Brendan Miniter wrote in OpinionJournal Republicans have abandoned small government. Why shouldn't voters abandon them?
Because the other side is even worse. At least there are some Republicans pushing to go back to fiscal conservative / small government. The Left is completely large government higher taxes..... What President Bush, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and other Republicans haven't figured out yet is that deficit spending isn't a problem for them unless it endangers the broader conservative agenda.
Like getting more conservative judges? Abandon the Republicans, and guess what you will get.If it does, it will become the electoral issue. And what we're seeing is that Katrina is swamping every goal conservatives have, from limiting government to cutting taxes to reforming entitlement programs. Katrina spending has already imperiled plans to repeal the death tax, and Congress is already $60 billion into a spending binge. Handing out $2,000 debit cards was just the beginning. The conservative Congress has brought back the welfare state.
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Because the other side is even worse. At least there are some Republicans pushing to go back to fiscal conservative / small government. The Left is completely large government higher taxes.
You know, this isn't really true about the Left. I certainly think it used to be truer, but, especially among younger Lefties, fiscal responsibility is a big issue. It was actually one of the reasons many of us liked Dean, who was way more centrist than people on either the Left or the Right liked to believe.
Many fiscal conservative Lefties don't look to raising taxes as the end-all, be-all solution, but also toward trimming government spending. We clearly would want to trim different things - like reducing the defense budget - but debating where government spending ought to be cut is an entirely different argument, with a much more in-common starting point than "we're polar opposites" suggests.
Sure, there are some tax-and-spend liberals, but we're no more monolithic than the Right is. There are secular, pro-environment, and/or pro-gay rights Republicans, too, after all.
There are certainly more tax and spend liberals than there are borrow and spend conservatives, especially when it comes to spending items which are not one time events (like a war or a cat 5 hurricane), and while many on the left would certainly like to cut the defense budget, I believe more of them would spend the savings on some welfare program than to cut the budget. Clinton never would have had a balanced budget if he had a Democratic House.
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