Paul Begala thinks he’s found a nut:
Begala, in an interview today with TPM, said Democrats should force the GOP to bring their ideas into the public eye.
“Why don’t we put Mr. Ryan’s budget up to a vote?” he said. “Make them vote on it.”
Democrats, he argued, should stop calling Republicans the “party of no.”
“They have ideas, and lots of them. And their ideas ruin the country,” Begala said.
There’s a serious problem with the 24-hour news cycle – even the most plugged-in operatives forget the past. The House put Mr. Ryan’s budget up to a vote LAST YEAR. They did make the GOP vote on it. In fact, the vote split their caucus:
Before passing the Democratic budget proposal, the House rejected an alternative proposal put forward by the GOP leadership, which called for $4.8 trillion less in overall spending over the next decade, in part through a five-year freeze in most non-defense discretionary spending.
Among other things, the House GOP’s version of the budget would have repealed the entire $787 billion economic stimulus package except for an extension of unemployment insurance benefits. It also would have rolled back a recently passed 8 percent spending boost in the budget for the remainder of the current fiscal year.
Thirty-eight Republicans voted against their own leadership’s bill in that vote, while two Democrats voted in favor of it. The final vote was 293-137 against the GOP proposal.
And that budget had almost exactly the same Medicare voucher program which would privatize the entire system and offer too-small vouchers to seniors to purchase health insurance. Note the part of the sentence in this post with the line “It didn’t generate a lot of attention.”
But that’s not for lack of trying. In fact, Democrats ran ads about it back in September, with the simple message: “Republicans want to end Medicare.”
Of course Democrats should force a vote on the Republican budget. They’d be arrested for political malpractice if they didn’t. But let’s not pretend it’s some wildly new idea. Democrats forced the same vote last year. It didn’t have much of an effect, especially considering it didn’t register with a party hack like Paul Begala. You have to actually coordinate your message and use your various messaging outlets to make something like this stick. And those barely exist on the Democratic side, certainly not to the extent of the tightly focused Republican noise machine.
