Could it be that John Boehner doesn’t really know what Barack Obama and the Democrats want to win from the Republicans in this fiscal cliff dance?
Limbaugh says Obama wants to destroy the GOP, more specifically its connection to its brand; i.e, the party of small(er) government and low(er) taxes, for the specific purpose of denying them the use of that standard in future campaigns.
This may be true, but in the short run the Democrats have so successfully vilified the beneficiaries of small government and low taxes, namely, those who work for a living in the private sector, that losing its connection with the GOP is more like counting coup than any great territorial gain. Still it will help the Democrats to be able to remind voters that the GOP abandoned it in 2013, should the need ever arise…and if it is the GOP carrying the standard when next they see it used against them.
But while Limbaugh’s right, still, there is an even more deeply embedded enemy of the Democrats and the Left than those Wascally Wepublicans involved in this GOP surrender of its “smaller government and low taxes” banner.
It’s the Risen Common Man and the role he has played in re-shaping the entire American economic landscape, gradually since the advent of the GI Bill, but set loose to full thunder with the Reagan tax cuts in the 1980s.
I can’t tell you how significant this has been, even as almost no one inside the Beltway ever mentions it. But the Risen Common Man was/is the principal purpose of the Constitution. It’s why every common man in the world looks to America, to be able to rise above one’s starting circumstances.
For thirty years it’s been on their shoulders, those with degrees from the lesser schools, or no school at all, who decided that working for themselves, taking the lonelier road instead of the corporate highway, being their own boss, getting their hands dirty, knowing both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, who expanded the American economy in the 80s and 90s. Not the banks, not Wall Street, not the Big Corporations. Apple may have created the iPod and iPhone, but it was those men who put money in people’s pockets so they could buy them.
They paved the way, and the financial collapse of 2008 was in large part the Democrat’s gambit to begin snuffing them out and putting them back in their place..
For today they make up the vast majority of the $250K, $500K and $750K ” millionaires” Obama says are not paying their fair share. And it is also those who have already disproportionately suffered the highest economic casualties since Obama took office.
To be sure, the Democrats noticed and recognized the Risen Common Man the minute he walked through the door. The entire religion of the Left is designed around insuring that this Man can never rise above the station the Left, and before them, the aristocracies, had always assigned him. His “you didn’t build that” success disproves everything the Left, going all the way back to Karl Marx, ever believed about themselves. The successful common man disproves everything Barack Obama ever believed about everything.
And since Reagan they have been Democrats’ worst nightmare, and all their politics since Clinton dedicated to putting this genie back into the bottle. Sadly, since 2009 they’ve been very successful.
But one has to ask, did the Republicans not also recognize this Risen Common Man?
(Don’t get me started, for there isn’t a 6-figure law partner in a major city, or corporate VP who doesn’t know at least one 10th-grade drop-out who is out-earning them twofold by selling scrap metal or running a lawn care business, but who also had that garish knack to pay $30,000 for a Cadillac then spend another $10K turning it back into a Chevrolet, so never worthy of an invite to the country club.)
In the 1960s the GOP allowed LBJ to steal away its other banner, equal opportunity for all people, the so-called “doctrine of liberty” Lincoln forged in 1863. LBJ used GOP-backed legislation to induce black Americans onto a plantation filled with free goodies. In the process Democrats have done well for themselves politically, raking off a minimum 50% for every tax dollar spent to insure those poor people remain uneducated, unmarried, unemployed, immobile, but stoked on Pepsi’s, Fritos and a get-out-jail free card called Hope, the Lottery. Half a trillion at least.
After forging the civil rights legislation to free those people, the GOP stood by placidly and watched them marched off to the plantation. One has to ask why.
With that banner so completely thrown down now that a black man can legally shoot you in twelve blue states if you so much as say that Dr King was a Republican, it’s only fitting that with the fiscal cliff crisis looming, Obama should play his final cards with John Boehner by pulling the remaining vestiges of the GOP brand as if they were so many eye teeth, one tooth at time. Like me, Obama believes that when a man is down, kick him.
