Democrats try to fill the hollow Trump agenda - By Jennifer Rubin
July 24 at 1:30 PM
When the Senate does not know what health-care bill it will vote on — and the White House doesn’t care — you know the pretense that the GOP is the party of ideas has been shattered. The populist message that got President Trump elected — no cuts to entitlements, no tax cuts for the rich, etc. — is nowhere in evidence. The agenda that House and Senate Republicans have attempted to shove onto the president’s desk — big tax cuts for the rich, cuts to Medicaid, deep cuts to domestic programs — has no real base of popular support. It’s a mishmash of outdated ideas from the past, nostalgia to return to pre-Great Society government, nativism and cartoonish corporatism (i.e. deregulation in the extreme, tax cuts). Advanced by a Cabinet filled with Goldman Sachs alums, it’s a caricature of right-wing economics. That agenda is unsatisfying to virtually every segment of the electorate, although inside the Beltway it may excite fossilized think tanks, big donors and anti-immigrant activists.
To the extent that Republicans have an agenda, it is a negative one — undo whatever President Barack Obama did — and lacks an answer to the simple question: And replace it with what?
The difficulty, to a large extent, centers on Republicans’ archaic view of economic growth, one that just so happens to mirror the demands of many big GOP donors. Still stuck in the supply-side mode, the GOP tries again and again to tug at the top, trying to boost the earnings of the wealthy and reduce their taxes. The body politic resists, for the defining issue of our time is how to remain a cohesive, productive society that allows for upward mobility and decent lifestyle for the vast majority of Americans. Like a swatch of taffy, the economy, if the GOP had its druthers, would be stretched — violently and immediately — at the top. The middle of the swatch would be thinned out until it is threadbare and finally breaks.
No wonder Democrats see an opening. Today the Democratic Party rolls out its “A Better Deal” (in contrast with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s “A Better Way”) to try to frame an economic argument, supplying the alternative to Trumponomics. From our vantage point, it is seeking to do two things — one purely political/symbolic and the other more substantive.
Some of the proposals are anti-Big Business, an actual populist approach that highlights Trump’s hypocrisy and seeks to capture the populist forces Trump rode to the White House. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) writes in The Post:
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/07/24/democrats-try-to-fill-the-hollow-trump-agenda/?utm_term=.473bc3968897
