| Who | Script |
| NARRATOR 00:00:13 - 00:00:28 Man with beard. 00:00:36 - 00:00:58 | Music: excited battle music VO: This is Wilson’s Creek Missouri, on the 150th anniversary of a famous American civil war battle. It was a war fought over slavery and triggered by the election of the first Republican President… I think we’re really just fighting some of the same battles again, the time of this war, the time of a centralized government, we’re talking about a government making decisions that certain sections of the population don’t agree with and isn’t that where we are today with American politics? Where will our government go, what direction will it take – will it be free spending or will it be economically conservative or will it be socially conservative? |
| NARRATOR 00:01:03 - 00:01:22 Pat Buchanan 00:01:23 - 00:01:39 00:01:39 - 00:01:54 | VO: Just About as soon as Barack Obama arrived in the White House in January 2009, Republicans were vowing to make him in to another Jimmy Carter – the very definition of a failed, one-term Democratic President. B ut of course in order to make Obama another Jimmy Carter, they needed another Ronald Reagan, and they soon found out a Ronald Reagan doesn’t come along every day. PB: Everybody wants to be like Reagan because everybody agrees it was a success – good heavens, he leaves office and the whole soviet empire collapses, the economy creates twenty million jobs, the spirit of the country is up, it’s morning in America again – I mean, what’s not to like? “It’s Morning in America….” |
| Ron Reagan Jr. 00:01:55 - 00:02:03 Reagan 00:02:04 – 00:02:24 | RRjr: Ronald Reagan is the guy in the poster, he’s the guy with the voice, with the face, with the beautiful words. A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us pleading for us to keep our rendevous with destiny. That we will uphold the principles of self reliance, self discipline, morality and above all responsible liberty for every individual. That we will become that shining city on a hill. |
| NARRATOR 00:02:30 - 00:02:36 James Fallows 00:02:38 - 00:03:03 Alan Simpson 00:03:14 - 00:03:34 Arlen Specter 00:03:34 - 00:03:46 Alan Simpson 00:03:47 - 00:03:56 Bruce Bartlett 00:03:56 - 00:04:42 NARRATOR 00:04:46 - 00:04:58 Mike Lofgren 00:04:59 - 00:05:30 Bruce Bartlett 00:05:31 - 00:05:40 NARRATOR 00:05:41 - 00:06:00 Arlen Specter 00:06:09 - 00:06:27 NARRATOR 00:06:28 - 00:06:41 00:06:49 - 00:07:46 James Fallows 00:07:17 - 00:07:38 Ron Reagan Jr. 00:07:39 - 00:07:57 Alan Simpson 00:07:58 - 00:08:15 Gary Bauer 00:08:16 - 00:08:54 NARRATOR 00:08:55 - 00:09:06 James Fallows 00:09:08 - 00:09:15 Alan Simpson 00:09:15 - 00:09:18 Grover Norquist 00:09:19 - 00:09:34 Alan Simpson 00:09:35 - 00:10:01 Bruce Bartlett 00:10:02 - 00:10:46 Grover Norquist 00:10:47 - 00:11:07 James Fallows 00:11:08 - 00:11:30 Grover Norquist 00:11:31 - 00:11:48 NARRATOR 00:11:58 - 00:12:19 Alan Simpson 00:12:29 - 00:12:46 James Fallows 00:12:46 - 00:13:05 Grover Norquist 00:13:05 - 00:13:20 Alan Simpson 00:13:21 - 00:13:41 James Fallows 00:13:42 - 00:14:23 NARRATOR 00:14:28 - 00:14:50 Matt Kibbe 00:14:52 - 00:15:04 Grover Norquist 00:15:05 - 00:15:24 Matt Kibbe 00:15:25 - 00:15:49 James Fallows 00:15:50 - 00:16:11 Bruce Bartlett 00:16:12 - 00:16:38 NARRATOR 00:16:40 - 00:16:59 Mike Lofgren 00:17:11 - 00:17:33 Matt Kibbe 00:17:34 - 00:17:49 Gary Bauer 00:17:50 - 00:18:13 Matt Kibbe 00:18:14 - 00:18:23 Alan Simpson 00:18:24 - 00:18:42 Bruce Bartlett 00:18:43 - 00:19:43 Arlen Specter 00:19:44 - 00:19:59 NARRATOR 00:20:06 - 00:20:13 Dan Schnur 00:20:15 - 00:20:23 Ron Reagan Jr 00:20:24 - 00:20:50 Dan Schnur 00:20:51 - 00:21:16 Sean Hannity 00:21:17 - 00:21:38 Ron Reagan Jr. 00:21:38 - 00:21:50 Mike Lofgren 00:21:51 - 00:22:28 NARRATOR 00:22:29 - 00:22:38 Arlen Specter 00:22:39 - 00:22:52 Alan Simpson 00:22:52 - 00:23:15 Ed Meese 00:23:16 - 00:23:45 Ron Reagan Jr. 00:23:45 - 00:24:19 James Fallows 00:24:20 - 00:24:40 Mike Lofgren 00:24:40 - 00:24:56 James Fallows 00:24:57 - 00:25:33 Alan Simpson 00:25:33 - 00:25:41 Pat Buchanan 00:25:42 - 00:26:04 James Fallows 00:26:05 - 00:26:36 Alan Simpson 00:26:37 - 00:27:15 00:27:16 | Virtually no Republican members of the House or Senate have been prepared work with President Obama since his election… JF: In 2006, when the Republicans lost their control of the senate and so Mitch McConnell who is the republican senator from Kentucky became the senate minority leader – he essentially said the filibuster was going to be applied to everything that came through the senate, so instead of one out of a hundred measures or whatever, it was eighty out of a hundred or ninety out of a hundred of insisting on sixty votes to get things through. AS: Well, that’s what he said he would do, I know Mitch pretty well, he keeps his troops together pretty well, he uses with an iron hand, he’s very clever, very shrewd, very partisan, and I think he has some allergy towards democrats, I don’t know what that is but it was early gained… Specter; Senator McConnell, the Republican leader said the Republican senate agenda was to defeat Obama in 2012 – now, is that a legislative agenda? AS: He will tell you, his members you know, if you work with the other side on that bill any further or try to accommodate, or I might have a new job for you, make you the ranking member of the journal committee or some lesser place in the structure. BB: The republicans have shown the Democrats exactly what to do should we have a republican president you can be guaranteed that the senate democrats will filibuster every single