Tom Delay, appearing yesterday (3 March 2009) on Hardball with Chris Matthews provided a key insight into how about 20% of the country can remain intransigent about fixing our problems.
“The left is trying to discredit the conservative movement, discredit the Republican Party, . . . They’re rewriting history.”
Delay goes on a two-minute rant that is a study on how conservatives (mis-)interpret events and deduce that Obama will fail. Here’s the full passage, with numbered reference points, which you can see on the MSNBC website or in this excerpt from This Week With Barack Obama:
[Delay] The left is trying to discredit the conservative movement, discredit the Republican Party, … [1]
[Matthews] How so?
[Delay] Well, [2]they’re rewriting history. You just did it in your introduction saying that…
[Matthews] What’d I do?
[Delay] the last eight years of Bush is what caused this recession. That is absolutely false, and you know it. [3]Giving Bill Clinton credit for good economics in the nineties is just false, because Bill Clinton didn’t get to sign one bill he initiated with a Republican Congress.
[Matthews] Mr. Delay, we just took a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, it’s out tonight, and the first number that jumped at me was this: “Did Barack Obama, the President of the United States, inherit the economic crisis we’re in right now or not?” 84% of the American people—not me—84% of the American people say he inherited this crap. He didn’t do it. And, nobody blames that in one month he brought the stock market down. They believe he inherited this mess. [4]You disagree with the overwhelming majority of the American people.
[Delay, shaking his head] No.
[Matthews] Accept it; you are in a very minority position here.
[Delay] Chris, you’re putting words in my mouth. I didn’t say he did not inherit this mess.
[Matthews] You just said that Bush was innocent of all this mess.
[Delay] [5]He was innocent of all this.
[Matthews] What?!
[Delay] He was innocent of all this.
[Matthews] Well, who was President during the last eight years?
[Delay] Excuse me, but [6]the economy from 2001 to 2007 was going quite well, thank you. [7]But people were pushing, especially . . . Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into loaning, making loans to people that couldn’t afford them. That caused the housing crisis. And we can all go through that. [6 again]But the economy most of the years of Bush was going just fine and [8]we were fighting a war on terror in two different countries and [9]we were keeping the homeland safe and [10]we were not on a spending spree [11]like Obama is putting us on with his budget. So, to say that it’s all Bush’s fault and that we inherited it so we don’t have to do anything about it, [12]we’re just going to transform America, it’s just absolutely outrageous.
[Matthews] No. I’m quoting the American people against you. Mr. Delay, you said, “It wasn’t Mr. Bush’s fault; it was Obama’s fault.” And, I’m saying the American people overwhelmingly right now disagree with you.
[Delay] No, I never said it was Obama’s fault. I’m saying that [13]Obama’s policies, which have nothing to do with getting us out of this economic mess—you look at [14]his budget. That has nothing to do with getting us out of the economic crisis. [15]His stimulus package has nothing to do with stimulating the economy. [16]He doesn’t understand and [17]he’s inexperienced in understanding what caused this problem. And, therefore, [18]he has no solution to help us get out of it. In fact, [19]his solution is going to drag us deeper and longer in this recession.
Matthews lets Nicole Wallace (former Bush White House communications director) get in a few words. She brings up Rush Limbaugh. Matthews opines that Limbaugh cuts through to the economic issues, the ones that he says will get the Republicans back in power some day. Then:
[Matthews] The same thing that got Ronald Reagan into power in 1980, not all the social arguments, the economic issues. . .
[Delay] [20]Wrong, Chris. Wrong, Chris.
[Matthews] Then why is Rush Limbaugh only talking about the economy?
[Delay] Because the economy is the top headline of today. [21]We’ve got plenty of time to talk about the social issues because those are coming in the next few weeks. Believe me. And, Rush Limbaugh will stand up, and he’ll talk about it. And, [22]he will lead. That’s the whole point here.
[Matthews] Well, when he went before CPAC he never mentioned any of those issues, which tells me he knows where the [bread? butter? What’s he saying there? He means that Limbaugh knows which side his bread is buttered on.]
