Trump Proves Republican Obama Hate Was Never About Obama’s Ideas

[applegrove]

Trump Proves Republican Obama Hate Was Never About Obama’s Ideas

By Jonathan Chait at NY Magazine

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/08/trump-proves-republican-obama-hate-was-never-about-ideas.html

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This week, largely drowned out on the stump by his succession of own goals, Donald Trump returned to a theme he has mentioned before in the campaign — his infrastructure plan, which would amount to either half a trillion dollars or a trillion dollars, depending on what day it is. Among the majority of Republicans who support Trump, this spending plan has provoked not a whimper of complaint. Among the minority who don’t like Trump, the irony is bitter. “If you ignore the rhetorical flourishes and stick to what he is actually advocating and how he proposes to pay for it you can call it by another name: stimulus,” writes anti-Trump conservative Jonathan Tobin. “So the question for Trump acolytes who now pose as the arbiters of what it means to be a conservative, what is it about Trump’s stimulus that [makes] it more acceptable to Republican voters than Obama’s?”

Why, that is quite a puzzle, isn’t it? The entire Republican Party treated Obama’s stimulus as a threat to the Republic, yet has said nothing as Trump has embraced a proposal with equally objectionable features. Tobin does not offer up an explanation for such a curious state of affairs, concluding only, “I’ve yet to hear a rational explanation for that fact.” Tobin is not alone in his incredulity. Conservative intellectuals who oppose Trump frequently deride him as a liberal, pronouncing his success at winning over conservative voters baffling. “Trump has talked repeatedly about favoring something like single-payer healthcare and the Obamacare mandate … The man doesn’t have a limited-government bone in his body,” wrote RedState’s Dan McLaughlin several months ago. In January, the conservative talk-show host Steve Deace ran through a long list of Trump ideological deviations and asked, “So why are some conservatives still defending this typical New York City liberal?” Again, he suggested no theory of the case. The question was the last line of the column.

Unlike the conservatives baffled at the voters’ acceptance of their nominee’s heresies, I do have an explanation. The overwhelming majority of Republican voters found Obama’s stimulus unacceptable for reasons that had nothing to do with its merits. Indeed, the same can be said of a large share of Obama’s entire domestic agenda, against which Republicans have spent eight years in a frenzy of opposition.


According to the official Republican history of the Obama administration, conservatives rose up in indignant protest against the administration’s radical left-wing agenda. Tobin repeats this well-worn version of events, reminding his readers, “opposition to Obama’s stimulus was, as much as the administration’s push for ObamaCare, the driving force behind the creation of the Tea Party in 2009 and 2010.” It is true that conservative elites believe, as Tobin does, that the stimulus did nothing to help the economy. (This belief is in contrast to the consensus of macroeconomic forecasters and economists.) But conservatives did not believe that fiscal stimulus can’t help a depressed economy until Obama took office. When the economy showed signs of sputtering in early 2008, Congress passed a fiscal stimulus by overwhelming margins (81-16 in the Senate, 380-34 in the House).


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