James Pethokouis argues that the $ 700 Billion bailout bill will shape an election that won’t take place for four years:
The Republican presidential nominee in the summer of 2012 will have come out against the Paulson-Bernanke bailout plan in the fall of 2008. Conservative rage against the $700 billion “rescue” attempt, as President Bush terms it, has been stoked white hot by Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and the powerful pundits of the right-wing blogosphere such as Michelle Malkin and Jonah Goldberg. But the inherent skepticism was there from the very beginning. Economist Brian Wesbury sums up the fears of many economic conservatives: “When the public hears the government must save the economy from capitalism run amok it loses faith in our free market system.”
Now 2012 may seem awfully far away right now. But is there any doubt that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee today if she had voted against the Iraq War back in 2002? She was for it, Obama was against it, and Obama is the nominee. And don’t be surprised if there are insurgent Republicans in 2010 who run against incumbent GOPer who voted for the bailout in a replay of the 2006 Lieberman-Lamont Democratic primary battle.
He has a point, but there is a big difference between the Republican and Democratic parties that is missing in the analysis. There is little historical evidence to indicate that Republican primary voters are as vindictive in their voting decisions as Democrats, especially the hard-core left of the party, tend to be.
For many Democrats, the simple fact that Hillary Clinton voted for the intial Iraq War resolution was enough to condemn her, even though she had subsequently changed her position signficantly. In fact, it’s hard to see Obama doing as well as he did against her if circumstances had been different and Clinton had been against the war from the start.
Things just don’t work that way on the Republican side, and Exhibit A in favor of that argument is John McCain himself, who won his party’s nomination only a year after having been declared public enemy # 1 for his position on immigration.
I’d like to think that this bailout bill will give a shot in the arm to the fiscal conservative, free-market wing of the GOP that has taken so any hits to the solar plexus during the eight years of the Bush Administration, but I’m not optimistic.
H/T: Hit & Run