Matthews plays a clip from a new commercial supported by the unions that features “comedian” Rush Limbaugh and his famous, “I hope he fails!” line[23]. Delay responds that the left has put together the most powerful coalition he’s witnessed in his lifetime. I think we should take a moment to (gloat, celebrate, faint dead away) and pat ourselves on the back. Just a moment, then back to it. We got their attention. (Which reminds me, incongruously, of how to kill a catfish—see below.)
But, the point of this is to think about what Tom Delay just said as a true spokesman for the conservative right of the American political landscape. This is a study in how they think. I’ve numbered the points in the transcript so that we can take them apart, one by one, because this went by so fast that no one would get them all unless they were on drugs. (I suspect. I had a Tivo to slow them down.) It’s really worth looking at this in detail, because there’s a lot in what he said there.
[1] “The left is trying to discredit the conservative movement.” Of course! They are opponents. But, there’s more to it than that. It hurts because the conservative movement has been shown up for what it is—a failure. When called on to guide the country in times of crisis it took us in a direction so wrong and destructive that it will take many years to fix the problems. That, and the utter rejection of the American people in the last election, have got to hurt. Where I differ with him is in that word trying. That would imply that it’s not effective.
[2] “They’re rewriting history.” The claim here is that the good economy of the Clinton era wasn’t caused by Clinton and the failed economy of the Bush era wasn’t Bush’s fault. I’m partly sympathetic to this, but that doesn’t help the conservatives. Clinton was not responsible for the growing economy of the nineties. He got the Double Bubble (the build out of the Internet and the coming of age of the PC), which would have been a huge economic boom time regardless of who was in power. Bush was also not entirely responsible for the downturn, since a huge boom is traditionally followed by a bust. What he’s guilty of is making it hugely more disastrous by launching an unnecessary war and then paying for it on a credit card, while simultaneously stripping the government of cash by dropping the top tax rates. But, this isn’t just his fault; he did exactly what conservatives told him he should do, and he was abetted at every turn in Congress by, well, Tom Delay and his friends. The problems we are experiencing are the fault of conservatives, and to the degree that Clinton and Bush latched on to conservative policies (like unrestricted international trade, exporting wealth-creating jobs, and importing workers to keep wages down) they both contributed to our current economic woes.
Which, by the way, have nothing to do with banking or housing. They are the direct result of extracting too much wealth from workers and handing it off to rich people and foreign entities. We buy our goods from China, our services from India, and our oil from various dictatorships around the world. We have an economic problem? Gosh. I wonder why. A housing bubble should not be fatal to the economy. Bad banks doing stupid things should not be fatal to the economy. The only reason they have caused this enormous problem is because the fundamentals of the economy are not sound. They are rotten to the core.
The problems happened because of an excess of power in the hands of business people, who may be conservative or liberal or just whacky. But, it was enabled by conservative ideology that took away restraint and let capitalism run to its logical conclusion.
[3] “Giving Bill Clinton credit for good economics in the nineties is just false.” True, in broad outlines. However, at least Clinton used the good economic times to create a budget surplus, something that probably helped cushion the blunders and foibles of the following folks.
[4] “Obama did inherit the mess, that wasn’t my point.” Really, Chris, you were off base here. They aren’t trying to say that there was no mess. They are only claiming that, despite the fact that they had control of the government for six years they aren’t responsible for any of it. I’m sure that Tom Delay believes this. From the conservative point of view, they are blameless because they only did what they had to do to protect the country.
[5] “George Bush was innocent of all this.” And so, because Bush only did what was needed to protect the country, he’s innocent, conservatives believe. This is how they excuse themselves. They don’t see that their spending was excessive because they think that it’s just the fault of the “left” that they weren’t able to cut enough social programs to balance the budget. If only they could cut out everything except for military spending, they wouldn’t have any deficits (save those needed to fight “necessary” wars), so what Obama inherited, mess though it is, isn’t their fault or Bush’s.
