Beware! Beware! His Flashing Eyes! His Floating Hair!
An interesting counter-factual at this point is to wonder what would have happened had the financial crisis hit in 2007, when the Republican primary was in full swing. At the time, of course, the GOP was pretty mum on economic matters, given their last 8 years of leadership and their desire instead to turn the contest into a dick-swinging machismo contest on immigrants and terrorists. And, of course, those candidates who were still in office when the financial industry went kaboom had a hell of a time, given that President Bush was the one shoveling an even more amorphous bailout. But it would have been interesting to see how they would have reacted had they been running for the Republican nomination at the time when Bush was using his last ounce of oomph to swing Republicans behind the bailout concept.
Now, of course, President Obama is in office, and the choice is made much, much easier for all involved. So suddenly, when the requirements for political courage aren’t quite very high anymore, all those candidates are suddenly popping up on my radar again, reinvented as budget hawks. Fair enough; better late than never. But I can’t help wonder.
Mitt Romney is still on a constant tour of “Look at me! I’m still relevant!”, and his current tact is to take conventional wisdom and try to spin it as his idea. For instance, his counter-proposal on the stimulus package looks suspiciously like the actual stimulus package, just with more emphasis on Republican objections. As Republican objections have increased, so have Mitt’s. Friday, he was in D.C. giving a rallying speech to House Republicans and making the rounds as pretty much an echo chamber for the Republican objections du jour. Nothing he’s saying is wrong, mind, but as with much of what Mitt Romney does, it seems pretty plastically craven.
Rudy Guliani caught himself a bit of the news cycle too. He is making the rounds too, and he’s also decided to throw in for good measure a spirited defense of CEO bonuses as being economically stimulating.
Mike Huckabee is still around, though much more under the radar than those two. His Five Principles for a Mike Huckabee Stimulus Package starts, as you might guess, with the principle “Family”. Basically, he wants to leverage the fed to stimulate growth, and then spend more on defense. However, he is blasting Republican supporters of the stimulus package as spineless and blasting them for their complicity in all this, both over the years and now.
And of course Fred Thompson is still pumping out snarky youtube videos in his underground lair. This one from right before Christmas is pretty good:
It goes without saying that Ron Paul is still around. Thompson sounds a lot like Paul in that clip, from his knock on the fed to his “job creation being have half the people dig a hole, the other half fill it in” (which Ron’s been using a lot). Anyway, he’s still doing pretty much the same thing he’s been doing all along.
And he still remains the only one standing that’s talking about systemic causes and effects, rather than just grousing.
Still, it’s been nice to see the old gang popping back up in my google reader, and nice too that they’re starting to sound like Republicans. I’m just curious what the election would have looked like had this been a front-and-center issue in, say, March 2007.