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Florida – The Next Bloodbath?

November 16th, 2009 at 7:35 am David Frum | 48 Comments |

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My column for CNN.com picks up on Tim Mak’s outstanding reporting of the Beltway campaign against Florida Gov. Charlie Crist. The column warns that if conservatives agree with Marco Rubio that the Obama stimulus is a red line, they’ll be defining themselves as a party without answers to the economic crisis – and disqualifying every Republican governor in the nation from further office. The results will make NY-23 look like a friendly neighborhood game of touch football.

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48 Comments so far ↓

  • ottovbvs // Nov 16, 2009 at 12:43 pm

    sinz54 // Nov 16, 2009 at 12:22 pm

    “States were going to lay off thousands of teachers and clerks (a.k.a bureaucrats), until the aid to states kicked in. That’s why even moderately conservative governors like Crist gladly took the money; they would have had to make draconian cuts in state budgets (laying off thousands of state workers) without it.”

    ……..Also known as cops, firefighters, healthcare workers, public works employees, etc etc……..and yep without federal help they’d have to make draconian cuts……you are obviously in favor of those cuts being made because just about every state in the country has huge budget problems mainly caused by the collapse in tax receipts……..your nihilism is bizarre but essentially it’s the standard GOP position these days and why they are completely unfitted for govt

  • balconesfault // Nov 16, 2009 at 12:49 pm

    And the biggest beneficiary by far has been the United Auto Workers.

    Not from the stimulus package. That’s a different discussion.

  • rbottoms // Nov 16, 2009 at 1:50 pm

    Also known as cops, firefighters, healthcare workers, public works employees

    Please, the only good deficit spending for Republicans is for more planes, bigger lasers, and larger contracts for Haliburton. Who the hell needs roads, bridges only fall down occasionally.

    And cops, teachers, firefighters, who needs em.

    A**hats the Musical, the modern GOP.

    Moose & Squirrely/2012

  • pauldpan // Nov 16, 2009 at 2:09 pm

    The solutions are quite simple: cutting spending and cutting tax. They’ve been proven worked every time.

  • DFL // Nov 16, 2009 at 2:39 pm

    Ultimately, printing money never has worked as successful long-term economics ever in human history. Witness Rome or Royal France. But most politicians care only about the short-term as do most voters. So Obama may be re-elected by Keynesian hyper-spending and his children will pay the price somewhere down the road.

  • sinz54 // Nov 16, 2009 at 4:10 pm

    ottovbs: Copper hit a new high at the end of last week……it’s risen in price by about 50% over the last six months
    Much of the rise in the dollar price of metals like copper is really due to the decline of the dollar. In the last week, the price of gold rose sharply, which is another way of saying that the dollar declined sharply.

  • sinz54 // Nov 16, 2009 at 4:14 pm

    ottovbs: cops, firefighters, healthcare workers, public works employees, etc etc……..and yep without federal help they’d have to make draconian cuts……your nihilism is bizarre
    “Nihilism”???
    How about fairness?

    At a time when 10.2% of the American workforce is unemployed, why should state workers be insulated from that economic distress? Why should state workers enjoy a much lower unemployment rate than the rest of us? Liberals always talk about “sacrifice” for a greater good–why aren’t state workers being asked to sacrifice just as much as the rest of us?

    The reason is politics. Because AFSCME worked hard to elect Obama, he gave them a special exemption from the pink slips their neighbors have been getting.

    That’s not stimulus. That’s pork.

  • rbottoms // Nov 16, 2009 at 4:19 pm

    At a time when 10.2% of the American workforce is unemployed, why should state workers be insulated from that economic distress?

    So you’ll be out patrolling the streets during the daytime dressed as a cop and fighting fires at night?

    Sort of like Spiderman.

  • teabag // Nov 16, 2009 at 4:31 pm

    “So you’ll be out patrolling the streets during the daytime dressed as a cop and fighting fires at night?

    Sort of like Spiderman.”

    Great comment, That is really funny.

  • DFL // Nov 16, 2009 at 5:18 pm

    I know this is anecdotal, but my wife was a biologist with the US EPA until she began to have my children. She claimed that there were plenty of worthless paper-pushers at the EPA and the secretaries did almost no work whatsoever.

    There is plenty of bureaucracy to purge before you get to police, fire and other safety personnel.