bill that he proposes they will filibuster every single nominee that he proposes and that the republicans who do that routinely to every one of Obama’s proposals and appointees now will scream bloody murder – they’ll say this is awful, this is anti-constitutional – they’re just hypocritical jerks. VO: Another battle in congress was looming. Mike Lofgren had been a Republican congressional staff member for 28 years, but began to worry about the Tea Party when they refused to support what had always been a routine increase in America’s debt ceiling. ML: This is about the inherently fragile institutions of our democracy, they are not automatically self-sustaining, they require an informed electorate that makes good decisions based on objective facts and not mystification. And the polarization has become so great that it threatens to simply stop the processes of government. BB: Its an institutional problem between the presidency and the congress that could ultimately lead to a constitutional crisis of some kind. VO: Arlen Specter was elected to the United States senate from Pennsylvania as a moderate Republican on the same day Ronald Reagan won the White House…he later became a Republican Presidential candidate himself, but finally left the Party when his fellow Republicans refused to support emergency spending at the height of the global financial crisis… Specter: When I cast the vote for the stimulus package there was no doubt that I could not win a Republican primary – you could politely characterize it as ‘irreconcilable differences’… but there was no longer any room for me in the Party. VO: Arlen Specter's defection gave democrats and President Obama a crucial 60th senate vote to overcome a filibuster and it made possible not just the rescue of the US economy but Obama's landmark healthcare reforms (STANDUP CAP HILL) It’s not just old style republican moderates like Arlen Specter that find they no longer have a home in the republican party – any Republican member of congress now who works across the aisle with democrats to try to get something done can now face a conservative challenger from the Tea Party – the result, the 112th congress elected in 2010 was officially the least productive and most partisan in American history – quite simply without compromise from both sides, this place doesn’t work. JF: Since the Democrats had sixty votes for any a few months in Barack Obama’s time it meant that most of the things they were trying to do they were blocked in doing – they couldn’t appoint people to judgeships, they couldn’t name ambassadors they couldn’t get things done and so you’ve had kind of a historically unprecedented log-jam in American governance that is really destructive. RRJr: I mean you’ve got people now who are willing to – well you’ve got a Republican party now that has announced that they think that the full faith and credit of the united states is as Mitch McConnell put it – a good hostage to ransom. (edit) And um, I don’t think that my father would have thought too much of people like that. AS: The word ‘compromise’ now has become a dirty word – a compromise means you are a whimp – if you compromise pffff you’re just a whimp. Well let me tell ya, if you cant learn to compromise an issue without compromising yourself, you should never be in a legislative body. GB: If one side wants the government to be bigger and my side wants the government to be smaller, what is the compromise between those two positions? Anything you agree on is either going to make government bigger or going to make government smaller. And you can go down the list on virtually every issue – either man is between a man and a woman or its something else – it cant be in between something else and a man and a woman, so I think we’re going through a period in the United States where unfortunately, probably we’re going to see these kinds of bruising battles and perhaps the country swinging back and forth depending on any given election which side prevails. VO: More than any other issue, modern Republicans wont compromise on tax increases – almost all signing up to a pledge never to increase taxes inspired by Ronald Reagan… JF: The muscle, or the face of the absolutism about taxes is a man named Grover Norquist. AS: he’s a nice guy with a very bad idea. GN: The taxpayer protection pledge is a written commitment that a candidate or an incumbent congressman, senator, governor, president, signs and its too the America people and it says ‘I will oppose and vote against any effort to raise your taxes.’ AS: Nice idea, and when he got those signatures unemployment was, you know, 4%, inflation was you know, whatever, we owed four trillion bucks instead of sixteen – and so he’s locked these people in and if they say well I’m going to repudiate that the he does a full page ad and he begins to use his money and he’ll cremate you in your district. BB: The no-new taxes pledge has had an enormous impact on federal finances, its really decimated them and made it almost impossible to raise adequate revenue to fund the federal government, and the people who support this idea such as Grover Norquist have this really extremely shallow and naieve view that if you just take away the governments credit card that somhow or another spending will automatically come down – this is just complete and total nonsense, and I think it misunderstands Reagan’s record – if you look at his record he did indeed cut taxes sharply in 1981 but he raised taxes almost every other year of his presidency 11 different times he signed into