By the same token, they don’t see how increasing taxes on the rich could be the solution to any problem. This is ideological blind-sidedness, but the obvious solution, which is to raise taxes instead of running a deficit when the country is attacked and you have to support military action wouldn’t occur to a conservative. So, they have no feeling of blame for their fiscal irresponsibility, because they don’t see that it was irresponsible. They have such an unquestioned belief in eliminating taxes that they can’t see that sometimes they are needed. For example, if you want to run a military operation then the money has to come from somewhere.
And, politically, they are trapped. They can’t talk about raising taxes because years of squashing anyone (even G. Bush I) suggesting it has made it politically suicidal to bring it up. They can only let the Democrats bring it up and then fight it lamely. That’s the only way Republicans can raise taxes.
Democrats should stick it to them for this. We should raise taxes on the rich and just say, “Look. The Republicans would have done this if they were responsible stewards of government, but they aren’t. We are. And, there’s nothing wrong with it. You problem isn’t taxes, anyway. Taxes are not too high. Your wages are too low.”
[6] “The economy from 2001 to 2007 was going quite well.” If you are a Republican leader, yes, it was excellent. If you were a kingpin of industry or got your money on the military supply dole, you were good. If you were able to take advantage of unregulated industry or position your HQ offshore but still squeeze money out of Americans, you were on a roll. The economy only suffered in the Bush years if you didn’t count. If you were one of those unique Americans blessed with three jobs (as Bush found in one of his on-stage events), then the economy was good in that you could find a third job so you could make ends meet.
I don’t especially remember personally benefitting from this boom economy, which obliterated my high-paying job and brought endless H-1Bs to compete for any others I might want. Nor, I would wager, was this a boom time for the typical Republican (although not the average one, the “average” being buoyed by a few robber barons), the typical Republican who clings to his guns and religion because the economy has stripped him of anything else he might aspire to, like a pair of jobs for him and the wife that pay well enough for two people to raise two children. This is where majority rule is hell for the Republicans. They have impoverished their flock to the point where they can’t afford to vote their conscience on abortion or prayer in the schools anymore because if they did then they’d starve. So, even traditionally conservative places like Ohio, where I grew up, have had to swing Democratic.
[7] “People were pushing institutions to make loans to people that couldn’t afford them.” Now, we are into conservative distortions of the facts to make political points. Where before, Delay’s points were those I could ascribe to an honest conservative, that won’t work here. I think that conservatives believe that they are good guys who did the best they could in trying times. But, for them to say that liberal policy resulted in bad loans, which then tanked the economy is exactly the type of re-writing history that he just accused the left of! No one told these institutions to make bad loans! I defy you to show me where that’s written in the law.
The proof of this is that the problem didn’t occur until the economy turned downward. The poor that got loans were quite able to make their payments while the economy was cooking and they had jobs. For years under both Clinton and Bush the loans Fannie and Freddie backed were being paid off.
Were there fraudulent loans made? Absolutely. What caused these? In my opinion, the key thing that caused these was a deliberate policy by the Bush Administration to fail to properly enforce regulation. As a result, borrowers and lenders that wanted to take advantage of lax oversight borrowed/lent money that they knew or should have known was only going to be repaid if housing prices continued to rise. Of course, we all know that prices go up and down, so making a loan on the assumption they will only go up is either fraudulent or criminally negligent. This system encouraged people to buy houses for investments (creating widespread two- or more-house families and speculators flipping houses). Hanging this on the poor is doubly false. It blames people who aren’t to blame and avoids the blame where it belongs, on the regulators.
[8] “We were fighting a war on terror in two different countries.” Maybe you conservatives were, but the U.S. wasn’t. The U.S. was dragged into an unnecessary war of aggression under false pretenses by the Bush Administration for what looks like private purposes. For all the navel staring this country has done, asking why, why did we go into Iraq, I don’t think anyone believes that it was about fighting terrorists or any of the other hokum thrown up by the Bush Administration. I believe that was just a series of thinly disguised excuses for trying to secure the oil in Iraq for the U.S. (and a few chosen allies, of which the French could count themselves out).
