Robert Reich Says Republicans Want To Make 2010 Elections “Hellfire And Brimstone” National Referendum

Robert Reich on his blog explains, “Why Republicans Won’t Support the Stimulus.” According to Reich, the Republicans are banding together as a deliberate political strategy aimed at the 2010 elections.

Reich explains, “Yesterday, while sitting across from Newt Gingrich on George Stephanopoulos’s Sunday morning television show, 1994 came roaring back into my head. Gingrich, you remember, turned that midterm election into a national referendum about Bill Clinton’s leadership…. Because House and Senate Republicans had kept remarkable unity in opposing Clinton at almost every turn, Gingrich in the election of 1994 could claim that and the Republican Party offered a clear alternative, and had earned the chance to control Congress.”

Reich says that the economy is in such an enormous hole that, “Even if everything goes as well as possible and the stimulus and next round of bank bailouts work perfectly, under the best of circumstances — assuming the stimulus is big enough to jump-start the economy and the next bank bailout big enough to get credit moving — most Americans won’t feel much better than they do now by November, 2010.”

But Reich is worried that the stimulus package will not be nearly big enough to solve the problems in our economy. He worries that the bank bailout will be ineffective. Reich comes close to predicting that by November 2010 the economy will actually be worse than it is today.

Reich says, “Republicans don’t want their fingerprints on the stimulus bill or the next bank bailout because they plan to make the midterm election of 2010 a national referendum on Barack Obama’s handling of the economy. They know that by then the economy will still appear sufficiently weak that they can dub the entire Obama effort a failure — even if the economy would have been far worse without it, even if the economy is beginning to turn around. They’ll say “he wanted more government spending, and we said no, but we didn’t have the votes. Elect us and we’ll turn the economy around by cutting taxes and getting government out of the private sector.”

“Obama believes Republicans will eventually embrace bipartisanship. I hope he’s right but I fear he’s wrong. They want to take back Congress the way Newt Gingrich retook the House (and helped Republicans retake the Senate) in 1994 — with hellfire and brimstone. Once in control of Congress, they’ll be able to block Obama’s big initiatives on health care and the environment, stop any Supreme Court nominees, and set up their own candidate for the White House in 2012.”