Only then will the debasement be complete. With no real flag to fly anymore, tax and spending restraints a memory, unemployed white and Latino people lining up to join the blacks on the plantation, and college kids selling heir “souls to the company store” (Ernie Ford) for what will result in a cubicle down at the Agriculture Department, teaching self-esteem at an Ohio middle school or ringing up flat screens at Best Buy, what can the GOP possibly stand for anymore? They will meekly become the domestic staff inside the Democrat’s manor house. Dems can keep them around to answer the door, run get coffee, and when company comes, show them off as the trophy they’ve become (scalps intact).
And I get the sense the GOP is fine with that, if the alternative means they have to shed their blue blazers and come join the hoi polloi out here in fly-over country in trying to really beat back all those constitutional issues they always say they are against. For just like their abdication of the blacks, the GOP and John Boehner seems to have no taste for protecting the one true fountainhead of the Founders’ blueprint, the American common man.
I believe the GOP started distancing themselves from the private sector small business class during the Reagan years when they nearly tripled the American economy, making Big Business as we know it today possible.
The small business explosion arising out of the Reagan tax cuts scared Democrats at several levels, for when even front-office receptionists had a piece of Wall Street, they knew they had no cards to play on class warfare if everyone could get a piece of the pie.
The Dems had to find a way to reverse this. They had to destroy the allure of the stock market for the little guy. They had to wreck the work ethic that stood behind the housing market. And they had to slice off at least 20% of that private sector small business sector, cutting some businesses in half, still others into bankruptcy, and all their employees on the public dole.
This they have largely accomplished, first with the help of some Clinton-era legislation so that by 2007, after the midterm sweeps and the subsequent election of Barack Obama, this had turned into a full-blown criminal enterprise takeover of American politics. The pieces just fell into place, in large part because no one was looking, since the GOP, more or less just sat back and watched.
Back in 2009 I called this the “culture of nice”, raking Mitch McConnell over the coals more than I ever did Jimmy Carter back in his day.
But I think I was wrong about the “nice” part, for nice had nothing to do with it. Bewitched, bothered and bewildered, maybe. Between-the-devil-and-the-deep-blue-seas also comes to mind, for clearly the GOP was psychologically unprepared to have to choose between losing its Establishment status, if only as a junior partner, versus taking on the role, like the fabled Republicans of yore, of spokesmen and defenders of the little guy…even if that little guy had proven the Founders and the American experiment right by building 50% of the modern economy by his own sweat…and high school diploma intellect. So give the GOP low grades for gratitude as well.
The rise of the American small business class was the culmination of the Founders’ dream for a free and prosperous America, driven by the hard work and ingenuity of its commoner classes, only no Republican ever says that out loud. The Risen Common Man is the risen middle class and nothing Obama or the government can say can actually put them into a different class. The rise to wealth and success in America still usually begins in someone’s garage or basement. Ask Bill Gates.
Obama doesn’t want their money, he wants their scalps. And John Boehner, who is the constitutionally designated hitter who must negotiate with Obama in this matter, will likely give them to Obama.
How do I know this?
For four years Obama has been too easily getting away with confusing co-mingling the working small business wealthy with the super-rich who can live well off capital investments and the corporate rich, who would steal the nickles from their dead grandmothers’ eyes if it would improve the bottom line.
Obama has been able to lump a small businessman who services home security units at the $250K level with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, because the GOP lets them. Why?
In those four years neither John Boehner nor the GOP establishment has singled out the working small business entrepreneur as either the lynchpin of the American Dream, or as an endangered species. I have yet to see the first media campaign from the GOP, (including Mitt Romney’s campaign) to attack the true purposes of Obama’s rhetoric.
Do they not really know who the true object of this war really is? Or do they not really care?
As I see it, the only way the Democrats and the Left can be thrown down will be at the hands of an all-out offensive, in full body armor, against their fundamental precepts. Then the dual banners of “small government, low taxes” and “the doctrine of liberty for the common man” will have real meaning to voters, for they will be re-offered to the American people with that certain mean look in the eye that signals “We mean it”.
Whenever that day comes I don’t think those banners will be carried by the Republican Party, at least not as we now know it.
