A field of RINOS

Posted on January 21, 2008

It looks like the Reagan revolution is now dead. Excerpt below from Jeff Jacoby

Running for president on a third-party ticket in 1968, George Wallace famously claimed that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between the Republican and Democratic nominees. Would anyone tuning in this year’s crop of candidates say the same thing? Consider some recent sound bites:

* “You said we would fight for every job! You said that we would fight to get health care for all Americans! You said we’d fight to secure our border! You said we’d fight for us to be able to get lower taxes for middle-income Americans!”

* “Guess what they’re doing in Washington: They’re worrying, because they realize, the lobbyists and the politicians realize, that America now understands that Washington is broken. And we’re going to do something about it.”

* “Washington told us that they’d get us better health care and better education — but they haven’t. Washington told us they’d get us a tax break for the middle-income Americans — but they haven’t.”

You don’t have to be a political junkie to recognize those as specimens of populist Democratic boilerplate, right? The only challenge is to match each quotation to the Democratic candidate who said it. Except that no Democrat uttered those words. The three big-government platitudes above were taken from Republican Mitt Romney’s Michigan primary victory speech on Tuesday.

No one is surprised when Dennis Kucinich or John Edwards insists that it’s the federal government’s responsibility to “get us better health care and better education.” Coming from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the claim that the Bush tax cuts shortchanged middle-income Americans is all too familiar. But from a Republican like Romney, who casts himself as the truest, most Reaganesque conservative in the GOP field?

Romney’s message used to be one of unabashed small-government conservatism: “Government is simply too big. State government is too big. The federal government is too big. It’s spending too much.” Those words still appear on his website, but there was nothing like them in his remarks last week. He told his supporters that Washington is broken and needs to be fixed — which is decidedly not the same as saying it needs to be shrunk. Romney used to boast of the hundreds of spending line-items he vetoed as Massachusetts governor; “I like vetoes,” he told audiences. But these days he’s singing from a different hymnal.

To be sure, Romney is hardly the only Republican candidate to distance himself from the gospel of less-intrusive, less-expensive government. Certainly no one would confuse Mike Huckabee — who as Arkansas’ governor raised taxes, hiked spending, and expanded state regulation — with Barry Goldwater, the original “Mr. Conservative.” And the man who succeeded Goldwater in the Senate, John McCain, is guilty of such big-government abominations as the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and opposing the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

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Posted by John Ray

» Filed Under 1st Amendment, Humor, News, Politics As Usual, Socialism

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4 Responses to “A field of RINOS”

edward cropper on January 21st, 2008 8:02 am

The Federal government exists and will continue to exist. Conservatives cannot eliminate that. Romney saying Washington is broke and needs to be fixed is not necessarily the same thing as saying Washington needs to be more involved in the daily lives of our citizens.
If you are stuck with something that you know is not going to go away, it makes sense to fix it so it does what it is supposed to do as efficiently as it can in serving the purposes for which it was intended.
This idea that Washington is going to become a non entity is not conservative philosophy, it is day dreaming.
Jeff Molby on January 21st, 2008 9:27 am

I love how you managed to bemoan the lack of a Goldwater conservative without even mentioning the candidate endorsed by the Goldwater family.
RegularRon on January 21st, 2008 9:53 am

Jeff, I was going to say the samething. The Goldwater family, and the Goldwater Ins. are fully behind Dr. Paul. For the same reasons that this post bemoans about. But as they called Reagan in his 76 campaign a kook, they play the same card on the Doc.

You want smaller Government, but love the welfare/warfare state. You want less intrusive Government, but you cheer the Patriot Act, and the Real ID act. You want less Government, but you cheered for “No Child Left Behind”. So what do you want?? You can’t have it one way, and then complain about it.

It’s mind boggling. I don’t want Washington fixed. I want it to go away.As I did back in the 90’s with Clinton, and has jack-booted thugs over at the DOJ. I feel NOTHING has changed. And the same Conservatives back then were complaining about Presidental powers, TODAY they Cheer them.

Oh well, you get what you vote for.
RegularRon on January 21st, 2008 9:58 am

Oh and here’s the link to Barry Goldwater Jr. endorsing Ron Paul.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7r27Az_Mns