"Can the Democrats Go Long?"

Robert Kuttner, on or off his meds, bemoans all the WINNING! the Republicans have gotten up to:

For more than 30 years, the right has been throwing long passes. The Democrats, with some fine individual exceptions in the Senate and House, have been playing an incremental game, eking out gains of a few yards at a time and often being thrown for big losses.

Guess which side has been winning.

Duh. The statists, represented more thoroughly by the Donkey Party, are winning. And they have been for a very long time.

The Republicans can point to a few long-term policy successes, such as…

Help a guy out here?

There was transportation deregulation, but that was a Carter/Kennedy project of the late ’70s. Reagan’s tax simplification was undone by a little by Bush, a lot by Clinton, more by that other Bush, and what little was left of it was burned, buried, and peed on by Obama. There was Newt Gingrich’s Balanced Budget Act, which HAHAHAHAHAHAHHA if there’s anything left of that. Welfare reform was undone by cowardly Democrat stealth in the 2009 stimulus. Every kind of welfare — personal and corporate — has done nothing but grow, while the sphere for private action shrinks, it seems, daily.

The Republicans have enjoyed some electoral successes, but that’s a far cry from actually enacting the kinds of policies Kuttner despises. I mean, the crowning domestic achievement of Bush 43 was a massive expansion of Medicare.

Some win, huh?

No, Crybaby Kuttner is wailing because the conservative movement has, on occasion, been able to throw up a few temporary speed bumps on the road to that happy place where everything which isn’t mandatory is forbidden.

So let him cry — while we work on a few more speed bumps.