GOP comeback strategy keyed in to lagging recovery

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

All but wiped out in 2008, Republicans groping for a comeback strategy determined there would be no swift return to economic health under incoming President Barack Obama.

They soon also agreed privately to oppose his major legislation.

Over the next two years, they criticized, attacked, voted against and then attacked some more as Democrats struggled to pass an economic-stimulus measure, health-care legislation and a bill to rein in Wall Street. Unemployment, 7.4 percent when Obama took office, soared to 10.1 percent then barely budged for months.

On Election Day, those calculations made in Republican suites in the Capitol reaped dividends that must have seemed almost unimaginable even to the architects of their strategy: a gain of 60-plus House seats, enough to win a majority and end two years of Democratic dominance in Congress, as well as six new seats in the Senate.

Many economists agree the economic stimulus, with its combination of tax cuts, aid to states and federal spending on construction and other areas, did create jobs. It was not a point Republicans chose to acknowledge.

The Republican Party chairman, Michael Steele, was scathing in his criticism. “The Democrat plan focuses on putting Americans on the public dole,” he said, citing expanded unemployment benefits, food stamps and other federal help.

In many ways, Republicans did exactly what a minority party does — creates bright lines of distinction by opposing the party in power.

But at the outset of Obama’s administration, it wasn’t politically popular to take on a new president with such a sky-high approval rating at a time when the country was in bad shape.

Republicans correctly foresaw that unemployment would rise and that if the economy remained weak, Obama and Democrats would get little or no credit from the voters for having stopped a near collapse. The GOP would not have fared so well if voters had agreed with leading economists who said things would have been much worse without those actions, or if Obama’s economic fixes had hastened the recovery.