Ha! Ha! Joke’s on you, jokers. By the time we get that oil it will be useless. We won’t be able to burn it into the atmosphere without bringing on a complete meltdown of the ice caps.
But, it’s a very expensive joke, and one that’s being paid by the American people, with interest.
The brutal truth is that terrorists are overrated. I’m in less danger of being killed by a terrorist than I am of being killed by my government. I thought conservatives were supposed to protect us from the government. You guys are sad excuses for patriots. Now we’re going to have to clean the Constitution of all that brown stuff you left when you wiped your butts on it. I don’t think we’ll ever get the stains off.
[9] “We were keeping the homeland safe.” That’s what certain Germans said back in the early 20th century. If you’d stop calling our country the “homeland”, then I’d stop comparing you to 1930s Germans.
[10] “We were not on a spending spree.” Here, again, I think that Delay is giving us the straight dope on how conservatives feel about the last 40 years. From their point of view, they wanted to keep spending down, and they only spent money on what they thought was really necessary. It was only the “liberals” who forced the government to spend that other part, the wasteful part that they never would have put in the budget for things like Headstart and S-CHIP. Why, oh, why do those mean old liberals insist on funding the Justice Department when all it does is enforce voter registration laws and look into violations of civil rights?
This is where we can expect to keep Republicans out of office indefinitely. As long as they are so delusional that they think they were not on a spending spree while personally running up trillions of dollars of federal debt, then I think we have a lock on independents in this country.
[11] “Obama is on a spending spree with his budget.” About time! But, I’m sure this is how conservatives truly feel about it. They were able to excuse their own excessive spending on things like the war in Iraq because it was for things they could convince themselves were required by the country. But now, the Democrats are spending even bigger sums on things conservatives don’t think are remotely necessary, like contraceptives and better education.
There is, however, a difference. The current borrowing and spending is coming during an economic downturn. Regardless of what the government spends it on, it is good spending. We could (but I hope we don’t) spend it on digging holes and filing them back in. By borrowing the money and spending it into the economy, it will create jobs that would otherwise not be there. I know that conservatives (being a little dense on mathematics) don’t get how this works, but most intelligent economists do.
As a result, the economy will recover faster. That means that we will have increased tax revenue in the future as a result of that faster recovery, which means that some or maybe all of the money borrowed can be repaid out of better tax revenues. Just like there is a time to gather stones together and a time to cast away stones, there is also a time to run up budget surpluses and a time to run up deficits. You have to know the difference, but obviously conservatives don’t because they never seem to know when a deficit is required. Or a surplus.
[12] “It’s absolutely outrageous to just transform America [without fixing all these problems we thought would distract you].” I can just hear what these people would say if they were in power and there was an emergency that required government spending on something, can’t you? Yeah, right. That’s how we got travesties like abstinence-only “education” and faith-based initiatives.
Democrats are not spending money on things like abortions for poor people because they like abortions or think that it’s only fair that we get to have liberal pork because the conservatives got theirs. We are spending money on things like this because we truly believe that it helps the country. (In this specific case, because it helps the country to not have unwanted pregnancies that result in economic devastation for poor people and the concomitant weakening of our economy.)
If you’re going to whinge on about “transforming America”, then please do it somewhere no one can hear you. The problem is that transformation has been long delayed. The Reagan rearguard action against recognizing and dealing with critical problems has run out of steam, and there is going to be transformation. Heck, you Delayed it yourself when you were in Congress! You’ve done all the damage you can do, so how about a little respect for the poor people who have to come in and clean it up?
[13] “Obama’s policies have nothing to do with getting us out of this economic mess.” From a conservative viewpoint, there isn’t any way to recognize the wisdom of Obama’s policies. They look totally alien, as if some Martian had dropped into the White House and was sending out red weed to take over the earth. But we have to remember that this is opinion, not fact. The economy responds to real input, not ideology.
