[Smurf-316]

03.04.2009


Is the GOP Cynical or Naive?
Responding to Ezra Klein's contention that the GOP alternative budget unveiled this week was a cynical effort at "messaging," rather than a serious attempt at governance, Ross Douthat suggests:

Sure, there may be some cynicism involved in how the Ryan proposal makes its numbers add up. But the overall outline - an across-the-board tax cut and a flatter tax code, substantial means-testing for Social Security and Medicare, and a five-year discretionary spending freeze - strikes me as the opposite of cynical. Rather, there's a kind of deep innocence about it: The purity of its small-government vision is more detached from the grubby realities of American politics than any similar document I can remember....
Sometimes naivete in the short run is wisdom in the long run. And maybe by providing such a rigorously small-government alternative to Obamanomics, the Congressional GOP will succeed in pushing the conversation rightward.... But sometimes naivete is just naivete. Sometimes, putting your least-popular ideas together in one agenda just makes it easier for your opponents to run circles around you. And right now, I think the country could use a right-of-center party that paid a little more attention to its messaging, and a little less attention to its blueprints for the ideal small-government society.

Are GOP House leaders cynical or naive? It strikes me that they--and a disturbingly large section of the party--are both. The GOP budget alternative isn't just goofy (though it certainly is that), it is breathtakingly dishonest: inventing insane, impossible Democratic spending numbers for 60 years' worth of future budgets and pretending they come from the CBO? Cutting the top marginal tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, but calculating deficit numbers based on the idea that taxpayers would voluntarily choose to pay the higher rate anyway? Such wild, deliberate deceptions are no part of a "pure" or "rigorous" small-government vision. GOP leaders in the House are trying to sell something, and they're trying to sell it by lying through their teeth.

Is The GOP Naive Or Cynical? Both!