Say Anything Blog

Alan Greenspan echoes something in a new book that I’ve been saying since the 2006 elections: Republicans lost power because they abandoned their small-government principles.

In a withering critique of his fellow Republicans, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says in his memoir that the party to which he has belonged all his life deserved to lose power last year for forsaking its small-government principles. . . .

Mr. Greenspan, who calls himself a “lifelong libertarian Republican,” writes that he advised the White House to veto some bills to curb “out-of-control” spending while the Republicans controlled Congress. He says President Bush’s failure to do so “was a major mistake.” Republicans in Congress, he writes, “swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.”

Indeed they did.  With more than one poll indicating that Americans see Democrats, and not Republicans, as the party of fiscal discipline, there is little doubt that Republicans have lost their way.

Everyone is caught up with Iraq right now.  Democrats, for obvious political reasons, want to blame Iraq for the downfall of Republicans and their mouthpieces in the media are happy to go along with that.  And so are Republicans, to an extent, as they aren’t exactly keen on their abandonment of principles they still want Americans to believe they hold dear.  But I’m willing to say that the Iraq war was all but inconsequential in the 2006 elections because even if 9/11 had never happened and/or if we’d never invaded Iraq the Republicans still would have lost.

Because America elected Republicans on the principles of limited government and lower taxes, and the GOP betrayed them.