Rolling Back The Years

According to The Hill “Republicans will unveil their new 'Contract With America' in Virginia on Thursday as they try to present a clear alternative to the Democrat-led Congress heading into the midterm elections.” Personally, I would have thought that all of the “Contract on America” snark that the last go-round engendered would have been inducement enough to pick a new name. It also seems kind of strange to call for another go-round of a “contract” that the Republican Congress under Newt Gingrich breached almost before they'd finished writing it. “This time we really mean it” has rarely been a resounding rallying cry...

The Hill's portrait of the new initiative isn't flattering, given that the new Contract comes off as a Republican bet that a majority of the American public so fed up with the Obama administration that they'd simply rather pretend that it never happened.

GOP leaders have already hinted at some of the ideas that could be included in the contract. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), for instance, has called for a two-year extension of all the Bush-era tax cuts and a reduction in spending to 2008 levels. [...]

Republicans have also pressed for repeal of the healthcare reform law, and for replacing it with new reforms. Some GOP figures have also called for repealing the Wall Street reform law that established a new regulatory structure for the financial sector.

Simply asking for 2009 and 2010 to be stricken from the record doesn't seem so much like a plan for going forward as much as it does a desire for a status quo other than the one that we already have... And perhaps I'm wrong, but if that status quo had been so wonderful, why were the Republicans so beaten up in the 2008 elections?

And (I'm so going to get myself in trouble with this) if we're going to roll the clock back to the “better days” that are now behind us, why stop at 2008? 2000 was a great year for me. And who wouldn't want to have Congress magically make them 10 years younger?