Give Away is the New AUMF

Andrew Sullivan promoted this from Pethokoukis, on his blog,

Newt Gingrich said voting for the bailout will break against candidates in 2010 and beyond when voters see how destructive it is to the economy. And that's the thing. While the bailout, if Paulson and Bernanke are to be believed, may prevent a financial meltdown, it will not by itself return America to prosperity. The labor market is clearly weakening, and is the last thing to turn around once an economy does regain momentum. So there's a good chance that a perturbed public, currently down on the bailout, will view it as an expensive flop by the time the midterm elections roll around. They will hold its supporters accountable.

The basic thinking here is that the give away becomes the AUMF vote. That 2010 will look very similar to 2006 when the country was so tired of the incredible violence in iraq that it revolted and severely punished the party in power. This is getting at something important that has been brewing in the liberal blogosphere since the inception of the Paulson Plan, Digby's THE TRAP. While Digby is applying this more towards the current election and the possibility of McCain running against the bail out to beat Obama the long term implications are there.

We will see the rebirth of the phony fiscal conservative image before our very eyes as our brave POW hero, John McCain, takes on the great malefactors of wealth while the soft, liberal elites behave like toadies to the rich. It's a neat trick for a man who owns seven houses and thirteen cars, but in America, you can be a multimillionaire and still be a man of the people as long as you drink a beer the right way.

Kilgore concludes that the Democrats must demand Republican votes in congress including John McCain's. But I don't see the mechanism for doing that. After the campaign he's run, I don't think we can rely on his "honor." So, the Dems can ask, but the Republicans will find a reason to do what they think will benefit them politically. And that is to sufficiently separate themselves from Bush and the congress that they can realistically be perceived as the real change agents.

The GOP and its ideology has failed in governance. Conservatives like to think Bush is not a real conservative but really he is just a natural extension of Reagan without the speaking skills. Given this problem what they need is a reset. They need a catalyst that can return them to their roots, a puritinization. The possibility exists that this bail out proposal could be that event.

The first thing to note is that it fits with preconceived notions about the worst of democratic party excess on spending. A traditional complaint that conservatives have against dems is that they spend too much money on the people who dont deserve it. If any one ever deserved to be bailed out less than the ibankers who knowingly too huge risks with instruments they could not even understand they probably committed a war crime. It looks like the dems are just throwing money at a problem, wasting it.

That no one actually seems to think this will work is also a problem. How can the dems line up behind something people said would not work? At least with iraq people were being told it would go great. Here it is all based on a "slap" mentality. Slap the markets and they calm down and somehow start to properly value their paper. People are not going to get behind that idea.

Opposing a big give away would be inline with traditional gop rhetoric. Ideologically the GOP should be against doing anything. Their position is that the free market is the best instrument to make economic decisions. The government should have a minimal role in the economy. 700 Billion is not a minimal role. Because it is so inline with traditional gop rhetoric it will not be a hard sell to the american people that the gop philosophy was the correct one. If the bail out flops it would be used as evidence that the republican ideology in its true form is right and that bush did indeed pervert it somehow. It would be seen as the republicans coming home to principle after the Bush years, they have seen the light etc. It worked for McCain with the Keating 5 right?

Another major point is that this is not the first time Dems are led into a disastrous policy by their own political cravenness. Iraq already happened. It is a classic case of fool me once shame on you foll me twice shame on me. Fool me three times and im an idiot. The country has an extremely low opinion of Bush. The country trusts him about as far as the distance between the nucleus of an atom and its valence shell. Still, the dems are willing to proceed in linking to him and following his dictates without revealing exactly what information they are acting on. The country will not tolerate that. In legal terms this is a minimum of negligent legislation. A reasonable person would know better.

When i say that the dems are linking themselves with Bush i should probably assert that they are also making this bill their own as much as they ca without scrapping it and starting over. They want to tack on all the provisions they can but the core is still the bush plan that pulled 700 billion out of nowhere. If you want to make it easy to run against you put your brand all over this bill.

The other consequence of this bill that is coming to light is that it should prevent any democratic agenda spending agenda should Obama win. That is the new media narrative that has begun to permeate the discourse. Much like '92 the dems are supposed to be the responsible ones and to hold off on the things like health care or education or SCHIP because the country just cant afford it. It is a perfect story for the GOP to run on should the dems actually try to do anything. Everything will be too expensive after the Dems irresponsibly spent all the money on the bail out.

The issues with this bail out are many and the up side is miniamal. given these conditions does it really even make sense to do this? I know the dems are trying to get some minimal cover from the GOP but really everyone will label them the driving force behind this in 2010.