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I was raised by Republicans. My Great Grandfather, Grandfather, and father were all radical Republicans all their life and as far as I know they have never, not one time, not one of them, voted for any candidate other than a Republican. I'm not sure what happened to me. They were all hardwired Republicans and I seem to be hardwired as a Liberal Democrat. Maybe I'm a short circuited Republican with fried thinking. Anyway, I remember, as a child, learning that there were Democrats and Republicans, I asked my father to explain the difference to me.
Eisenhower was president, I was 5 years old, and my father had to dumb it down, or child it down so a child could get it.
"Republicans believe in states rights," my father said. "Democrats want to make decisions and force them on Texas . Republicans want the states to decide what goes on in the states."
That made sense to me then. I was five. I didn't know anything about the Jim Crow Laws. I didn't know then that "states rights" was code for racial prejudice. The sad truth is that many Republican leaders remain in a massive state of denial about the party's four-decade-long addiction to race-baiting.
Perhaps the greatest, most admired Republican to ever live was Abraham Lincoln. It is odd to me, because Lincoln was adamantly opposed to "states rights." The War Between the States was specifically about states rights and not slavery. Slavery was the subtext of that war, but the issue that sent the bullets flying was states rights. Do the states have the right to govern themselves, to pay or not pay taxes to allow slavery to exist or to legislate it out of existence? Lincoln said NO. At the time of the unCivil War it was the Democrats who were for states rights and slavery. The liberal at that time was the new Republican Party. The Southern states thought the states had the right to do what they want and if the Union , the Federal Government didn't like it, well, they would "pull out" and secede. The first, and most famous, most admired Republican based his entire Presidency on saying that the States DO NOT have the right to secede, the states do not have the right to violate the laws of the Federal Government, that we are one Nation, not a loose confederation of independent states.
The Republicans are no longer liberal. The Republican Party today seems dedicated to saying NO to everything. The name of the party matters less than the goals and mind-set. For Republicans today the mindset seems to be to let Big Business do whatever the hell they want, eliminate every regulation and if you have money you should keep it all, and you have no responsibility to pay for the benefits and needs of government. I recently read an article that said the mindsets of Republican and of Democrats are hardwired into our brains at birth. Some of us are born selfish, and callous, and others are born to be compassionate and drawn to share.
As I watched the Republicans continually blast the Federal Government's efforts to save our economy and help suffering citizens I come to see most Republicans as negative, mean-spirited creeps who will not support any attempts to help "the little guy" and are eager to help the "rich folk" time after time after time. Each and every positive effort is met with the knee jerk response called the Republican NO.
Consider the strange case of Senator Judd Gregg. Senator Gregg asked to be Obama's commerce secretary, lobbied for the job, knew that Obama wanted to include Republicans in his cabinet, so he wanted the job, and almost as soon as it was offered to him, the guy backed out of the appointment Apparently that ole Republican hardwired job messed him up. Because Senator Gregg could not support everything Obama did 100 percent of the time, he felt he had to back out.
Now really, who supports 100 percent what anyone says or does ever? The Senator could have seen this as an opportunity to curb the excesses of a Democratic President, a President who was inviting him to be there to add another point of view.
I, being a hardwired liberal, see there is some value in governing in an adversarial manner. It is our opposing views that keeps us, as a people, from going off in one extreme over the other. I am not, however, in favor of our positions to be so adversarial that we become enemies. There was a time when Republicans and Democrats were adversaries and yet they were willing, and able to compromise. Give and take was possible.
Today is seems that we have to have majority rule of one side or the other or else nothing gets done. Things get done when the president and the Congress are in the majority. When the power is closer to 50/50, then we are stagnated.
Most Republicans supported Bush's spending but hardly any of them support Obama's spending.
Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ken.) recently said that if you started the day Jesus Christ was born and spent $1 million every day since then, you still wouldn't have spent $1 trillion, and this is just said as if it was irrefutable proof that the Obama stimulus plan was wrong. The implied point is stupid. For one thing, the Obama stimulus is not a trillion dollars. We might also say, "So what?" If we need to spend a trillion dollars to avoid 25 years of economic hardships, then what does that have to do with math/history trivia?
On 1600 Pennsylvania Ave a Op-Ed show on MSNBC points out how silly this spending since Jesus was born comparison really is. For example, if we spend $20 million a day for every day since Jesus was born we would have a sum that was less than the new wealth created in the United States every year.
If we spent 1.3 million dollars starting on the day Jesus was born and continued until today we would not have spent as much as the Iraq war has cost us so far.
It is very true that the US and the world has never had an economic problem exactly like this one, and so we have no known procedure that is tested and certain to redress the situation. We have a sense that Hoover Republicans thought we should do nothing and that would fix the Great Depression, and most of us think that made the problem worse. FDR did try some big spending, but he was hesitant, and after some spending he pulled back and the Great Depression crippled the world for many years to follow that 1929 Wall Street crash.
We don't need to agree on everything to move forward, but we need to be willing to work together, compromise, and be willing to do something rather than do nothing. Just say no didn't defeat the war on drugs, and it isn't going to defeat our economic crisis.
Tex Norman is a Child Welfare Specialist working in the area of permanency planning. His job is to work with families to eliminate risk factors that have caused their children to come into the Department of Human Services system due to abuse and neglect. He has a number of books published POD through Lulu, and a novel (The Wewoka Switch) and a book of poetry (Portrait of a Poet As A Wild Hare) both are available through on line book sellers like Amazon, Books-a-Million and Barns and Nobel. Tex has been married for 38 years, and is very proud of his 30 year old son, Ryan Norman, who is about to complete his PhD at Princeton University doing research related to the formation of the spinal card.
Great article, Tex. You really put things into perspective.
I would love to hear your thoughts on the GM/Chrysler auto bailout. I thought the first payout to them was a good idea to help prevent massive employee layoffs, but now I'm not so sure.
I read this morning that Thomas Friedman is now saying that he thinks GM & Chrysler should be allowed to fail and then we should use the money that would have been paid to them to fund start-ups with new ideas. Sounds like a great idea to me.
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