My bet is that Obama’s policies do get us out of the economic mess, but that it takes a long time because he has to overcome a lot of negativity. The entire conservative philosophy is based on resisting change. We are in a deep economic hole, and mining down even as I write, so it’s going to take a lot of energy to overcome the extreme negativity of conservatives.
What I’m sure of, and I think most Americans believe, is that conservative advice on the economy, if taken, would ensure a deep and lasting depression, comparable to that of the 1930s, but vastly more destructive because it would hurt vastly more people, probably on the order of four times as many, given world population growth. OTOH, it would be great for solving global warming!
[14] “His budget has nothing to do with getting us out of the economic crisis.” Ibid.
[15] “His stimulus package has nothing to do with stimulating the economy.” Ibid.
[16] “He doesn’t understand.” Just what you would expect from conservative quarters. They can’t understand Obama’s thinking. They don’t have the same premises from which to start. They don’t have the same priorities. (For example, they don’t have any native feel for what life is like for someone who works for a living, so they can’t fashion policies that would help or protect workers.) Logic, to the extent they use it, works the same for them, and their feelings are ever so strong, so they have the illusion of certainty. You’d think they might lose a bit of this with age, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. No matter how old you make a conservative, they never seem to lose that absolute certainty that they are right. Since their selection of facts and their priorities are totally different, there is little chance of convincing any of them. Only their absolute powerlessness will allow the country to get ahead. Am I off base here?
[17] “He’s too inexperienced to understand what caused this problem.” This isn’t just a normal conservative belief surfacing as Delay talks. This is a calculated attack that is intended to make people question whether Obama is making the right choices. Obama’s judgment is sound. Experience has nothing to do with this. I could have told you at sixteen that Tom Delay’s economic policies wouldn’t work and that Obama’s would. It has nothing to do with experience or age. There are some truths that you know independent of experience, and those are ones that can’t be learned in any event. Most conservatives will never understand what got us into the current mess no matter how old they get. When their mummies are disentombed in 4,000 years and they peel off the cloth these people will still be murmuring “Traitor!”
But, just in case you aren’t a conservative, I’ll mention just a few things that contributed to the problem. We let corporations run our government. We let people who controlled oil and coal and uranium decide energy policy. We didn’t stand up to people who thought that the military should have every gizmo they wanted, even if it cost us two or three times what any sensible person would spend on “national defense”. We let our population, and that of the world, grow unattended for so long that we have almost no hope of keeping climate under control or preserving enough wild habitat to ensure our own survival. We cared more for being right about who gets what than we did about seeing to it that everyone had their basic needs cared for, things like their health and retirement. We did what Rush Limbaugh does to such extreme disgrace, we thought that Americans were exceptional and somehow better than other people, that we deserved whatever we wanted (no matter how obese it makes us) and that we could kill and maim anyone anywhere in the world to get it. We did what Ronald Reagan encouraged us to do, to ignore when people told us the truth about our gluttony for oil and our callous disregard for the environment and simply forge ahead with a bigger truck and a bigger house.
It isn’t any mystery what caused the problem and you don’t need experience to see what it is. What you need is a conscience.
And, frankly, the American people would have done what was right, I believe, if they hadn’t had a bunch of conservative “leaders” whispering sweet nothings in their ears, or buying them off when necessary. Changes would have been made except that at every turn, when a sensible proposal was put forward to make progress some conservative or other popped up and scuttled it.
All of this was done by those with far too much experience.
[18] “He has no solution to help us get out of it.” Ibid.
[19] “His solution is going to drag us deeper and longer in this recession.” This is just another way of saying that conservatives can’t bring themselves to see public dollars spent for liberal causes. They think that Obama will make the recession longer because he will somehow prevent the private sector from recovering. Of course, it shows no signs of doing that without stiff medicine, but when you have a dying patient perhaps doing no harm means doing nothing at all.
