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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTrump Proves Republican Obama Hate Was Never About Obama’s Ideas
Trump Proves Republican Obama Hate Was Never About Obamas IdeasBy Jonathan Chait at NY Magazine
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/08/trump-proves-republican-obama-hate-was-never-about-ideas.html
"SNIP.............
This week, largely drowned out on the stump by his succession of own goals, Donald Trump returned to a theme he has mentioned before in the campaign his infrastructure plan, which would amount to either half a trillion dollars or a trillion dollars, depending on what day it is. Among the majority of Republicans who support Trump, this spending plan has provoked not a whimper of complaint. Among the minority who dont like Trump, the irony is bitter. If you ignore the rhetorical flourishes and stick to what he is actually advocating and how he proposes to pay for it you can call it by another name: stimulus, writes anti-Trump conservative Jonathan Tobin. So the question for Trump acolytes who now pose as the arbiters of what it means to be a conservative, what is it about Trumps stimulus that [makes] it more acceptable to Republican voters than Obamas?
Why, that is quite a puzzle, isnt it? The entire Republican Party treated Obamas stimulus as a threat to the Republic, yet has said nothing as Trump has embraced a proposal with equally objectionable features. Tobin does not offer up an explanation for such a curious state of affairs, concluding only, Ive yet to hear a rational explanation for that fact. Tobin is not alone in his incredulity. Conservative intellectuals who oppose Trump frequently deride him as a liberal, pronouncing his success at winning over conservative voters baffling. Trump has talked repeatedly about favoring something like single-payer healthcare and the Obamacare mandate The man doesnt have a limited-government bone in his body, wrote RedStates Dan McLaughlin several months ago. In January, the conservative talk-show host Steve Deace ran through a long list of Trump ideological deviations and asked, So why are some conservatives still defending this typical New York City liberal? Again, he suggested no theory of the case. The question was the last line of the column.
Unlike the conservatives baffled at the voters acceptance of their nominees heresies, I do have an explanation. The overwhelming majority of Republican voters found Obamas stimulus unacceptable for reasons that had nothing to do with its merits. Indeed, the same can be said of a large share of Obamas entire domestic agenda, against which Republicans have spent eight years in a frenzy of opposition.
According to the official Republican history of the Obama administration, conservatives rose up in indignant protest against the administrations radical left-wing agenda. Tobin repeats this well-worn version of events, reminding his readers, opposition to Obamas stimulus was, as much as the administrations push for ObamaCare, the driving force behind the creation of the Tea Party in 2009 and 2010. It is true that conservative elites believe, as Tobin does, that the stimulus did nothing to help the economy. (This belief is in contrast to the consensus of macroeconomic forecasters and economists.) But conservatives did not believe that fiscal stimulus cant help a depressed economy until Obama took office. When the economy showed signs of sputtering in early 2008, Congress passed a fiscal stimulus by overwhelming margins (81-16 in the Senate, 380-34 in the House).
..............SNIP"
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