Editorial: Why the Democrats must win in 2010

First of all, the Democratic Party is the majority party. It has been this way since the Great Depression. Oh sure, the GOP has had their victories, but this is because Democrats did the right things when they were in power.

For example, The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for the widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans in the United States. Many reactionary Democrats in the South left the Democratic Party after the law passed and the so-called Reagan Revolution followed. President Lyndon Johnson thought it would take 10 years for Democrats to recover, but it took nearly 25 years.

Conservative Joe Scarborough o the Morning Joe has even admitted that Democrats should win every election. Rightardia agrees.

Second, the Republicans are a minority regional party. The GOP actually functions better as a minority party. If you examine the last three Republican Administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, all of those administrations ran in the red and all of them sponsored expensive wars and insurgencies. The Republicans have been able to win elections, but they have never been able to govern effectively. The GOP has always left wars and a financial mess for the Democrats to clean up.

The Great Recession is by far the worst crises conservatives have created in the past 60 years. It will probably take the Democrats four to six years to fix the damage done to the United States by wayward conservatives.

Third, the GOP lives in the past and view the world in black and white. Many Republicans think they are still fighting the Civil War. Others think the US is fighting the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Most Republicans don't even realize the USSR is now called Russia.

Republicans prefer a bi-polar world with big enemies such as Russia and China. They wants to defeat communism, although few communist states still exist and the ones that do are not direct threats to the US.

We trade with Vietnam, Russia and China. The Russians launch our satellites and sell us their rocket motors. Seventy per cent of Wal Mart's goods come from China. Giving the devil his do, Richard Nixon and his diplomat, Henry Kissinger, were greatly responsible for the thaw in relations with the Chinese.

George W. Bush could have smoothed over relations with the Russians, but instead tried to antagonize them by wanting to install NATO missile defense systems in former Warsaw pact countries. This pig headed conservative belligerency eventually led to a confrontation between Russia and Georgia. The US proxy, Georgia, was badly defeated.

President Obama wisely went to Russia to reopen diplomacy afterwards. The missile defense system is on hold and a new START Treaty will be signed next month. Rightardia hopes the GOP in the Senate will show some bi-partisanship and confirm the treaty. Rightardia would also like to to see the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which a Cold War relic, rescinded. We need to resume trade with Russia.

Fourth, the GOP has no clear agenda that can help the financial crises and unemployment in the US. The Party of No is made up of two diverse components: the Ditto heads and Tea Partiers; and the Major Donors. The Tea Party movement is not strongly influenced by the RNC. Dick Morris recently said

“when you give money to the Republican National Committee, you're wasting your money."

The GOP agenda over the years has had three components: 

1. Attack or destabilize perceived international enemies.
2. Cut taxes for the affluent and corporations
3. Deregulate corporations

It is clear that with the present economic crisis in the US that tax cuts would create larger deficits. Because many of the states succumbed to conservative pressure to cut taxes, they did not maintain reserves for the 'seven years of famine. ' Many states, particularity Southern are strapped for cash and looking for new taxes to generate revenues.

Florida Republicans refused to raise the corporate unemployment tax as all of the other US states had done and quickly spent the states limited reserves for unemployment during the Great Recession.

Florida has had to borrow $ 100s of millions of dollars to pay for unemployment. Initially the corporate unemployment tax was substantially raised, but the Republicans backed off due to corporate pressure. This is unfinished business because the tax will have to be raised to pay the federal government back

President Obama would be wise to raise taxes on the affluent who have been the biggest beneficiaries or GOP tax cuts since the 1970s. If you look a the the lessons learned from World War 2 and the Great Depression, the affluent were taxed at the 90 per cent level to fund World War 2 and to pay for the social programs that were needed during the depression.

According to a Federal Reserve study, the middle class was greatly weakened during the Reagan years because of regressive tax cuts.The middle class doea not have the resources because of these regressive tax cuts to help as much as the most fortunate Americans.

Congress and Senate are working on bills to regulate the financial industry and Wall Street. The deregulation efforts of the GOP since the Reagan era failed and it clear that the naive belief that industries can regulate themselves is foolish.

Likewise, the US can no longer afford to launch preemptive $ one trillion wars on foreign nations. We need to let nations develop without the threat of US military interference. Recessions invariably follow wars so the suggestion that wars are good for the economy is bogus.

It would also be advisable for the president to reform the Intelligence Community so that intelligence is less partisan can be provided to the President and the Armed Forces.

The CIA recently arranged for the defection of an Iranian nuclear physicist. The US has a good idea of Iranian nuclear intentions. We need more successes like this and fewer intelligence failures which result because Republican presidents want conformity between intelligence and conservative foreign policy.

Conclusion: It should be clear that the GOP has little to offer America in 2010. The GOP hasn't really proposed any new ideas in the past year and preferred to stonewall the Democratic agenda. Until the health care bill passed, the number one objective of the GOP was to derail the Obama presidency.

President Obama never even got the six months Honeymoon that past GOP presidents have enjoyed. The new priority of the GOP now appears to be the repeal of health care that would require 67 votes in the Senate after President Obama's veto. Senator Bob Corker made the following comment on health care repeal:

"The fact is that's not going to happen, OK?"

If Republicans were to retake either House, the net affect would be that the recovery would slow down. Americans need bold action, not watered down bi-partisanship. The Democrats cannot waste anymore of its political capital on one item agendas like health care.

Numerous problems need to be hastily resolved. If the Democrats need to get the job done by using reconciliation, then by all means do it. The Republicans have set a Senate record for filibusters. The Democrats should return the favor by passing a record number of bills using reconciliation.

American has always trusted the Democrats in a time of crises. During World War 1, Woodrow Wilson was elected president and during the Great Depression and World War 2, the public elected FDR. FDR realized increased government spending and taxing the affluent was the only way out of the Great Depression.

The Tea Partiers suggest that balancing the budget and reducing the size of government will resolve the problems the country is facing. However, the government didn't create this crises, private enterprise did after years of government deregulation. Conservatives also whine about Income Tax, but the US Income tax is about 28 per cent of the GDP, well below other industrial nations of the world.

Do the Tea Baggers, most of whom are Baby Boomers, want their Social Security Benefits cut? The new health care law got rid of Medicare Advantage, the Republican Medicare private option that was heavily subsidized by the federal government . The big ticket item for Income tax is the Armed Services which eats up about 36 per cent of the Income Tax pie. Obama is pulling the US out of Iraq this year that will cut some of the costs in the defense budget.

We are now recovering form the Great Recession and will need further Democratic majorities in the House and senate for this country to pull itself up by its bootstraps. The voters gave George W. Bush six years of Republican control of the House and Senate to run the United States into the ground. The public should give Obama and the Democrats the same mandate and time line to rebuild America.

Switching horses mid-steam will not benefit the country. Rightardia suspects it will take more than the coarse rhetoric of the GOP and the staged events of Tea Partiers to win back the trust of the voters again. The last thing this nation needs at this critical time is more grid lock.

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