So why do the Republicans want the Presidency? They seem to be doing so well without
it. They have the majority in the House
of Representatives. Through the use of
the never-ending use of the filibuster (by just saying "we filibuster,"
courtesy of Harry Reid not actually having to do it) they control the
legislative process in the Senate. They
have a lock on the majority of the Supreme Court. They have a President who, for whatever
reasons, simply does not fight or fight back, even when the leader in the
Senate announces that his number one goal for the current Congress is to insure
the President's defeat.
Indeed, this President gives in with very little if
any fight on almost every major issue. Consider, for example: abandoning cap-and-trade and any other means
for dealing with climate change; undercutting the EPA on air pollution standards;
agreeing to the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy; not going after the banksters; failing both
close Guantanamo and go after the law-breaking torturers in the US
"intelligence" establishment; and then, on more recent matters: the morning-after-pill-for-females-under-17 ban (one
question he has not yet dealt with here is: does the rapist father of his
daughter's child have to pay child-support?); establishing 50 different state
plans for the "Affordable Care Act" (sic), making it much more
unwieldy than it already is; abandoning his threat to veto the US version of
the 1933 German "Enabling Act" which laid the basis for Hitler's dictatorship:
the provisions for the arbitrary arrest and indefinite imprisonment without
trial of US citizens (which has always been there since the Patriot Act, but is
now re-affirmed); the giveaway on the "millionaires' tax;" the likely
giveaway on the Canada-US oil pipeline; and who knows what's next.
But at the same time, as the economy
stagnates, as the gap between the very rich and the rest of us continues to
increase, as the percentage of US citizens living in poverty increases, as the
army of the permanently unemployed expands, the GOTP is able to blame it all on
Obama. After all, he is the president,
you know. So I (1) and others have
speculated that they really do not want the presidency at all. Most of their policies get implemented and
most of those that would start to pull the country out of the recession, like
the desperately needed national infra-structure construction/reconstruction
program, don't.
But it is now becoming increasingly
apparent that they do want it, with the rallying around Romney from Rove's
group (the real Republican Party, most of whose figures we don't' know about)
to (gasp) the former Gingrich lapdog Sean Hannity. Romney is the only current GOTP candidate
with a chance of beating Obama, and he is "getting tougher" in the GOTP
sense. On MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Dec.
20, 2011, in referring to the need to defeat Obama Romney actually used the
Gingrich-Tea Party term "take him out."
Of those potential candidates not running with a chance for victory,
Mitch Daniels has a wife problem, Chris Christie has something in his
background that he wouldn't want to come out (coming from New Jersey who
knows?), JEB Bush, for all the current talk has obviously decided to wait until
2016, Paul Ryan hung himself out to dry with his proposal to abolish Social
Security, and Rudy Giuliani, like Gingrich, has lots of baggage. So they have settled on Romney.
So what is it they want that they don't
have now? Well, a lot that the
Republicans and the Corporate Power who they represent, cannot get even with Obama
in the White House. What they want all revolves around the decline of the US
manufacturing base, caused by the Corporate Power, of course, but which decline
has caused them to shift to other sources and potential sources of profit, such
as massive expansion of natural resources exploitation, the financial services
industry, and then some new ones that they have their eyes on. First and foremost would be massive
deregulation, for the environment, labor practices, and financial markets. Second, if you listen carefully to what certain
leading right-wing figures, not necessarily elected ones, say, they do recognize
what terrible shape the US infrastructure is in. They want to fix it all right, but they want
to privatize it at the same time. I am
not talking about the construction, which of course would be privately
done. I am talking about the running of
it, from the roads, to the water supply systems that are not already in private
hands, and everything else in between.
Next, they want to be able to destroy
the US Postal Service, both to privatize it and to put one of the last national
labor unions out of existence. They want
to destroy what is left of the US labor union movement, especially in the
public sector, as they are doing, for example, in Wisconsin and Ohio, so that
they can further depress wages (otherwise known as "increase productivity"). If they had full control of the Executive and
Legislative branches, I would not put it past them to repeal the National Labor
Relations Act, once again outlawing collective bargaining, as Scott Walker has
done for public employees in Wisconsin.
Finally, they want full control over foreign policy. On the one hand they want to resume the
pursuit of Cheney's dream of permanent war.
For if Obama gets a second term, the US will indeed likely pull out of
Afghanistan by 2014 (I didn't say the man is all bad). On the other hand, they want not only to not cut
military spending; they want to increase it.
After all, it is one of the most profitable sectors of the US economy.
So yes indeed. Even with Obama sitting in the White House,
there are plenty of reasons why the Republicans want the presidency. Given the national Republican voter
suppression program and their well-known vote-count cheating programs,
regardless of what the real count would be, if they want it, they will have it.
References:
1. The GOP's Presidential
Dilemma, BuzzFlash@Truthout, 07/18/2011, http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/12863 .