  • ottovbvs // Nov 16, 2009 at 5:36 pm

    DFL // Nov 16, 2009 at 5:18 pm

    ………there are plenty of useless bureaucrats in any large organization……I’ve worked in a few so I know…….Believe it or not there’s probably quite a few in Cisco……all this statement tells us is the sun rises in the east……actually reducing headcount is a far more complicated process and in the context of a collapse in employment opportunities even more so

  • ottovbvs // Nov 16, 2009 at 5:40 pm

    sinz54 // Nov 16, 2009 at 4:14 pm

    ”
    Nihilism”???
    How about fairness?

    At a time when 10.2% of the American workforce is unemployed, why should state workers be insulated from that economic distress?”

    …….As ever you completely over simplify…….many states have laid of large numbers of people……..whether you like it or not private and public employment play by different rules……even if you accept the premise that we need to cut govt bureacracies and I do…….the depths of the most serious depression since the thirties is NOT the time to do it.

  • ottovbvs // Nov 16, 2009 at 5:56 pm

    sinz54 // Nov 16, 2009 at 4:10 pm

    “Much of the rise in the dollar price of metals like copper is really due to the decline of the dollar.”

    ……..Some of it is but only a small part…….the dollar has declined by about 15% since the start of the year copper is up by over 50%…….whenever it comes to identifying major or minor causal links we can always rely on you to pick the minor cause and assign it the major role……I’m trying to decide whether this is because you really don’t know the difference or because it provides a fig leaf for your generally iffy economic prognosticating

  • ottovbvs // Nov 16, 2009 at 6:09 pm

    pauldpan // Nov 16, 2009 at 2:09 pm

    “The solutions are quite simple: cutting spending and cutting tax. They’ve been proven worked every time.”

    ………The economic ignorance of the true believer has to be seen to be be believed…….and in this bit of unreality from pauldpan is summarised the GOP’s problem when it comes to economics…….As the honest conservative Bartlett keeps reminding us the GOP has invested all it’s economic intellectual capital in a series of policy prescriptions that are not only innapropriate in the present circumstances but would actually be hugely damaging if actually implemented……thus pauldpan and his ilk are reduced to parrotting nonsenses like this that totally ignore the fact that the problem in the first of this year and still, although to a lessening degree, is a shortage of demand from the private consumer and business sectors……..if you cut spending in this environment as Mr Hoover did when following pauldpan’s advice back in 1930 it exacerbates the problem…….73 years after Keynes published his general theory and you STILL have to explain this.

  • ProfNickD // Nov 16, 2009 at 6:59 pm

    David said,
    “they’ll be defining themselves as a party without answers to the economic crisis ”

    I had to do a double take at that. Surely, having the government plow hundreds of billions of dollars into non-productive enterprises cannot be considered an “answer” to the economic crisis.

    The soruce of the crisis is that the Federal Reserve kept interest rates were kept too low for entirely too long, enabling too much liquidity into the financial system, i.e., credit was made too cheap to too many people and firms who shouldn’t have had access to it. Another way of describing it: the federal government pursued inflationary policies. And, when that occurs — every time it occurs — the “boom” and “good times” (i.e., inflation) ends in financial recession.

    We’ve already tried the borrowing/spending/printing way out. Is David entirely oblivious to the massive increases of federal spending and borrowing under the Bush administration, far outstripping that of any President, Republican or Democratic, since LBJ? Is he oblivious to the first stimulus in Spring 2008? Is he oblivious to TARP? To the bailout of GM?

    All of this occurred under Bush and none of it stopped the recession because continued spending/borrowing/printing money cannot stop it. The recession will end, and not before, when all of the bad debt entered into over the past 10 years is restructured, written down, or the debtors (e.g. auto companies, banks, home builders, other companies that make crap, and the people who went into debt buying crap) go bankrupt.

    David’s goal, apparently, is to keep unproductive enterprises on life support in perpetuity, taxpayer be damned and inflation be damned.

    Is David heavily invested in Goldman-Sachs, Best Buy, Toll Brothers, and GM? Because the existence of those companies on the government dole is the problem that the recession is continuing. Bailing them out is hardly an “answer.”

  • Jim Sheire // Nov 16, 2009 at 9:01 pm

    Fine; your CNN piece corresponds to my worry and concern about the status of the GOP and this comes from an ardent Obama supporter. My concern is that your party in its now predominant “base”, that now includes former “moderate” elected officials and commentators, is in great danger of striking the “loyal” from the term “loyal opposition”. As I perceive it, and I have fought against this perception, the “base” is its fundamental opposition to very literally every Obama policy imitative and his every action, personal and otherwise, is determined to destroy his presidency. The adverse consequences are two. First, the two party system that has served us so well is in danger of being very adversely affected. Second, the unremitting attacks on Obama adversely effects not only a democratically person, but also the prestige of the office itself. In relation to our foreign and national security affairs no friend or foe can take a sitting US president seriously who does not enjoy domestic support and/or is unable to deliver abroad. Does your base realize that it is very adversely affecting the prestige of the USA? Or, I sometimes think, is its attitude simply “We don’t give a damm?”

