| If you continue to blame Washington for your self-created mistakes and problems, Mr. Perry, Democrats like me are going to hammer you back with factual reality checks.
It is your Party's voodoo economic policies and its worship of a trojan horse called trickle down economics (i.e. perpetual tax cuts for the rich, with borrowed money, if need be) that delivered the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The GOP has had control of Washington in one form or other since Ronald Reagan years. During the Clinton Administration Congress was controlled by a very hostile GOP majority. This crop of sorry Republicans were more concerned with political gaming and endless witch hunts than they were with serving the needs of the American people.
President Obama recently gave a refresher on GOP economic policies since President Ronald Reagan.
Eight million Americans lost their jobs in this recession. And even though we've had eight straight months of private sector job growth, the new jobs haven't been coming fast enough. Now, here's the honest truth, the plain truth. There's no silver bullet. There's no quick fix to these problems. I knew when I was running for office, and I certainly knew by the time I was sworn in, I knew it would take time to reverse the damage of a decade worth of policies that saw too few people being able to climb into the middle class, too many people falling behind. We all knew this. We all knew that it would take more time than any of us want to dig ourselves out of this hole created by this economic crisis.
According to the author of the article cited above:
The other brutal truth is that the opposition has nothing substantive to offer to remedy this. If all they've got is keeping the Bush tax cuts for those earning over $250,000 a year, they really have got nothing. What they do have is cultural symbolism and the exhausted right-left tropes that were trotted out at the mercifully vacuous parade of God and Country on the Mall with Beck and Palin. (A cynical atheist's parody of such vacuousness can be read here.) Maybe in power, by some miracle, the Tea Party Republicans will actually propose the long-term massive cuts in entitlements they claim to believe in. But I don't believe it for a second. I don't believe they are in any way serious about spending restraint and are only serious about their bewilderment at the real America where racial, religious and cultural diversity is a fact, where illegal immigration has been plummeting, where gay marriage is winning, where legal abortion will never go away, and where the new empire the last administration embarked upon has bankrupted us for a generation at least.
And this, in the end, must be what our politics is about: substantive policy responses to profound crises inherited from the past. Obama's call for transportation infrastructure investment is one tiny but real response and no panacea but it's paid for and it's something.
It would be nice if Rick Perry and his Republican colleagues both in Austin and Washington were capable of crafting substantive policy responses to our profound crises of today. But they obviously are not.
Instead of frankly discussing our financial challenges with reporters chicken Rick Perry has gone on a verbal rampage against Bill White.
This week alone, Perry called asking for financial facts "bizarre" and his campaign said Bill White talking about budget numbers was "irresponsible."
Actually Governor, as a candidate for Texas Governor it would be bizarre and irresponsible if Bill White did not ask about the financial realities of an office he may very well occupy in the future.
Rick Perry should know that Bill White did not make up the deficit numbers. The deficit estimates -- of $18 billion to $20 billion -- came from his very own Republican colleagues House Appropriations Chairman Jim Pitts and House Speaker Joe Straus. Who ought to know.
And so should Rick Perry.
Rick Perry is too afraid to debate Bill White because the Governor no longer has any clothes left in which he can hide. |
