We have a fantastic opportunity to set up the 2010 and 2012 elections, regain our footing as fiscal conservatives, and box in the Democrats into their big spending souls.
But to do so, we need to ramp up our critique of his puny effort the cut some government spending, but we need an about-face on defending our own spending as well.
Republicans rightly look at Obama’s proposal to get credit for cutting 17 billion bucks out of a 3.4 trillion dollar budget as virtually nothing. It’s a whopping half of a percent of his proposed budget, which wildly increases overall spending.
“It’s as if you took a teaspoon of water out of the bathtub while you left the spicket on at full speed,” Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H.
Not only will Democrats fight their own President on even these tiny cuts, they’ll go apoplectic if Republicans insist on more cutting of unnecessary spending.
But moving beyond the Bush years means we must be willing to cut government spending on our own pet programs as well. When Republicans fight to defend spending on things like “abstinence-only education programs,” we just look like different sides of the big spending coin.
I never understood why the same Republicans were telling me that under Clinton, Goals 2000 was a horrible overreach of federal involvement in education, but under Bush, No Child Left Behind was a great program.
Conversely, I never understood why Democrats said the exact opposite each time. I’m willing to wonder if either program was worth it.
The days of “my spending is better than your spending” are over. We can no longer afford that kind of politics. We need to make up our minds to be the party of smaller government, not the party of more spending on conservative government programs.
Reagan was right in this respect. The federal government shouldn’t have a multi-million dollar program for every idea, good or bad.
Most voters think federal spending is far too much. Cutting deals with Democrats to get “our spending” included just increases the cost to taxpayers.
But we have to get our story straight. Eight years of the Republicans being the Party of different spending rather than lower spending has imbrued our reputation and character. It has given the voters no real reason to trust us as their champions.
We need to communicate that federal government spending doesn’t do much more than crush us with debt we can’t afford, policies we can’t impact and freedom that we can never get back.
