Change: The Republicans' Pledge to America is being attacked as "ideological," even "hysterical." Which shows how far our government has strayed from its founding constitutional principles.
Hoping to avoid a bloodbath, Democrats want the Republicans to be seen as nutty extremists. But no one examining the party's new policy platform, filled with sensible solutions to the Obama-Pelosi spending spree, is going to buy that.
At 21 pages, most voters won't be reading the Pledge to America. The 1994 Contract With America, by comparison, on which Republicans gained historic, long-lasting majorities in Congress, was about two pages and came in at fewer than 900 words.
Then again, Bill Clinton's 1992 manifesto, "Putting People First," was over 200 pages and a lot of the people who voted him into the White House that year never read it - though they heard Clinton describe it a lot. ("It begins with a tax cut for the middle class," he liked to say - a tax cut that never materialized over his two terms.)
The danger this year is that people will believe what the likes of Clinton tell them about the GOP Pledge. "These hysterical tirades against government" is how the former president put it to Bloomberg's Al Hunt this week. "It's an ideological document."
What exactly is "ideological" about declaring the obvious fact that "if we've learned anything over the last two years, it's that we cannot spend our way to prosperity"? Does pointing that out constitute trying "to dismantle the federal government," as Clinton slanderously charges?
Is a rollback of government spending "to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels, saving us at least $100 billion in the first year alone," coupled with "strict budget caps to limit federal spending from this point forward," really raving mad? Has simple fiscal sanity really come to sound cuckoo to Americans' ears?
The Pledge calls for repealing ObamaCare and replacing it with "real medical liability reform," plus allowing health coverage to go across state lines. It calls for "permanently stopping all tax increases, currently scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, 2011."
It would "cancel unspent 'stimulus' funds, and block any attempts to extend the timeline for spending 'stimulus' funds." The TARP corporate bailout program would also be canceled, saving taxpayers $16 billion.
In advocating hard spending constraints, the document points out that "budget caps were used in the 1990s, when a Republican Congress was able to bring the budget into balance and eventual surplus" - an achievement for which Clinton loves to take credit.
A nice touch in the Pledge that will attract Tea Party support is its appeal to return to constitutional restraints: "For too long, Congress has ignored the proper limits imposed by the Constitution on the federal government."
Congress' "unclear and muddled laws" have allowed activist federal judges to legislate from the bench, the Pledge notes. Under a new GOP Congress, legislation would require "a clause citing the specific constitutional authority upon which the bill is justified."
We could quibble at this document's lack of perfection. It has no market-based reforms of entitlements like Social Security and Medicare - two-time bombs that constitute the country's most serious long-term fiscal problem.
But the Pledge's sober contents should forge a formidable GOP-Tea Party partnership in an election year in which voters are - justifiably - as mad as they've ever been.
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