"Bi-Partisanship, Fiscal Conservatism, Cocktails and the same old GOP"

“What we need most right now, at this moment, is a kind of patriotic grace – a grace that takes the long view, apprehends the moment we’re in, comes up with ways of dealing with it, and eschews the politically cheap and manipulative” – Peggy Noonan (b. 1950), journalist (The Wall Street Journal), former speechwriter and special assistant to Ronald Reagan and political conservative.

My brother-in-law is in his mid-‘40s and is a very smart guy. He works as a senior process engineer and beyond knowing that his company has some ongoing contracts with the Department of Defense that involves airplanes I have no clue what he does. One of the reasons I like him is that he has taken his analytical and scientific mind and applied it to making beer, a hobby for which he has won a number of awards. Occasionally my wife and I will receive a package with the latest bottle of his tasty tonic enclosed for the requisite R&D. During the lead in to the general election last November I also learned that he intended voting for John McCain. Aghast that any of my in-laws would consider voting for McCain over Obama, we entered into a healthy dialogue about the qualities of both candidates.

I quickly understood why he intended voting Republican; my brother in law is a fiscal conservative. He is originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan, a state that has voted for the Democratic nominee for President in each of the last five general elections and he now lives in San Diego, California. Whatever liberal or semi-liberal social views my brother in law has, they were roundly beaten into second place by his fiscal conservatism. I am not making him wrong because of his opinion; however it does explain his decision to vote for John McCain. Or does it?

My boss is from Utah, which means that he is Mormon, and not only fiscally but also socially conservative. Coincidentally, much of my travel for business in the last year has been to Utah so I have been given a wonderful opportunity to understand the history and culture of Mormonism. My boss and I had many a healthy political debate in the months leading up to the election in November. He reads the Drudge Report and the National Review while I read the Huffington Post and The Nation.

While he is in no way a liberal or even a semi-liberal he is open to logical argument and is happy to debate the pros and cons of a policy plank or a political decision. He is also a fiscal conservative and as such was voting John McCain in the election. However, while acknowledging Obama’s charisma and bipartisan nature in the months before the election, I understood that there was no way I could change his mind. Mitt Romney, a fiscal conservative and a Mormon, and who ran for President in 2008, is a Republican. Ironically, his father, George Romney, was a former governor of my brother in law’s state of Michigan from 1963 to 1969.

There are many urban political myths that have sprung up over the years and morphed into somewhat of a conventional wisdom in the minds of many voters. Namely that Democrats are free spending, big government liberals and Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility, or, that only the Republicans can be tasked with the job of protecting America and ensuring national security while the Democrats were weak in dealing with Communists 40 or 50 years ago and are weak on terrorism today. All you need to do is take half a second to contemplate these so-called maxims of political wisdom to realize that they are entirely baseless and false.

Let me ask these two questions: What party was in power for the past 8 years and in the process of demonstrating fiscal responsibility ensured that the national debt of the United States increased from $5T to $10T? (…and yes, that’s T for Trillion) Answer: The Republicans. What party was in power when the United States shirked its national security interests and helped win World War II, bombed (needlessly in my opinion, because the Pacific War was already won) Hiroshima and Nagasaki or displayed an outstanding combination of brilliant diplomacy and implied aggression during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Answer: The Democrats. So, if anyone tells you that Republican’s are fiscal conservatives you can quote them the facts.

Fast forward to January 2009 and the now famous $800B stimulus package. President Obama demonstrates a level of bipartisanship not seen in decades in an effort to bring Republicans into the process of reviewing and providing constructive input to the details of the proposed stimulus package. House Democrats were put out by the level of bipartisanship being displayed by the President, leading some to declare publicly, though off the record, that Obama was spending more time consulting with Republicans than Democrats. The President hosted Republican and Democratic leaders at the White House for a cocktails happy hour on not one, but two occasions. He invited senior congressional leaders to watch the Super Bowl with him. He removed a number of provisions in the stimulus package that the Republicans didn’t like and inserted increased tax cuts to make them happy.

How many votes did the President’s bipartisanship garner him for the all important vote in the House? The answer is zero. The Republicans claimed afterwards that they couldn’t support the bill because it didn’t include enough tax cuts for the wealthy and that there was nothing in the bill that would “stimulate” the economy. Then the President got mad.

Rightfully pointing out that he wasn’t going to be bullied into amending the bill to suit Republicans, the same Republicans who helped double the national debt under George W. Bush and essentially deregulated the entire financial services and banking sector that has precipitated the depression that is now engulfing the country, Obama has learned a tough lesson. The Republicans are publicly delighting in the fact that they displayed a tough response to the President’s request to leave the old political dogma to one side and step up, accept responsibility and do the people’s business.

What they continue to fail to remember is that the American people voted for change in November, to the tune of a 2-1 margin of victory in the presidential election and increased majorities for the Democrats in the House and Senate. In the aftermath of the stimulus bill finally passing both Houses of Congress (where no House Republicans and only three Senate Republicans supported the bill) Obama has said that “I am an eternal optimistic but that doesn’t mean I am a sap”. He has learned his first harsh Washington lesson.

As for the Republicans, they need to wake up and smell the coffee, and quickly. This is no longer 1958, 1988 or even 2008.