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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2005-01-20

More Good Reading At Opinion Journal Online

Paul Gigot also offers an interesting read on today’s OJO. His conclusion is simple, and important: Republicans now have an opportunity to re-make the way government works for the people. . .if Congressional Republicans have the same courage as the President and will it into being.

Republicans in Congress like to complain about this White House's negotiating style, and of course they will want to put their own stamp on legislation. But they should also recognize how fortunate they are to have a president willing to expend some of his own prestige to persuade the public and make their reform votes easier.

If they think they can walk away from his agenda in the name of their own incumbent self-preservation, they might want to recall why they were able to win the majority back in 1994. Democrats ran the entire government then, but liberals told the upstart president from Arkansas that the welfare reform he'd run on was a non-starter. The campaign reform they'd all promised for years? Also no way. Their (much larger) majority proceeded to split apart over guns, health care and taxes. It could happen to Republicans too.

A wise bit of warning, to be sure.

But that isn’t the best part of the article. I like Gigot’s recounting of major accomplishments by liberals:

Whatever one thinks of its policies, the Democratic Party surely made a difference during its 20th-century heyday. Set aside its last, corrupted years in power. When liberalism was ascendant, from the 1930s through the 1970s, Democrats permanently altered the face of government.

They ended poverty for the elderly with cross-generational entitlement programs, broke Jim Crow's hold in the South with civil-rights laws, built the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies that bedevil American business every day, turned our courts into quasi-legislative bodies, and planted the seeds of government-run health care that continue to grow today. As the party of government, they built institutions and processes that have consistently expanded its scope.

If we ever needed to be reminded of good reasons to vote for Republicans, that list sums it up rather nicely.
Posted by: Michael / 1/20/2005 06:37:00 PM

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