Or, perhaps they are looking ahead with dread for that fateful day when the Bush tax cuts expire and they will be forced to help pay for this mess. They will be sure to tell you every day until that time comes, and then every day afterward, that raising taxes on the rich will prevent them from spending on the needed investments to make the economy grow. Still, they aren’t able to explain what’s preventing the rich right now, rolling in all that dough, from investing and expanding the economy today. Perhaps we haven’t been sufficiently supplicant. If I crawled to Wall Street on my belly do you think that perhaps they’d start putting more money into the economy, now? No? Maybe it’s my fault for not coming up with a sufficiently lucrative scheme for them to put their money into, something that will make me an island for my retirement and them vast boatloads of money to sail to their own islands. Whatever the reason, I don’t see that taxing the rich has ever been an impediment to growing the economy. Far from it, it seems like that helps get it rolling.
[20] “It’s wrong to believe that Rush Limbaugh is showing the way by ignoring social issues and talking only about the economy.” Chris! Don’t defang us! We need those social issues because it’s the only way to dupe poor Americans into voting for conservative policies that suck up all their money, leaving them dirt poor and breeding a bunch of consumer/workers for us. It’s the only thing we’ve got to flog these people with and we will never give it up! [Oops. Sorry. That was Delay’s subconscious speaking for a moment.]
[21] “Rush will come back to social issues in a few weeks.” Yes, he will. That’s a certainty because the budget is making its way through Congress. The new budget will be written to Democratic tastes, decidedly more liberal than those of the strained Republicans that usually inhabit Congress. Conservatives are no doubt hauling out their old note cards on how to demonize sensible public spending as “liberal pork”.
This is where we will find out if Democrats have really accepted the recent election or not. Do they believe that the American people really gave them a green light to change from tired policies that have been heading us in the wrong direction or do they buy into conservative arguments that the last election was a sham, a fluke, a blip that doesn’t mean anything at all?
[22] “Rush will lead.” Yes, he will. He will be first in line to complain that the budget is the work of the “liberal” Nancy Pelosi (would that she were) and that sly villain Harry Reid, with the Cheshire grin of Obama hanging over it. Rush will tell you that it was written behind the scenes in the basement of the White House by Daily Kos and Moveon.org, with the complicity of Planned Parenthood and “feminists”. (He will have more colorful terms to describe these groups.)
The question is: Will Americans who only want to do what’s right for the country, and therefore join either the Republicans or the Democrats at the polls, want to identify with this guy? It used to be fashionable. You could get credit with religious zealots, military cheerleaders, fascist-lovers, and others who seemed to have all the right answers, if you at least stood still to listen to Limbaugh diatribes. But, given that several decades of following this prescription put the patient into bed with something that everyone acknowledges could be fatal, one wonders how many people who want to do what’s best for the country are going to join Limbaugh this time around. Did they learn anything from the past few years? And, even if they want to do what these creeps tell them on the squeaky box, do they have it in them anymore? Or, has the result of Republican rule stripped them of all their savings, their house, their family, their health, and left them with nothing to hope for but a place in line at the Democratic soup kitchen?
[23] “I hope he fails!” That’s pretty pathetic, isn’t it? Not caring enough about your fellow humans and the country as a whole to shut up and let someone bail us out. Not having the presence of mind to know when you’ve been wrong, and you should stop giving bad advice. Not being smart enough to think through the implications of what you propose. Not being even smart enough to learn from your own mistakes, after they’ve been rubbed in your face and those of all your fellow men.
Money can’t buy happiness. You can only get that through paying attention and learning to successfully live the life you have. The conservatives have wasted enormous sums of money on the infrastructure of sophistry. They put together funding and think tanks, media companies and ideological schools, bought the right politicians, and what has it availed them? They didn’t go after truth. When someone like Tucker Carlson has the courage to point out to them that this little item, truth, is actually necessary to their success, they boo him.
The opposition had no money to speak of. Still, it erected its own infrastructure, but by accident, necessity, or design one with some modicum of openness, one where the truth could penetrate. That palace of liberalism (or, at least, genuine American thought) has come to impress and perhaps even scare conservatives. Tom Delay just gave it his begrudging acknowledgement of effectiveness. He will see it as nothing but an opposing edifice of sophistry, but that’s his failing.
Don’t let it be yours.