The Pendulum of American Politics
The American voter has the span of a
chicken electoral memory. How soon the voter forgets that the largest US
spending and deficit resulted from the other party’s 8 years of mismanagement
and illegal foreign wars with over three trillion dollar bill for the Iraq
war alone. Yet the voter seems to remember only the trillion dollars spent to
stimulate a dying economy, to put an end to job losses and save the US from the
largest recession in recent history.
The voter was lost in a “cup of
water while ignoring the whole ocean.” The Republican Party who defined the
issues in 2004 around fear succeeded in reelecting a president who turned the
largest government surplus into the largest deficit. And now, the same
pundits were able to hold the party in power responsible for America’s economic
ills.
The party responsible for the
biggest economic crises since the depression placed the “monkey” on the
Democratic shoulders who failed badly in defining America’s economic and
political agenda. The vast majority of the voters believes that America is
moving in the wrong direction and from the latest election, the Democrats are
responsible for the present wrong course.
Why are the Democrats shying away
from pointing to the origin of current economic ills? It was under the previous
administration where the 700 billion dollars tax break for the top 2 per cent turned
a surplus into a deficit. Why the Democrats are failing to tell the American that
the cost of the Neo Zion illegal war against Iraq resulted in wasting more than
three Trillion dollars? Not to mention the loss of human life.
The Republicans won because they
framed the discussion around national spending and the haphazard healthcare
plan. The Democrats failed to convince the American voter that spending is only
a small portion of the deficit created by the previous party.
Now welcome back to grid lock. Instead
of succeeding on their merits, the Republicans have shown in the past that the only
way they do well is by having the party fail in governance, even if that means
a national failure. Hence the policy they pursued in the last two years.