Bob Shrum. He's a lousy campaign manager/advisor, but this piece by him will be standard reading for my friends and family... LOTS of good points.
Attack of the Zombie Republicans... They won’t admit it, but like the de facto leader of their party, Rush Limbaugh, Republicans want the President to “fail.” Their arguments—if one can dignify them as such—are by turns petty, dishonest or ignorant, ahistorical and ugly.
The pettiest point was their complaint about the modest funding for birth control in the original version of the House stimulus bill. Heaven forbid—or at least Pat Robertson does—that the poor would have access to family planning. So at the President’s request, the provision was removed; the funding will come later in a different piece of legislation.
At least their quick, cheap hit on contraception lacked the intellectual slovenliness of their other objections. Once and future presidential candidate Mitt Romney told the GOP House retreat that the size of the recovery package threatened to set off hyperinflation. Either he was intentionally deceptive or, like George W. Bush, he slept through economics classes at Harvard Business School. The danger now is not inflation, but a descent into deflation. An economy with a paralyzed private sector needs public spending to create demand, production, and jobs.
But spending won’t work, according to the conservative oppositionists. Look at the New Deal, they say, it failed! This Republican fiction assumes that in 1936 Americans suffered from mass delusion as they reelected FDR in a huge landslide. Apparently voters hadn’t noticed his conspicuous failure in office.
In fact, as I’ve pointed out before, from 1933 through 1937, unemployment declined year on year in what was then the largest period of uninterrupted growth in American history; the Dow-Jones Industrial average rose nearly 400 percent. The New Deal only faltered afterwards, in 1938, as the President prematurely moved toward a balanced budget with less stimulative spending—precisely the course the Romneys, Kyls and Republican ideologues now demand.
Then there is the timing complaint. Republicans assert that the Obama plan falls short because the majority of the stimulus won’t affect the economy in the first 18 months. This recycled charge is based on an incomplete Congressional Budget Office report; the final report on the House bill concludes that two-thirds of the money would be spent by 2010. Moreover, it would make no sense to abruptly cut off investments that will create jobs now while contributing to long-term prosperity. High-speed broadband, for example, like the Tennessee Valley Authority, will make a powerful economic difference decades after the present crisis is past.
Senator Kyl has another objection: the plan, he says, “wastes a ton of money” because it provides help for the states and a $500 tax rebate for people lower down the income scale. He overlooks the undeniable reality that both provisions are far more efficient drivers of demand than his preference for permanently extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Surely the answer to what got us into this mess—a cold, thin gruel of trickle-down leftovers—is not more of the same. Kyl’s not alone in myth-making, however: CNN economics correspondent Ali Velshi dismissed extended unemployment and food stamps as “not stimulus”—despite the fact that few, if any, measures deliver as much economic bang as fast....
MORE...
http://www.theweek.com/article/index/92863/Attack_of_the_Zombie_Republicans
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