Despair All Around

I have never faced an election with such despair as this one.  Conventional wisdom has it that the House will stay in Republican hands, although Democrats may pick up a few seats; the Senate will probably (but not necessarily) flip to Republican control, and the Presidential election is too close to call.

I canvassed for Obama believing that he would reverse the worst abuses of the Bush War on Terror.  Aside from ending the official practice of torture, all he has done is consolidate them.  I applauded Obamacare and Frank-Dodd, thinking that even if he lost in 2012, these would remain as legacy (rather was Bush’s worst abuses remained as his).  But Republicans are taking a far more root-and-branch approach  that Democrats ever did, and the Supreme Court may very well do their work for them.

So, what are the possible outcomes?

 Obama wins, Congress remains Republican.  The result will be all-out war.  Republicans will see their mission as destroying the Obama presidency to assure that no Democrat is ever elected again.  They may even refuse to raise the debt ceiling and force a default.  Any damage the larger country may suffer will be acceptable collateral damage so long as Obama is blamed.

 Romney wins, the Republican right prevails in Congress.  Granted, it is considered unlikely that Republicans will get a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, but that little obstacle is easily overcome by eliminating the filibuster.  Root-and-branch repeal of Obamacare and Frank-Dodd will be their top priority.  Passing the Ryan budget, making huge cuts in Medicaid, Food Stamps, and other programs for the poor, cutting off funding for family planning, and slowly privatizing Medicare will be passed.  It is estimated that Ryan’s cuts will raise the number of uninsured by 14 to 27 million.  Since the cuts will be made under the guise of turning Medicaid into a bloc grant to states so they can make it more efficient, states will get the blame for the increase in number of uninsured.  Also, as I understand it, Ryan will also cut off the federal assistance that made Romneycare possible, and thereby ensure that no state can reduce the number of uninsured.  Of course, these will be offset by a huge tax cut, so the deficit will balloon.  I suppose this could be the Keynesian stimulus the economy needs.  But at least according to conventional liberal wisdom, injecting money at the bottom is more effective than injecting it at the top because people at the bottom are more likely to spend it.  What I cannot tell is whether the ballooning deficit will be ignored on the grounds that deficits only  matter when Democrats are in power, or will provide the perfect excuse to cut Medicaid, Food Stamps, and other programs for the poor even more, if not eliminate them outright.  I would like to think that all of this will be unpopular and provoke a backlash against Republicans, but even if it does, the damage will remain.  Oh, and of course, the official practice of torture will be revived.

 Romney turns out to be Eisenhower  (or, perhaps, Obama).  What do I mean by this?  The Truman presidency was a time of bitter partisan strife because the U.S. was going through a transition.  Ever since George Washington’s Farewell Address in which he warned against “entangling alliances,” U.S. policy had been not to get mixed up in Europe’s conflicts.  Obviously we made two big exceptions during WWI and WWII, but these were seen as exceptional circumstances.  With the Cold War, Truman was asking Americans to set this tradition aside and become permanently “entangled” in Europe.  Yet even as Truman was calling for the US to take a world-wide stand against Communism, he was also in the process of shifting the New Deal from an emergency measure to deal with the Great Depression into permanent policy and trying (unsuccessfully) to expand it.  These actions struck many conservatives a socialistic.  Then he sent in troops to fight Communist aggression in Korea.  This was represented another major shift in policy.  It was our first large-scale limited overseas engagement.  Until then our overseas commitments had been either quite small in scale, or world wars.  Many people at the time assumed that the Korean War was the opening salvo in WWIII.  General McArthur famously wanted to invade China and start WWIII.  Plenty of people were so frustrated with a large-scale, intractable, limited war with no victory in sight that they regarded WWIII as an improvement.

The Republican reaction to all this was McCarthyism.  A lot of it seemed more like reflexive opposition to anything Truman did than anything else.  McCarthyists simultaneously sought to block Truman’s attempts to fight Communism in Europe while accusing him of being soft on Communism and madly hurling accusations of Communism against anyone who told them what they didn’t want to hear.  The denounced Truman for squandering blood and treasure in Korea and simultaneously wanted to escalate into WWIII.  And, most famously, they started investigating anything and everything for Communist infiltration, even as they ignored the Communist threat abroad.  Truman left office wildly unpopular.

Eisenhower was a moderate Republican, but seeking the nomination meant pandering to the right wing of the party.  In particular, McCarthy has been making accusations against George C. Marshall, the chief of staff during WWII, Truman’s secretary of state who developed the Marshall Plan, and later secretary of defense.  To Truman, attacks against himself were politics as usual, but attacks on Marshall were an outrage not to be tolerated.  He expected Eisenhower, who as field commander during WWII had worked closely with Marshall and knew his character, to come to his defense.  Bowing to the McCarthy wing, Eisenhower failed to do so.  Truman never forgave him for that.

But once Eisenhower came to office, things began to change.  McCarthyists discovered that Communist infiltration was only an issue when a Democrat was in the White House, and that with a Republican, all the Communists mysteriously went away.  Eisenhower also accepted the New Deal as a fait accompli and dismissed any attempt to undo it as political suicide.  He ended the war in Korea and resisted the temptation of starting another one in Vietnam.  Partisan acrimony faded.  Eisenhower effectively solidified Truman’s general legacy.  Truman looks a lot better in retrospect than he did when he was in power.

So, what does it mean to say Romney might be Eisenhower?  Well, undoubtedly he would still bring torture back, since (as Obama quickly learned) upholding the rights of scary brown people is a political loser anyhow.  And he would throw terrorist suspects into Guantanamo and hold them indefinitely without a trial for much the same reason.  But he has gone on record saying suspiciously Keynesian things, that he does not want his tax cuts matched by immediate spending cuts because they would shrink the economy.  Certain conservatives have advocated introducing a new healthcare plan that ends the fee-for-service approach to Medicare (just what Obama did, and was denounced for establishing “death panels”), would give everyone a refundable tax credit that can only be spent on health insurance (nothing but the mandate under another name), make available comparative information about effectiveness of different medical approaches (again, something denounced as death panels when Democrats did it) and have insurance companies promote healthy behavior (as opposed to that tyrant Michelle Obama).  Hell, some conservative have even hinted at breaking up Too Big To Fail banks, something they would have denounced as a Communist dictatorship if Obama had done it.

So how would I feel if Romney played Eisenhower?  On the one hand, we could see these things as vindication, much as the right saw Obama's adoption of most of Bush's War on Terror policies as vindication.  Or, more optimistically, as Nixon going to China.  It would, after all, give us what we wanted -- a Keynesian stimulus to revive the economy, and universal health care.  But it would mean that Republicans get the credit.  And worse, Republicans would be able to argue that they were able to deliver when Democrats were not and therefore should be the only ones entrusted with political power.

This will, once again, but submitting to blackmail.  It will, in effect, be granting Republicans a monopoly on power because they will make the country ungovernable unless given it.

That being said, there is an obvious obstacle to the Eisenhower route.  If Romney were to propose a Keynesian stimulus and some form of universal healthcare, Democrats would have to either favor or oppose it.  If they oppose it, all fine and good, Republicans can accuse them of mindless partisanship and boast how much more effective they are than Democrats.  But if Democrats agree to support either of these proposals, the effect will be to kill them.  Republicans will not dare vote yes for fear of a Tea Party primary challenge.

So we circle back to the beginning.  All alternatives fill me with despair.

PS:  Most of this post was written several days ago.  That was just before we got today's very bad economic news.  I think we can now rule out Outcome 1.  Obama is toast.  We are having a Lehman Brothers moment.  Barring a miracle, this election will be a Republican blow out.