Obama's (And The Democrats') Republican Policies

If you are a regular reader of this blog, then you have probably heard me register my disappointment with President Obama and the Democratic Party in general. In 2008, they (or at least most of them) ran on a platform of change and hope. Many of us on the left took this to mean we would see them institute some progressive policies and legislation.

But that didn't happen. What we got instead was the continuation of some Republican policies and the revival of some others. Guantanamo is still open and the kangaroo military trials there are resuming. We are still engaged in both of Bush's ridiculous wars (and have now added a third one). Obama supports the same kind of "free trade" policies that Bush did, with no protection for American workers. And the subsidies for Big Oil, drilling in the Gulf, and job outsourcing all continue with no changes.

Even the bills that have been passed such as health care reform and Wall Street reform are nothing more than a retread of old 1990s Republican proposals -- as is the proposed cap-and-trade energy policy which is yet to be passed. I know I may have made some Democrats mad with those conclusions, but it is still the truth. And I'm not the only person who believes this. Here is some of what Ezra Klein had to say about current Democratic policies in the Washington Post:

President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican from the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.

If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a health-care plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal coverage; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans staked out in the early ’90s — and often, well into the 2000s.

Take health-care reform. The individual mandate was developed by a group of conservative economists in the early ’90s. Mark Pauly, an economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, was one of them. “We were concerned about the specter of single-payer insurance,” he told me recently. The conservative Heritage Foundation soon had an individual-mandate plan of its own, and when President Bill Clinton endorsed an employer mandate in his health-care proposal, both major Republican alternatives centered on an individual mandate. By 1995, more than 20 Senate Republicans — including Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Dick Lugar and a few others still in office — had sponsored one individual mandate bill or another.

The story on cap and trade — which conservatives now like to call “cap and tax” — is much the same. Back then, the concern was sulfur dioxide, the culprit behind acid rain. President George H.W. Bush wanted a solution that relied on the market rather than on government regulation. So in the Clean Air Act of 1990, he proposed a plan that would cap sulfur-dioxide emissions but let the market decide how to allocate the permits. That was “more compatible with economic growth than using only the command and control approaches of the past,” he said. The plan passed easily, with “aye” votes from Sen. Mitch McConnell and then-Rep. Newt Gingrich, among others. In fact, as recently as 2007, Gingrich said that “if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur . . . it’s something I would strongly support.”

As for the 1990 budget deal, Bush initially resisted tax increases, but eventually realized they were necessary to get the job done. “It is clear to me that both the size of the deficit problem and the need for a package that can be enacted require all of the following: entitlement and mandatory program reform, tax revenue increases, growth incentives, discretionary spending reductions, orderly reductions in defense expenditures, and budget process reform,” he said. That deal, incidentally, was roughly half tax increases and half spending cuts. Obama’s budget has far fewer tax increases. And compared with what would happen if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire in 2012, it actually includes a large tax cut.

The normal reason a party abandons its policy ideas is that those ideas fail in practice. But that’s not the case here. These initiatives were wildly successful. Gov. Mitt Romney passed an individual mandate in Massachusetts and drove its number of uninsured below 5 percent. The Clean Air Act of 1990 solved the sulfur-dioxide problem. The 1990 budget deal helped cut the deficit and set the stage for a remarkable run of growth.

Rather, it appears that as Democrats moved to the right to pick up Republican votes, Republicans moved to the right to oppose Democratic proposals.

It has become a sad truth that there is no longer a progressive party in the United States (although there are still a few progressives in the Democratic Party). We have a center-right party in the Democrats and a far-right party in the Republicans. That is why there is no public option for health insurance, no serious effort to stimulate job creation (while outsourcing continues unabated), no effective legislation to control global climate change and protect the environment, no reining in of Wall Street and corporate greed, no sensible energy policy, no real education policy (or adequate funding), and social programs (including Medicare and Social Security) are on the chopping block.

It's no wonder that the American people are disappointed and discouraged by the Democrats, because they don't offer much real change from the failed policies of the Republicans. Why then do the Republicans oppose everything proposed by Obama and the Democrats (since they are just revived Republican programs)? That's easy. The Republicans made a decision to oppose everything Obama tried to do. They believe that is their path to a return to power.

The sad fact is that Obama could adopt everything in the current Republican platform, and the Republicans would just move further to the right and vote to oppose it. They are truly the party of NO -- even voting no to their own policies. And even sadder is the fact that Obama, in an effort to be "bipartisan", has moved further to the right to please them.

I wish I could say that a big Democratic victory in 2012 would set things right, and we would see the Democrats pass some progressive legislation. But I don't really believe that. America, and both its parties have moved right of center -- and until the people wake up and demand change, the country is in for a hard time (and a continuing recession). That's just the way things are right now.