Penny-wise Pelosi

[Tigermike 3,039]

Penny-Wise Pelosi

Democrats try to reinvent themselves as the party of fiscal discipline.

BY BRENDAN MINITER

Tuesday, September 27, 2005 12:01 a.m.

If Democrats retake the House next year, we can mark the start of the party's resurgence to a speech Nancy Pelosi delivered on Capitol Hill last week. It was there, at a press conference called to attack Republicans over their response to Hurricane Katrina, that the House minority leader actually used the words "waste, fraud and abuse" in talking about government spending.

What Ms. Pelosi and a few other Democrats seem to be figuring out in the wake of Katrina is that Americans aren't happy with their government throwing billions of dollars around with little if any accountability. Therefore she's laying out a legislative agenda aimed at capturing the mantle of fiscal responsibility. So far that agenda includes calling for an "antifraud commission" to look into Katrina spending as well as an independent examination--modeled after the 9/11 Commission--of the government's response to the monster storm. And, of course, her party has long attacked Republicans for deficit spending and no-bid contracts to Halliburton in Iraq. A Halliburton subsidiary is already coming under scrutiny for receiving a contract to help rebuild the Gulf Coast.

What Ms. Pelosi is now counting on is that as Republican spending goes through the roof, obstructionism might finally pay off for Democrats.

This may come as a shock to some on the right. It shouldn't. Republicans have held the House for almost 12 years and have occupied the White House for all but eight of the past 25 years, yet they have failed to shut off the spending valves in Washington. It was only a matter of time before Democrats ran against wasteful Republican spending. It's also not surprising that Democrats would claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility, for that claim has won them elections in the past. Indeed, it's how Sam Rayburn--the legendary speaker who now has a House office building named after him--won back the House for Democrats in 1954 and handed the party 40 years of uninterrupted control.

Ms. Pelosi isn't thinking that long-term, yet. But her actions suggest she is following Rayburn's playbook. At the time, 1952 looked like a very good year for Republicans and might have been a post-FDR Republican resurgence. The GOP won both the House and Senate and elected Dwight D. Eisenhower president, and that year Barry Goldwater won the seat from which he later ran for president. But Ike turned out to be a big spender who pumped large sums of money into Social Security, foreign aid and schools. He also began Republicans' love affair with laying asphalt by launching the largest domestic infrastructure program in history, the interstate highway system. To pay for this agenda, he killed Sen. Robert Taft's efforts to cut World-War-II-era tax rates.

Sensing that many voters felt the government didn't really need high tax rates in the booming postwar economy, Rayburn and other Democrats proposed their own tax cut. Ike fell into their trap. He declared he'd fight any tax cut while there was a federal deficit--all but guaranteeing that the government would stay in the red. But instead of winning points for being fiscally responsible, he handed the 1954 election to the Democrats, who won control of the House and Senate. In 1956 a surging economy created a surplus, but there was no tax cut, and Democrats held onto Congress even as Ike was re-elected.

It wasn't until the 1960s and the Kennedy tax cut that Americans finally saw their tax bills fall. In 1964 LBJ won a landslide victory--for a variety of reasons--but by 1968, when the cost of the Great Society became apparent, Democrats lost the presidency. But that's getting ahead of our story.

Ms. Pelosi is on step one--about where Rayburn was in 1953--so she is offering to let some highway money earmarked for California be used for Katrina relief and is desperately looking for other ways to pose as a fiscal conservative. Don't be too surprised if she finds a tax cut to embrace--perhaps, repealing the alternative minimum tax, which hits affluent blue-staters especially hard.

For Republicans this may all seem to be an unlikely turnabout of political fortunes. But if they don't want to see Ms. Pelosi become speaker, "offsetting" the cost of Katrina by delaying new programs for a "few years," as Sen. Jon Kyl said on Fox News Channel yesterday, and providing responsible leadership in the cleanup of Hurricane Rita aren't going to be enough. Republicans were sent to Washington in the 1950s to repeal the New Deal. Voters sent them packing when it became clear they were big spenders. In the 1990s Republicans were sent to Washington to repeal the Great Society. If they too turn out to be big spenders, they can expect a similar fate.

Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/b...r/?id=110007321

[WarTim 3,456]

This is truly funny. Libs are the party of BIG spending and BIG taxes. Bush spends WAY too much(See, I do not agree with the President on everything) and now the libs are attempting to appear as if they really want to cut taxes and cut spending.

What a world!