Feeling lucky
“Contrary to conventional Beltway wisdom, the House Republicans’ zero votes for the Obama presidency’s stimulus ’package’ is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the GOP’s political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties,” Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger writes.
“If the GOP line holds, the party could win back much of the goodwill it dissipated with its big-government adventures the past eight years,” Mr. Henninger says.
“For starters, notwithstanding the new president’s high approval rating, his stimulus bill (ghostwritten by Nancy Pelosi) has been losing altitude with public opinion by the day. People are nervous.
“Then after Tim Geithner scampered through the tax minefield and into a Cabinet seat, the Daschle tax bomb went off, laying open for public view the world of Washington’s pay-for-favors that makes the average Wall Street banker look like Little Bo Peep.
“Conventional wisdom holds that the Republican refuseniks shot themselves in the foot by staying off the House stimulus package. Real wisdom holds that congressional Republicans should consider putting distance between themselves and anything Democratic just now. The party’s crypts are opening.
“The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, with an apparently recession-proof cash hoard, is running radio ads against 28 House Republicans. The theme of the ads is ’Putting Families First.’
“Families first? The only family standing at the front of the stimulus pay line is the federal family. Read the bill.
“Check your PC’s virus program, then pull down the nearly 700 pages of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Dive into its dank waters and what is most striking is how much ’stimulus’ money is being spent on the government’s own infrastructure. This bill isn’t economic stimulus. It’s self-stimulus.”
Blago’s triumph
“You have to hand to it Rod Blagojevich. For someone who’s supposedly the most cuckoo and crooked man in politics, he’s assembled quite a fan club,” the New Republic’s Jacob Gershman writes at www.tnr.com.
” ’I must say the guy is growing on me,” said Dennis Miller on Fox News. ’I love Blago,’ confessed Maureen Dowd with only a tinge of irony. ’Sure, he’ll still be kicked out of office tomorrow, but now everyone in America loves him,’ wrote the media blog Gawker. Blagojevich even won the grudging respect of a teenager who posed for a picture with him outside the governor’s home on the day of his impeachment. …
“Blagojevich knew he couldn’t rescue himself from impeachment. After years of feuding with lawmakers, he was a marked man. So, at the opening of his impeachment trial last Monday, he looked ahead to his criminal trial and broke his silence with a brazen media blitz (’The View,’ Diane Sawyer, Larry King, Rachel Maddow, Glenn Beck and more than a dozen other interviews) that might have rescued him from impending jail time. ’I refused to accept what some of these people want me to do, and that is to quit, hide in a corner, adopt a fetal position and act like I did something wrong,’ Blagojevich told The New Republic [Wednesday] in an interview.
“Though he was widely mocked for the aggressiveness of his media appearances - David Letterman: ’Why exactly are you here? Honest to God …’ - Blagojevich’s spokesman, Glenn Selig, says there was a method to his madness: ’Public opinion is very important. The jurors are members of the public. … The public barely knew the guy. I think their minds are now open.’ In other words, what may have seemed a laughable series of PR stunts has in fact been a tremendous success,” Mr. Gershman writes.
Buy American
“In 1930, as the Great Depression tightened its grip on the country, Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Act, erecting a high and onerous tariff wall around the U.S. economy. The lawmakers thought they were helping American workers; instead, they greatly lengthened and deepened the Great Depression, here and worldwide,” the Rocky Mountain News said Thursday in an editorial.
“What the Congress is considering doesn’t rise to the level of Smoot-Hawley but ’Buy American’ is protectionism and protectionist measures tend to feed on themselves. If this nation enacts them, our trading partners will likely retaliate and on it will go in a downward spiral,” the newspaper said.
“Just the prospect of it caused the European Union to complain to the White House and the Treasury and State departments that Congress was about to set ’a very dangerous precedent.’ The House added a measure to the stimulus bill requiring that only U.S.-made iron and steel be used in federally funded public works projects. The Senate is contemplating an even more drastic step - that ’manufactured goods’ used in public works projects come from a U.S. supplier.
“President Barack Obama is against it. He has said that the United States should avoid doing anything that ’signals protectionism.’ This will be a tough call for him.
” ’Buy American’ is a great sound bite but bad economics. The Democratic congressional leadership and the unions are strongly for the Buy American provisions. But Obama cannot let them become law.”
Headliners
“The annual CPAC convention of conservatives is expected to be a sellout because two huge names are coming to deliver red-meat speeches: Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin,” Paul Bedard writes in the Washington Whispers column at www.usnews.com.
“Limbaugh will play cleanup, speaking on the last Saturday in February, and organizers expect him to expand on the fight with Obamacans over his recent comment: ’I want him to fail,’ ” Mr. Bedard says.
“Recall that earlier this week we reported on the liberal group Americans United running ads against conservatives, citing Limbaugh’s comments. The president, of course, also took on Limbaugh, urging Republicans to work with him and not follow the talk show host’s urgings. Look for it to get even hotter.”
CPAC stands for Conservative Political Action Conference.
• Greg Pierce can be reached at 202/636-3285 or gpierce@washingtontimes.com.
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