HUH?:

What Bill Clinton could teach President Obama (E.J. Dionne Jr., February 15, 2010, Washington Post)

[R]epublicans (and in retrospect, you can say this was shrewd politics) understood in 1994, as they do in 2010, that allowing these talented icon smashers to govern differently and draw in members of their own party would be fatal to a GOP comeback.

So in Clinton's case, Republicans voted to a person against his economic recovery plan that -- combined with President George H.W. Bush's deficit-reduction moves -- put the nation on the road to budget surpluses. Remember those? And then they killed Clinton's health-care plan.

Under Obama, Republicans have used precisely the same tactics without facing any criticism for a lack of originality. Obama's stimulus bill got three Republican votes in the Senate, none in the House, and GOP lawmakers rail against it even as they claim credit for projects financed by a bill they opposed. And Republicans are doing all they can to make sure that Health Care 2.0 is ruined by the same political viruses that infected Health Care 1.0 under Clinton.

Republicans had just lost the White House in 1992 because of a needless tax increase but they were supposed to help Bill Clinton pass another one after he'd run on cutting taxes? Meanwhile, the entire difference between the big deficits under Reagan/Bush and the surplus under Clinton/Gingrich was the 3% of GDP we got back as a Peace Dividend.The two tax hikes were just too comparatively trivial to do much harm.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 15, 2010 7:04 AM