Paul Krugman: The Blackmail Caucus
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 1, 2012
If President Obama is re-elected, health care coverage will expand dramatically, taxes on the wealthy will go up and Wall Street will face tougher regulation. If Mitt Romney wins instead, health coverage will shrink substantially, taxes on the wealthy will fall to levels not seen in 80 years and financial regulation will be rolled back.
Given the starkness of this difference, you might have expected to see people from both sides of the political divide urging voters to cast their ballots based on the issues. Lately, however, I’ve seen a growing number of Romney supporters making a quite different argument. Vote for Mr. Romney, they say, because if he loses, Republicans will destroy the economy.
O.K., they don’t quite put it that way. The argument is phrased in terms of “partisan gridlock,” as if both parties were equally extreme. But they aren’t. This is, in reality, all about appeasing the hard men of the Republican Party.
If you want an example of what I’m talking about, consider the remarkable — in a bad way — editorial in which The Des Moines Register endorsed Mr. Romney. The paper acknowledged that Mr. Obama’s signature economic policy, the 2009 stimulus, was the right thing to do. It also acknowledged that Mr. Obama tried hard to reach out across the partisan divide, but was rebuffed.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/opinion/krugman-the-blackmail-caucus.html?hp
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Ok, OK, I admit it. I'm NOT one of DU's more liberal posters. But I AM a Democrat, a partisan Democrat, and I agree with a lot of progressive positions.
Nevertheless, I think there is a point we need to emphasize for not-so-liberal and also Republican voters--the Republican congressional representatives and Republican senators by and large have been dealing in bad faith even before President Obama was inaugurated back in January of 2009. They have been engaged in a non-stop campaign of obstruction, sabotage, and blackmail. They have chosen to put their own partisan objectives ahead of the wishes and interests of the American people; they have been dealing in bad faith.
In our private lives, most of us don't have to deal with people who deal in bad faith. We can take our business elsewhere and (hopefully) get to watch those people go bust as their customers and creditors get angry enough to pull the plug on them. When we're owners and managers, we can fire people who deal in bad faith.
Those Republican congressional reps and those Republican senators ostensibly work for us (Although most of us have solid grounds to doubt that they really ARE working for us). Almost all of the congressional reps and many of those Republican senators are up for election this year. If they have been dealing in bad faith with us (their employers), they should be fired.
