Trump budget deal shows the tea party is very dead
Fast-forward to this past February, when Cheney's observation seemed to become an operating motto for Trump's team. With the launch of his reelection campaign, Trump is nudging aside the deficit hawks. His own chief of staff and budget chief Mick Mulvaney said "nobody cares" about the deficit anymore.
Well, not quite nobody. Americans still care a lot about Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and defense, among other government programs that are called "third rail" -- touch them and you die.
Yet, if there is any consistency we see in the long-running debt and deficit debate, it has been how much more important it has been to Republicans than to Democrats, especially when Democrats are running the White House.
Look how much less heat Trump has received from his base for running up the red ink -- or, for that matter, for anything else -- especially in comparison to the heat that deficit hawks put on his predecessor Obama.
Bottom line: As a political matter, the national debt means less as an actual hazard than as a symbol for what it represents to our evaluation of political candidates: How much do we trust this person to have our interests in mind when they govern?
It is not unfair to say that tea party folks I interviewed in their movement's heyday sounded more motivated by social and cultural values than by numbers.
Whether by accident or design, Trump picked up on that discontent and successfully rallied the discontented to build a base and take on all opponents. That's a big reason why today's progressive-wing Democrats talk about the national debt less than the more pragmatic Obama did. They understand that how much you spend in the political world can be less important than what you spend it on.
And they learned a lot of that from Republicans.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2019 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
