General Discussion
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Dear Republicans,
Sorry about the election. I know how much it hurts when your presidential candidate loses. Ive been there many times. Youre crestfallen. You cant believe the public voted for that idiot. You fear for your country.
Cheer up. The guy we just re-elected is a moderate Republican.
I know how stupid that sounds. Barack Obama is the head of the Democratic Party. For five years, conservative politicians and media told you he was a raving socialist. In the heat of the campaign, when youre trying to beat the guy, its hard to let go of that image of him, just as its hard for Democrats to see past the caricatures of Mitt Romney. But now that the campaign is over and youre staring at a second Obama term, the falsity of the propaganda may come as a relief. By and large, Obamas instincts are the instincts of a moderate Republican. His policies are the policies of a moderate Republican. He stands where the GOP used to stand and will someday stand again.
Yes, Obama began his presidency with bailouts, stimulus, and borrowing. You know who started the bailouts? George W. Bush. Bush knew that under these exceptionally dire circumstances, bailouts had to be done. Stimulus had to be done, too, since the economy had frozen up. A third of the stimulus was tax cuts. Once the economy began to revive, Obama offered a $4-trillion debt reduction framework that would have cut $3 to $6 of spending for every $1 in tax hikes. Thats a higher ratio of cuts to hikes than Republican voters, in a Gallup poll, said they preferred. Its way more conservative than the ratio George H. W. Bush accepted in 1990. In last years debt-ceiling talks, Obama offered cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in exchange for revenue that didnt even come from higher tax rates. Now hes proposing to lower corporate tax rates, and Republicans are whining that he hacked $716 billion out of Medicare. Some socialist.
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Yes, Obama imposed an individual mandate to buy health insurance. You know who else did that? Romney. You know where the idea came from? The Heritage Foundation. Personal responsibilityinsisting that people carry private insurance so we dont have to bail them out in emergency rooms and hospitalswas a Republican idea. Same with Wall Street reform: Theres nothing conservative about letting financial institutions gamble with other peoples money in ways that would force us to bail them out again. Even Obamas cap-and-trade proposal echoed the market-based emissions-control policies of the 1990 Bush administration and the 2008 McCain campaign. And last year, when the EPA proposed a new air-pollution limit, Obama ticked off environmentalists by killing it on the grounds that it might jeopardize the recovery.
.................. the rest> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2012/11/obama_the_moderate_republican_what_the_2012_election_should_teach_the_gop.html