…the best way for Dems to nationalize the elections right now is for Congress to hold a vote on whether to extend the middle class tax cuts. If Dems did this, it would reinforce the national strategy that Dems already have in place: Making the case that a vote for the GOP is a vote to return to the Bush policies that ran the economy into the ground.
Indeed, we’re finally seeing polling evidence that voters are beginning to buy the core Dem message that the GOP wants nothing more than a rapid restoration of Bush’s policies. Is it an accident that this is happening right when the debate over the Bush tax cuts is dominating the news? Doubtful. And holding a vote on whether to extend the middle class tax cuts would dramatize the contrast between the national parties even more cleanly, forcing lawmakers to go on record choosing between Obama tax policy and Bush tax policy. Put simply, there is no better way of driving home the Dems’ core message than to hold this vote.
Day: September 20, 2010
Blood Oath
[Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa)] said the problem in 1995 wasn’t the government shutdown under President Bill Clinton – which occurred after Republicans attached Medicare cuts and other items to spending bills – it was that Republicans blinked when they feared the polls were turning against them.
“We must not blink,” he said, noting that money cannot be spent without the House voting to pass it. “If the House says no, it’s no.”
Their new tea party backers won’t tolerate anything less than a full repeal of the health care law, he said.
“They will leave us if we go wobbly,” he said. “I am worried about that, but that’s why I think it’s got to be a blood oath.”
First off, what form of whistle-speak is this whole “not blinking” or “you can’t blink” thing? It comes up with alarming regularity and has the unmistakable ring of that ever popular, not-actually-in-the-Bible-but-definitely-coming-soon The Rapture (what, you think the Tea Klan’s most sophisticated eschatologists have actually read the Bible? Or know who Cotton Mather was? They haven’t, don’t, and won’t).
Secondly, and much more importantly, government shutdown will be Job One of any new GOP majority in the House. Carve it in stone. This will be immediately followed by repeated articles of impeachment (regardless of what the Senate does with said articles, should the Senate remain Democratic, of course), based on said shutdown: e.g., the GOP will shut the government down, then blame Obama for said shutdown’s effects, and then accuse him of “high crimes and misdemeanors” relating to the ontogeny of said shutdown (he made us do it, more in sadness than in anger! We are the Patriots here! And we mustn’t blink. Ever. No blinking.). Watch and see. Preferably without any blinking.
[Steve King quote courtesy of the Washington Monthly]
To the Mondale-Phone!
Ezra Klein, 2010:The argument for taxing people who make more than $250,000 isn’t that they’re bad people, and it isn’t that they won’t notice the tax increase. It’s that we’ve got a very large budget imbalance, and we’re going to need to do a lot of things to correct it. Taxes on the rich have dropped even as the incomes of the rich have skyrocketed. So one of the obvious things to do is update the tax code to correct for that drift. But eventually, we’ll need to do much more than just increases taxes on the rich, and though politicians have tried to sell this one as a change that most Americans won’t notice and needn’t worry about, eventually, they’re going to have to start talking about changes that people will notice, and should worry about.
Walter Mondale, 1984: By the end of my first term, I will reduce the Reagan budget deficit by two-thirds. Let’s tell the truth. It must be done, it must be done. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.
Lemkin, 2010: Oh for those heady, brutally honest days of the first Mondale administration.
Lemkin 