The Other McCain

Why hasn’t the American public completely repudiated the policies of the Obama administration? At a time when the unemployment rate has been hovering near 10 percent for nearly a year, Obama’s job approval numbers are very near dead even, and Republicans are just barely leading on the generic ballot.

Why isn’t the administration’s abject failure on economic issues more apparent? The reason, I suspect, is that many independent voters are still willing to blame Republicans for these problem. The GOP has still not figured out how to undo Bush-era “brand damage” and Democrats continue to point the finger at Republicans (and those convenient proxy villains, Big Business and The Rich) for the nation’s economic woes.

It is only in this context of the GOP’s lack of credibility that Democrats can get away with advocating policies that obviously aren’t working and, really, don’t even clear a minimal threshold of common sense. Consider Rachel Maddow’s statements on Sunday’s “Meet the Press”:

Well, you end, you end up with the situation which again you’re back to choice vs. referendum because Republicans . . . can argue about how it’s all about spending, it’s all about debt. But it’s not just talking about the past to say, “When Republicans have had the reins, this is what they’ve done: two wars not paid for, prescription drug benefit not paid for, two tax cuts that mostly benefited the rich not paid for.” They put all that stuff on the deficit, $1.3 trillion sitting there as — in a deficit when Obama took over, after the previous Democratic president had handed him a surplus. If you talk about — if Republicans want to run as this fiscally responsible party, it’s neat, but it’s novel. It’s not how they’ve actually governed. . . .
I think that, I think that most Americans also, though, understand the basic arithmetic that when you’re talking about pushing tax cuts that do mostly benefit the wealthy and you’re simultaneously talking about getting tough on the deficit, you’re talking about a world in which math doesn’t work the way most people think it works. . . .
Tax cuts hurt the deficit. . . .
If you really want, if you really want a stimulus, do what we — what’s proven to work in stimulus, which is things like extending unemployment benefits, which is something that Republicans are completely blocking. . . .
It’s the most stimulative thing you can do.

What Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters notices here is the similarity between Maddow’s statement about unemployment-as-stimulus and Nancy Pelosi’s recent remarks. What I notice, however, is a message that cleverly muddles the policy picture in such a way as to make it appear that Republicans are actually worse than Democrats in terms of economics.

When Maddow says that various Bush-era policies were “not paid for,” she means only one thing: Taxes weren’t raised.

Notice how Maddow hammers on the idea that tax cuts are bad policy which increase the deficit and benefit the rich. I’d be interested to see how that kind of message plays with a focus group of independent voters, because I think it resonates much deeper than most Republicans understand. Conservatives are always talking about how we’ve “won the war of ideas,” but the fact that Democrats still believe they can win with such economic themes — utterly ignoring the supply-side revolution — means that the war of ideas is a long way from being won.

Of course, as the Obama/Pelosi/Reid “stimulus” spree illustrates, there is no such thing as a liberal “deficit hawk.” Like other liberals, Maddow talks about deficits only as an argument to raise taxes or reduce military spending. Domestic entitlement programs are sacred and cannot be subjected to any budgetary discipline, and certainly no liberal expressed any deficit-related concerns about ObamaCare.

Maddow and Democrats clearly believe that voters are too stupid  to notice these inconsistencies, and are counting on Republicans being too stupid to point them out. And I fear that they may be right on both counts.