The Republican Strategy

[nroberts98]

On January 16, 2009, days before President Obama took office, Rush Limbaugh addressed his radio audience, wishing for Obama to fail. Later he softened his words by saying it was Obama's policies that he wanted to fail. And thus was born the Republican strategy to insure Obama would become a one-term president, which was later given voice to by the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, shortly after the Republican victory in the 2010 midterm election when his party retook control of the lower house of congress. Implausible as this might sound, it is my contention that from the very beginning of the Obama presidency, the Republican Party did everything in their power to prevent Obama from rescuing the failing American economy, and more specifically their effort to keep the unemployment rate above 8%. They realized that if Obama succeeded in rescuing the economy, the Republican Party would, not only be terribly weakened for at least a generation, but that it might actually cease to exist as a viable party. In order to accomplish their nefarious goal they first fought against and, consequently, reduced the requested amount of Obama’s initial stimulus request from 1.2 trillion dollars to 787 billion dollars. Then with Senator Richard Shelby at point, they strenuously fought against Obama’s bailout of the American auto industry, which had they succeeded would have cost Americans directly involved in that industry at least a million jobs, with an additional untold number of jobs lost in sectors of our economy both directly and indirectly supported by our auto industry. Most egregious and cynically harmful, the Republicans, emulating Chicken Licken, fought against Obama’s attempts to rescue the economy by continually and remorselessly frightening the already shaken American public, exclaiming that his policies, especially the stimulus and tarp programs were abject failures. In fact, to this day, Romney, the leading Republican presidential contender, proclaims that the stimulus was an abject failure producing no job growth, disregarding the fact that the month Obama took office we were losing over 750,000 jobs per month, which turned into a net positive the following year. Had we been in a shooting war with the nation’s fate at risk as we were in 1942, the year following the disastrous Pearl Harbor attack, it would most certainly had been considered treasonous for an individual or party to continually and publicly disparage our war efforts. Yet, at the outset of Obama’s presidency, when we were most certainly in the economic battle for the very life of our nation’s economy, and a heartbeat away from a second great depression, the Republicans, did just that. And because our economy is basically, and unfortunately, 70% consumer driven, Americans, further frightened by the Republican ongoing diatribe, drastically reined in their spending and investing, which further depressed our failing economy, and it is my contention, has delayed and stalled the recovery. This is further evidenced by the actions of the lower house since the Republicans regained control. Not only have no bills been presented or passed promoting job growth, but because of spending cuts initiated in the lower house, we are experiencing a marked reduction of public sector jobs, which has served to negatively affect the unemployment rate in spite of the gains from job growth in the private sector. Historically, no president has been reelected when the unemployment rate has been above 8%, the magic number, above which the Republicans plan to recapture the White House without destroying their brand in the process. Fortunately for them, a major segment of the American public, for a variety of reasons, is not paying attention, at least as of yet, and another segment is so set in their ideology that they simply refuse to accept what should be clearly obvious. Bottom line, at the time of this writing, the global economy, primarily because of Europe's sovereign debt crisis, and ours, primarily due to our political gridlock, is on the verge of sliding back into recession. And the Jury's out about whether or not we'll fall back into recession, and if so, how deep it might be.