The GOP's most curious playbook

It's weakly sourced, but yesterday's Politico story, "Forget change: GOP eyes retro strategy," testified to what we strongly suspected: Congressional Republicans are bughouse bats -- and not in a lovable, crazy uncle kind of way.

It's not merely that they're fighting the last war or charging a recently refortified Capitol Hill, wrapping themselves in nostalgic reverie of ingenious glory; it's more a matter of their ongoing battle against anyone's welfare but their own. They are, it seems, altogether detached from the human experience.

One would think the depleted ranks of Washington's GOPers, having largely gotten us into this mess, would now feel some unresisting sense of responsibility for helping us dig our way out. But that would be a positive thing, and these contemporary Republicans don't do positive.

Instead, reports the Politico, they "are hatching a political comeback by dusting off a strategic playbook written nearly two decades ago. Its themes: Unite against Democrats’ economic policy, block and counter health care reform and tar them with spending scandals."

It's always nice to have a civil war heaped upon times of national apocalypse, don't you think? Well, anyway, it is what it is and Congressional Republicans are what they are.

Their "playbook," however -- and much of this, I think, harks back to that reference about their detachment from the human experience -- seems not only risky, but blinkered.

Launching charges of spending scandals -- number three on the Republican "to-do" list -- could, if handled properly by Democrats, which is to say, undefensively, actually be beneficial to the White House and its Congressional allies, assuming no one at either venue is directly involved. President Obama has already put local spending authorities "on notice" and he further said he will out them in any event of fraud or waste.

So when the charges come -- and they will, substantiated or not -- simply thank the GOP for its due vigilance, take immediate corrective action as conscientious stewards of the public purse and move on. Note in passing, however, that the same vigilance would have been most helpful, say, during Iraq's multibillion-dollar non-reconstruction.

Gosh, I suppose we could even see a vigorous Congressional investigation into that? Subpoenas and all? Possible criminal charges against GOP-friendly malefactors of fraud? Isn't blackmail a handy thing?

Among its three plays the GOP's best shot, its strongest shot, is of course against Democrats' economic policy. Here, Republicans could have an extended case -- not because the stimulus bill wasn't loaded down with more tax cuts, but because it wasn't freighted with more infrastructure-spending.

If, within a year or so, what stimuli are there don't start kicking in, in the form of upticking economic news, Republicans will magically transform themselves into tsk-tsking Keynesians, shrieking that they warned of this all along (and neglecting, naturally, that what they by and large advocated was a supply-side cure). Indeed, that's why so many of us cringed, grimaced and convulsed when Democrats went soft on the spending side in the face of daily accumulating, horrendously bad economic news.

But, just as Republicans are what they are, the stimulus bill is what it is and at this point about all one can do is cross fingers and whistle or clasp hands and pray. (As for addressing the equally critical credit crunch, someone might want to electroshock Tim Geithner. People and markets are becoming a trifle impatient.)

Congressional Republicans' almost inconceivable kamikaze raid, however, will come in their attempts to "block and counter health care reform." What is it kids say? That is so yesterday. Because even some rank-and-file Republicans I have known are sick to death of this, the world's finest health-care system.

I realize this is anecdotal, nevertheless it's instructive as well, since the anecdote's object cannot be alone. To wit, in the nineties I was acquainted with a fire-breathing Missouri Republican who had, perforce, lost her employer-provided health care when she started her own business. When she went to procure her own policy she discovered that a preexisting condition made that policy, to put it mildly, prohibitive in cost. So she joined the tens of millions of the uninsured, and -- in true Republican fashion -- discovered through personal privation a national problem.

This fire-breathing Republican became an unabashed advocate of national health insurance. Socialism! I cried, although she was not amused.

And neither will other under- or uninsured Republicans be amused when their Congressional representatives attempt to thwart what is now so immeasurably necessary and long overdue. Whatever that minority percentage is, it will join with the vast multitudes in demanding a more civilized system of health care.

But, as noted, Congressional Republicans are woefully detached from the human experience. And quite probably to their own political detriment. But in another but, I'm not sure anything of any virtue can any longer get through to these chaps, even for their own good.