Paul Krugman was on ABC Evening News last night and blasted the Republican opposition to the Stimulus Bill. He said, “We’ve just had eight years of Republicans pretty much getting everything they want in Washington, and it happens to be the worst eight years since the great depression. I find it hard to understand how so many Republicans can be so confident about their economic judgment when having their own way for eight years led to this disaster.”
Krugman said, “The modern Republican party is a hard line, conservative, very cohesive group of people. They’re just not going to go along with anything that deviates from their philosophy. Obama did a tremendous amount of attempted outreach (to the Republicans), and he got absolutely zero, absolutely nothing. I hope he has learned his lesson from that.”
I hope the democratics get everything put back into the spendulus bill that the Senate took out. Then a year from now, when this disaster has had time to germinate and die on the vine, the great Krugman will be unmasked for the socialistic, wealth distributionist he is.
“The modern Republican party is a hard line, conservative, very cohesive group of people. They’re just not going to go along with anything that deviates from their philosophy.”
HHAHAHHHAHHAHHHAHHHAHHAHHAHHHAHHHAH!!!!!! QApparently Krugman has been out of the country since Coolidge.
If you don’t just start laughing uproariously when you read Krugman’s statement, what about the statement is there to disagree with?
Maybe he means the leadership and particularly the Republicans in Congress are hard line, conservative, and very cohesive. Republican governors are less so. Even Palin governed as a moderate in Alaska. And the party itself has a mix of interest groups. People who like Jindal may be different than people who like Palin. There are the big business and financial industry Republicans, like the Wall Street people, small business Republicans like “Joe the Plumber,” and a mix of social conservatives from mostly Evangelical and Catholic backgrounds, as well as military industrial Republicans from many backgrounds, and also various ideologues and intellectuals. As a coalition they have been much more cohesive than Democrats, in part because they combine money and people, and can divide up the pie without competing or disagreeing over policy. It did happen under Bush where the small government-small spending people lost out over Medicare D and the bailout. In any case they stuck together under Bush, and are doing so now.
There are Republican moderates, many of them affluent suburbanites. They have been marginalized by the conservatives since the Reagan era but have mostly gone along. Bush lost them to Obama, but the rest of the Republican coalition held together. Interestingly Republican conservatives have been the ones who would be singing “solidarity forever.”