Fortune magazine’s Nina Easton writes today about a movement among movers and shakers within the GOP to sign on to a resolution condeming TARP and the financial bailouts.
Too little, too late. A gargantuan federal government with tentacles reaching far into private industry is now a sad reality, thanks in part to the GOP. A resolution isn’t going to change that one bit, and the policy and political implications are predictable.
Writes Easton:
Now that a Republican administration has turned Wall Street into the equivalent of a giant public utility and doled out hundreds of billions to financial firms and automakers, it’s hard to know what the GOP stands for.
Maybe Paulson was right on the economics, and he had no choice. But politically, he left the Republican Party with an identity crisis – making it hard to mount any serious opposition to Obama’s fiscal stimulus plan or to paint him as a “big spending liberal.”
The Obama stimulus plan, which will affect most of America, is expected to carry a price tag roughly equivalent to Paulson’s rescue of Wall Street. Blackwell summed up the GOP’s conundrum best when he likened President Bush to Herbert Hoover this way: “Hoover opened the door to big government activism and unfortunately Mr. Bush has opened the door to Mr. Obama’s big government.”
