Although Bush refrained from using the phrase "read my lips" before uttering the GOP anti-tax mantra, that famous slogan was still lurking in the background. Bush may be an imbecile, but he has a keen memory for family history. One could argue that a lot of Bush's policies stem from a strong drive to correct perceived failures of his father's presidency.
Members of the GOP, however, are currently fighting amongst themselves over whether there is anything left to cut in the federal budget. Republican Senator and ultra-extremist Tom Coburn took some time away from his crossword puzzle to take issue with Tom DeLay's recent assertion that there is no more federal fat left to cut away. Coburn used a nine-letter word that starts with "L" and ends with "S" to describe DeLay's position, and other less crossword-savvy extremists have also put in their two cents:
"There has never been a time where there is more total spending and more wasteful spending in Washington than we have today," said Pat Toomey, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania and the head of the conservative Club for Growth. "There is ample opportunity to find the offsets we need so that this does not have to be a fiscal disaster as well as a natural disaster."
Don't get me wrong -- I can't say I totally disagree with members of the extreme right who feel that there might yet be some fat in the federal budget to cut away. For example, there's some bridge construction up in Alaska that could probably be put on permanent hold.
In any event, the Democrats need to take advantage of this GOP infighting by going on a major offensive of their own, and their target should be the tax cuts enacted during Bush's first term. Yesterday, Bill Clinton took time away from acting like a diplomatic ex-president and started acting like a Democrat again. He called for the repeal of Bush's high-income tax cuts. David Sirota, in his blog, had this response to Clinton's call for fiscal sanity (via Armando at Daily Kos):
Let's hope the Democratic leadership in Congress starts to echo this and make it a central theme in the next weeks and months. Remember, as I noted in my piece, with record deficits and all the bills from Iraq and the Katrina rebuilding piling up, the Bush administration's tax cuts would give $336 billion to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans over the next 5 years. That's money we are literally going to give away to those handful of Americans who make an average of $1 million a year or more. We can't afford it - and it's time for the Democratic Party as a whole make that truth part of its core message moving forward.
Sirota is right, and any Democrat out there who thinks that calling for the repeal of Bush's tax cuts is too risky needs to read David Mamet's recent piece wherein he applies basic poker strategy to politics. Mamet writes:
Control of the initiative is control of the battle. In the alley, at the poker table or in politics. One must raise. The American public chose Bush over Kerry in 2004. How, the undecided electorate rightly wondered, could one believe that Kerry would stand up for America when he could not stand up to Bush? A possible response to the Swift boat veterans would have been: "I served. He didn't. I didn't bring up the subject, but, if all George Bush has to show for his time in the Guard is a scrap of paper with some doodling on it, I say the man was a deserter."
This would have been a raise. Here the initiative has been seized, and the opponent must now fume and bluster and scream unfair. In combat, in politics, in poker, there is no certainty; there is only likelihood, and the likelihood is that aggression will prevail.
The Democrats will not get a better moment in history to call for the repeal of Bush's idiotic tax cuts. They need to seize this opportunity immediately. The time has come for Howard Dean to take the lead on this, because I just don't think there are any Democrats in Congress who really know how to play poker.
No comments:
Post a Comment