Posted on 10/29/2010 8:24:21 AM PDT by WebFocus
Barring a huge upset, Republicans will take control of at least one house of Congress next week. How worried should we be by that prospect?
Not very, say some pundits. After all, the last time Republicans controlled Congress while a Democrat lived in the White House was the period from the beginning of 1995 to the end of 2000. And people remember that era as a good time, a time of rapid job creation and responsible budgets. Can we hope for a similar experience now?
No, we can’t. This is going to be terrible. In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness.
Start with the politics.
In the late-1990s, Republicans and Democrats were able to work together on some issues. President Obama seems to believe that the same thing can happen again today. In a recent interview with National Journal, he sounded a conciliatory note, saying that Democrats need to have an “appropriate sense of humility,” and that he would “spend more time building consensus.” Good luck with that.
After all, that era of partial cooperation in the 1990s came only after Republicans had tried all-out confrontation, actually shutting down the federal government in an effort to force President Bill Clinton to give in to their demands for big cuts in Medicare.
Now, the government shutdown ended up hurting Republicans politically, and some observers seem to assume that memories of that experience will deter the G.O.P. from being too confrontational this time around. But the lesson current Republicans seem to have drawn from 1995 isn’t that they were too confrontational, it’s that they weren’t confrontational enough.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Maybe Mr. K will move to Canada? No, it’s got a conservative government. So how about France? Oops, same thing. Germany? Nope, Merkel is in charge there. Even the Danes and the Swedes are cutting back.
Paul Krugman is still carrying a torch for Joe Stalin.
I think the leftie media is moving to a message that the governmental system is broken, and can’t work. Bob Woodward was spouting that trash on Morning Joe and went unchallenged. I’ve noticed more and more that the lefties are in such despair that they’ve decided that if the government doesn’t go their way, it must be broken.
It’s a very similar line of thought to how they view conservatives. The left has decided that anyone who is conservative, must be stupid.
LLS
Correct.
I'm liking this. If it's going to be bad for Paul Krugman and his Marxist fantasies, that just about ensures it will be good for the rest of us.
The POS democrat party said the same things about the 1860 election and the result was a catastrophe of their own making. So, yeah, the democrat party again pushes us toward catastrophe but blames the other side.
Isn’t he the Economist from Zimbabwe, you know the one in charge of their Monetary policy??
Is Krugman dense or highly partisan?
Hey Paul, did you see the quote from Obama the other day that Republicans can join Obama but they'd have to ride in the back of the bus? Are you saying that he needs to be more or less "concilitory" than that?
When has this Stalinist Dwarf been right?
Divided government is only good with a Republican President /krugman
“hat era of partial cooperation in the 1990s came only after Republicans had tried all-out confrontation, actually shutting down the federal government in an effort to force President Bill Clinton to give in to their demands for big cuts in Medicare.”
Actually, it came only after Clinton (who’d run on a platform of welfare reform in 1992) was forced by a Republican Congress to sign historic welfare reform legislation that saved taxpayers many tens of billions of dollars. These same Republicans forced Clinton to balance the budget rather than spend surpluses on all the leftist do-gooder ideas Hillary kept planting in his ear.
In short, the many beneficial results of that era arose because an ethically challenged Dem president(but much more politically skilled than Obama ever will be) opted to compromise rather than hew to a very unpopular progressive path advocated by hard leftists. The only “risk” in Obama’s following suit is to his own pride and to the left-wing agenda favored by the likes of Paul Krugman.
Clinton won re-election in 1996 because he’d figured out how to work with Congress. We should cross our fingers that Obama listens to Krugman’s advice, as that will ensure his defeat in 2012. It is the re-election of BHO that poses the single greatest risk to Americans of this generation.
As Krugman sips a fine wine from a NYC ivory tower... reiterating that “let them eat cake” line over and over until he realizes... no one’s listening/no one gives a damn what he says.
Sounds like he’d be happier with Lenin as Speaker of the House.
Fortunately, most Americans don’t share his daffy notions.
China, Venezuela, Cuba or Zimbabwe?
Wrong Again!
Funny...did not go unnoticed.
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