2010, when Republicans threatened to cut unemployment insurance for the 5 million Americans who lost their jobs and the health care of 9-11 Responders (you know, the people who ran toward the crumbling buildings to rescue their fellow citizens?)

Then the Governor wants to take those tax cuts to another level.

Added up, the Romney cuts would increase the national debt by more than $10 trillion over ten years, more than twice what the Bush tax cuts cost our nation. He and Paul Ryan, his boy wonder tax cutting pal and possible VP candidate, say they will slash Medicare and other spending on, well they haven’t said what they’d cut, to offset that $10 trillion in revenue cuts.

Like Bush and especially like Cheney, Romney wants to rattle the cages of war with yet another Middle Eastern country and continue the steady buildup of our military might and all the costs associated with that. The former Massachusetts governor is ominously bringing on some of the architects of the Bush/Cheney neo-Conservative foreign policy including, State Department counter- terrorism coordinator Cofer Black, former CIA Director Michael Hayden, and former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff. These are the guys who were part of the team that brought you torture, phony WMD warnings, phony terror alert warnings and phony theories about Sadaam having a hand in 9-11 attacks.

Like Bush and Cheney, Romney found a way out of the Vietnam War while supporting the war. In fact as a student, Romney protested against the protesters, demanding the Vietnam War continue. Then he was off to a palace in Paris where he served as a Mormon missionary, exempting him from being drafted and going off to war himself.

Sound familiar?

The truth is, while so many Republicans refused to utter Bush or Cheney’s names because they know most Americans blame W and the Shooter for the economic and foreign policy disasters from which we are working to recover, they want to continue those policies long into the future.

This is like Philip Morris, makers of deadly cigarettes, changing their names to Altria while still adding addictive chemicals to their products. A cancer stick by any other name will still make breathing a challenge.

Despite this all-out effort to keep the Bush/Cheney brand silent during this campaign, the former leaders of the free world may make that quite difficult.

On the day Rick Santorum effectively ended his race, Bush himself made a speech before his own Bush Institute in New York lamenting only the name of the tax cuts he enacted that began the collapse of our economy. “I wish they weren’t called the ‘Bush tax cuts,’…If they were called some other body’s cuts, they’re probably less likely to be raised.” Such lovely prose.

Then just weeks after receiving a heart transplant, Cheney, the architect of the Iraq War, the man who failed to figure out how to catch Osama bin Laden, the man who said “deficits don’t matter”, the man whose Halliburton stock option prices skyrocketed during a war in which more than 100,000 human beings were slaughtered, called President Obama an "unmitigated disaster."

While Bush has remained somewhat quiet since the unmitigated disaster of his own presidency, you can be assured that Cheney, with his fresh new heart and his huge ego, will keep pounding home the idea that the Iraq War, the torture, the tax cuts for the rich, the war profiteering, were all better than what Obama has to offer.

My guess is Governor Romney will try very hard to avoid having his name and face associated with Cheney and Bush, while channeling Reagan every chance he can get.  But his ideas, his policies and his biggest supporters will do all they can to ensure that a Romney first term will be more like a Bush/Cheney third term than anything even resembling what Ronald Reagan produced.  

FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER
@JavaThinkerE