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