    Jim Sheire
    Great Falls, MT

  • teabag // Nov 16, 2009 at 10:05 pm

    Jim,

    They don’t give a damn!

  • johnmarzan // Nov 17, 2009 at 1:21 am

    i really don’t care who wins. i have only one question: who’s more “electable”?

  • steelyblades // Nov 17, 2009 at 1:37 am

    Jim Sheire, I share your frustration. But I don’t see things as being so dire. Read any of the history of our country, and you’ll realize that the rhetoric of our political theater has always been sharp, divisive and denigrating. The noisy arguments of today, while amplified by cable news and the Internet, are really nothing new. Alexander Hamilton drew the blueprint for smear campaigns in American politics two and a half centuries ago, and he has many students in both parties today. It’s just the way the game is played.

    Unfortunately the GOP is peeling a scab which has been several decades in the making. The strategy of pandering to racial and religious prejudices to pull more people into the tent worked well until they had to confront the reality that all these morons were actually IN THE TENT. Whoops…hence the inability to form a coherent message, and the pathetic descent into Party-of-No status.

    The unfortunate consequence of this is that a lot of potentially good ideas get left on the table. Fiscal prudence, restraint in meddling about in foreign affairs, leadership in scientific innovation, and most glaringly the staunch defense of individual liberties are all “conservative” ideals that have been thrown in the trash over the last couple of decades. But I believe it will turn around eventually. Nature abhors a vacuum, as they say…

  • sinz54 // Nov 17, 2009 at 10:10 am

    Jim Sheire: As I perceive it, and I have fought against this perception, the “base” is its fundamental opposition to very literally every Obama policy imitative and his every action, personal and otherwise, is determined to destroy his presidency.
    What else can they do, when they’re diametrically opposed to Obama’s ideology, his culture, his vision?

    The problem is that we elected a truly doctrinaire tax-and-spend transnationalist liberal to the White House, McGovern version 2.0. There’s very little opportunity for compromise, when Obama’s vision of America and the GOP base’s vision of America are so far apart.

  • sinz54 // Nov 17, 2009 at 10:12 am

    ProfNickD: I had to do a double take at that. Surely, having the government plow hundreds of billions of dollars into non-productive enterprises cannot be considered an “answer” to the economic crisis.
    You just confirmed Frum’s point: You went on to criticize what was done, instead of saying what should have been done instead.

    I challenge you to tell us what YOU would have done about this economic crisis, if YOU were POTUS instead of Obama.

  • sinz54 // Nov 17, 2009 at 10:19 am

    DFL: There is plenty of bureaucracy to purge before you get to police, fire and other safety personnel.
    I agree.

    You could get a “twofer” by using stimulus money, NOT to keep bureaucrats employed, but to upgrade automated information systems, databases, etc., to reduce the need for so many paper-pushers. That would employ programmers, engineers, information system architects–people who do real work. And at the end of their endeavors, you could lay off all those clerks.

    How many times have you waited on a long line at some government office, only to be told by the bureaucrat you finally meet that you don’t have all your needed paperwork, or you were in the wrong line all the time–and you have to start all over again on another long queue for another bureaucrat? Automated kiosks in those offices could tell you precisely what information you need and how to go about getting it processed, before you actually get on any long lines. And then you wouldn’t need so many bureaucrats wasting your time and their time.

  • sinz54 // Nov 17, 2009 at 10:23 am

    ottovbs: the dollar has declined by about 15% since the start of the year copper is up by over 50%
    That’s true of gold as well.

    But it’s not because a recovering economy suddenly found a new industrial use for gold.

    It’s because investors and speculators, seeing the decline of the dollar, are betting on raw materials as a storehouse of value.

    BTW, Bernanke himself said that the economic recovery will be weak and largely jobless for the foreseeable future.

    http://money.cnn.com/2009/11/16/news/economy/bernanke_outlook/

    Your fellow liberals are panicking: Robert Reich, Krugman, HuffPo, etc. I’ve been listening to them. They’re all telling Obama we need a new WPA (!!!) or else the Dems will take a shellacking in November 2010.

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