http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/opinion/01rich.html?ref=opinionHerbert Hoover Lives
By FRANK RICH
Published: January 31, 2009
HERE’S a bottom line to keep you up at night: The economy is falling faster than Washington
can get moving. President Obama says his stimulus plan will save or create four million jobs
in two years. In the last four months of 2008 alone, employment fell by 1.9 million. Do the math.
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The crisis is at least as grave as the one that confronted us — and, for a time, united us — after 9/11.
Which is why the antics among Republicans on Capitol Hill seem so surreal. These are the same
politicians who only yesterday smeared the patriotism of any dissenters from Bush’s “war on terror.”
Where is their own patriotism now that economic terror is inflicting far more harm on their constituents
than Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent W.M.D.?
The House stimulus bill is an inevitably imperfect hodgepodge-in-progress. Obama’s next move,
a new plan to prevent the collapse of America’s banks, may prove more problematic still, especially
given the subpar record of the new Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, in warding off calamity while
at the New York Fed. No one should expect the Republicans to give the new president carte blanche,
fall blindly into lock step or be “post-partisan.” (Though that’s exactly what the G.O.P. demanded of
Democrats with Bush: You were either with him or with the terrorists.)
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His deputy, the Virginia congressman Eric Cantor, has followed the same script, claiming that the G.O.P.
will not be “the party of ‘No’ ” but will someday offer unspecified “solutions and alternatives.” Not to be
left out, the party’s great white hope, Sarah Palin, unveiled a new political action committee last week
with a Web site also promising “fresh ideas.” But as the liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga observed,
the site invites visitors to make donations and read Palin hagiography while offering no links to any ideas,
fresh or otherwise.