Okay, that last one didn’t work out so well. Of course, 95 to 99% of the reason why is that the Republicans didn’t want it to happen. They wanted to destroy Obama, as the Democrats wanted to destroy Herbert Hoover way back when.
So it’s nice to imagine that a Mitt in office would turn into an Obama in disguise. There are, after all, only so many ways to skin a cat, and the cats we got right now are howling. The Republicans want to cut spending? Let’s see them do it. Let’s see them cut current year outlays so sharply that it won’t be necessary to raise the debt ceiling, even as Mitt raises defense spending, as he’s repeatedly promised/threatened to do, to 4 % of GDP a year, where, apparently, God intended it to be. And, while he’s at it, he can reform entitlements as well, this year, not 10 years down the road, when he won’t be in office.
In office, Mitt will surely force the Tea Party crew to shut up about raising the debt ceiling. That will happen, repeatedly, because no one is going to have the nerve to actually cut outlays. But the Republicans surely will cut any and all means-tested programs. Poor people never vote Republican anyway. The states are likely to bitch and push back when they see how much money they’re losing, which is one reason why the debt ceiling will continue to rise, and one reason by Mitt surely won’t get his 4% for defense, but everyone will get something, except the poor, who will get less.
Well, if, like me, you think a lot of anti-poverty spending represents a combination of liberal guilt and bureaucratic feather-bedding, is that so terrible? Maybe having to exercise power will sober the Republicans, forcing them to deal, at last, with entitlements in the here and now instead of the conveniently distant future. Hey, and maybe Mitt will legalize marijuana as well.
Well, maybe he will. Now that Mitt is starting to look like a winner, the Tea Party Group is likely to swallow their loudly expressed disdain. Having struggled furiously to take down Obama for the last three years, are they now going to take down Mitt instead, and give the Kenyan socialist another four years? The odds are very likely not.
It would be nice if Mitt turned out to be an Obama in Republican clothing, free to do all the things that Obama couldn’t do because of all the screams from the right. But I hardly think that will happen. He will have to talk some sense into their heads regarding the federal budget, and they will have to take it, because there’s nowhere else for them to go. But having disappointed them on that issue, he will likely have to give in everywhere else. Most of all, I think, he will be under immense pressure to do something ballsy in foreign affairs, something Obama wouldn’t do. If we’re lucky, he’ll just tell Putin to go to hell. If we’re unlucky, he’ll bomb Iran, and we’ll have an utterly phony, utterly useless “Cold War” for another twenty or thirty years. Some choice, eh? A Democrat who’s scarcely distinguishable from a Republican, and a Republican who’s scarcely distinguishable from a Democrat, both terrified, it seems, of an electorate who wants somebody to pay for something, in blood.
