The Set-Up

[Barry Rene DeCicco]

paula:
>>
Again at work I'm over-hearing our affluent diners visciously denouncing
Gore for their market woes and I really think that in their minds the
money
they made in the last 8 years was a bi-product of the Bush/Raygun years.
And no matter how many times I mention the Goldman Sachs trader who ran
Treasury for Clinton, they firmly believe Clinton/Gore/Hillary, seemingly
one entity in their world-view,  is a socialist.  Amazing.

smooches from the Rube Gallery
>>

Never expect your enemies to be grateful for anything that you do for
them.  You might have to work out a compromise on various matters
(something Clinton has eagerly done).  However, your enemies remain
your enemies, and if your arrangement can be renegotiated (with a knife
in the back, for example), it will be renegotiated.

And yes, these people do believe that everything good that happened in the
1990's was because of Reagan, and everthing bad, because of Clinton.

Even though the Republicans were loudly disclaiming any credit for the
economy in the early 1990's, and predicting nothing but destruction 
from Clinton, they have had zero shame in taking credit as soon as things
went up.

This leads to a major problem for left/liberal politics - the fact is that
Republican economics is fraudulent, but successfully so.  Supply-siders
claimed that deep tax cuts wouldn't lead to deep deficits, because of the
magic of supply-side econmics.  Afterwards, they said that the deficits
happened because spending wasn't cut in line with the tax cuts.  Which is
precisely what orthodox economics would say, and precisely the opposite of
the central claim of supply-side economics.

Barry