My fellow Americans, before enumerating my many disagreements with the policies outlined by the president, let me acknowledge why we had a Democratic president standing before a Democratic-controlled Congress tonight. The Republican party – my party – lost its way. In doing so, we lost your trust and our power.
We were supposed to be the party of sound money and fiscal discipline. Instead we transformed a $127bn surplus in 2001 into an estimated $1.2tn deficit by 2009. We presided over an explosion of the national debt, the biggest new entitlement programme since the Great Society, the biggest increase in inflation-adjusted discretionary spending since Lyndon Johnson and a $700bn bail-out of Wall Street at a time when working families were struggling to put food on their tables on Main Street.
We Republicans were supposed to be the party of limited government. Yet we grew the size, cost and scope of the federal government at almost every turn. Instead of eliminating cabinet departments, we created a new one with functions redundant with the departments of justice and defence. Instead of reforming Social Security and other entitlements as we promised, we created a new Medicare prescription drug benefit that added trillions to that programme’s unfunded liabilities. Instead of supporting local and parental control of education, we gave you No Child Left Behind. Instead of defending individual freedom, we eroded civil liberties and expanded state surveillance powers without checks and balances.
We were supposed to be the party of a realistic foreign policy and strong national defence. Instead we wasted the international goodwill following 9/11 that could have been used to launch a successful global campaign against the terrorist murderers of al-Qaida. We did so by launching a war against Iraq to disarm it of weapons it turned out not to have – opening up a Pandora’s box of warring factions we are only now beginning to contain, increasing the power of radical Islam within that country and removing a regional check against the ambitions of Iran.
We have bogged down much of our military – our soldiers and sailors, munitions and equipment – in a nation-building operation in Iraq, leaving scant resources to meet American national-security needs. We funded the war in a scandalous way, in an attempt to mask its true cost to the American taxpayer.
Why – after growing the government, saddling our children and grandchildren with debt, invading Iraq while failing to guard our own borders and failing to counteract the loose monetary and lending policies that precipitated our financial collapse – should we Republicans be given another chance? Because for all of his rhetoric about change, President Obama is giving us continuity: continuing an interventionist foreign policy, continuing the bail-outs that have already failed, continuing to expand government and contract the private sector. Except he is doing so with an even bigger price tag than President Bush, and is combining his borrowing and spending with even higher taxes.
There’s one more reason to trust the Republicans again: We get it. We’ve learned from our mistakes. Those of us who opposed these fundamentally un-conservative policies from the beginning are joining with those who have seen the light and are taking control of the Republican party.
hat tip: Doug Bandow