Since George W. Bush took office in 2001, he and the Republican majorities in the Senate and House have talked the talk on cutting federal spending and reducing the power and influence of government but they haven't walked it.Tapscott closes with this warning:
In fact, they have run about as fast as their political legs would take them in the opposite direction, piling up thousands of special interest earmarks, adding the biggest expansion of entitlement spending since 1965, pushing failed federal programs in areas like education to record heights and increasing the national debt to previously unimagined levels.
Put another way, they've done pretty much what a Democratic president and Congress would have done had the election of 1994 not prompted Bill Clinton's hollow 1995 State of the Union proclamation that "the era of Big Government is over."
Millions of conservatives across the country worked so hard for so many years for a GOP majority in Congress and a GOP President and for all those years they were told that doing so would produce genuine change in Washington, even the consumation and completion of the Reagan Revolution.
Now, with another legislative subterfuge in the offing, we see all too clearly that we've been taken for a ride. Come November, the ride will be over for a bunch of Republicans who think the base "has nowhere to go."
I guess my question for Mark would be where will those millions of conservatives go? They won't vote for Dems, and so far there hasn't been a viable third party capable of electing anyone. Will we all just stay home? I don't think so because conservatives are usually pretty diligent about getting out to vote (civic duty and all). It could be 1998 again when conservatives stayed home in big numbers, but even then the GOP retained majority control, though they lost some seats.
It's going to get interesting.
And this kind of stuff doesn't help either.
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