law different tax increases. GN: Well the taxpayer protection pledge has allowed the modern republican party not only to be the party that opposes tax increases but to be branded like a product that voters KNOW that if you vote for a republican you have ivory soap percentages 99.99% certainty that they wont raise taxes. JF: After the Reagan era, this goal of “starving the beast” became much more of a fixed ideology of literally no new taxes and so the republicans who had historically prided themselves in the Eisenhower administration and Robert Taft as being the party of fiscal prudence, became the party of gigantic deficits. GN: We have a spending problem; the government spends too much. We don’t have a lack of taxes, its not the problem. It isn’t that the peasants aren’t bring enough money into the King ITS THAT THE KING IS SPENDING TOO MUCH MONEY – YOU GOTTA KNOCK IT OFF…. So step one, hey hey hey, we’re not giving you any more money, step two, stop spending so much… VO: To try and find a bi-partisan solution to reign-in America’s sixteen trillion dollar debt, President Obama appointed former Republican Senator Alan Simpson as co-commissioner for fiscal responsibility, but he soon found Republicans would only consider cuts to spending, not increased taxes… because of Grover Norquist’s pledge, half the solution was already off the table… AS: You can’t cut spending you way out of this hole, you cant grow your way out of this hole, you could have double-digit growth for twenty years and not grow out of this hole, and you cant tax your way out of this hole – so you have to have a blend of cutting and revenue… JF: Something has to give. The tax versus debt tension for the republican party – we had the classic irresistible force and immovable object situation because they cannot plausibly be on the warpath against deficits and on the warpath against ever raising taxes. GN: The commitment that republicans who sign the pledge is; when I go to Washington I'm not going to raise taxes, I’m going to reform government, what the democrats and people like Simpson want to do is raise taxes so that Washington doesn’t have to reform itself. AS: I mean, what the hell… lets get serious, this guy is a monster… and he is the most powerful person in America today, but Isaid to him ‘you will be irrelevant in two years’ cos your country cant exist on this diet of soup… JF: Its put the republicans in an untenable position – which you saw during the 2012 primaries when there was one debate where the question was suppose their was a budget deal skewed ten-to-one in favour of budget cuts spending cuts versus tax increases would you veto it and every single republican candidate raised his or her hands saying yes they would veto that even a ten-to-one, ten to one bargain… and it became difficult both for them to say debt is this huge menace to the country and we are so unreasonable that even a ten-to-one solution is out of bounds for us, so I think the Republicans, this is one more force pushing them to the extreme. VO: Another force arguably pushing the Republican party to an extreme position is the anti-Tax Tea Party Movement….and like Grover Norquist, many Tea Partiers take their lead from Ronald Reagan… Matt Kibbe is one of the most prominent Tea partiers, he’s with a group called Freedomworks which finances Tea Party Republican candidates… MK: Go back to Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan said that government was the problem not the solution … Republicans win when they stand for something that’s an alternative to the big government progressivism represented by this President.
GN: The Republican party has become the party that will not raise your taxes, after the Tea party movement, the Republican party became the party that wanted to reign-in spending but that second half only happened more recently and came about as a result of the failure of the Bush administration to focus on restraining spending. MK: We trace it to the wall street bailout, and particularly when George W Bush said I’m abandoning free market principles to save the free market. Every Tea partier I know again and again and again will quote that verbatim and cite that as the moment they realized they needed to show up and fight against a government that had gotten too big, perhaps gotten too close to Wall Street and too in bed with special interests inside the DC beltway…. JF: The Tea Party Movement simultaneously added fervor and energy to the Republican side while pushing it to the extreme, I think that Mitt Romney in the 2012 general election had a much harder path to follow against Barack Obama than he would have if he hadn’t had all of this Tea Party pressure during the primaries that he had to accommodate. BB: Today’s run-of-the-mill, you know, Republican Tea Party member, I mean to them Ronald Reagan is like a face on Mount Rushmore, he is just someone that they worship but they don’t really know anything about what he actually did – they just assume that everything he did was great and everything good that happened to the United States in the 1980’s was his responsibility…err their knowledge is really very, very shallow. VO: Almost two years into Obama’s term the political tide had turned from Hope and Change to fear and anger over the struggling economy and ballooning debt, Tea party republicans won senate seats including Arlen Specter’s and claimed the balance of power in the House of Representatives, handing them huge power to block the President’s agenda. ML: By the 2010 mid-terms, once you saw the incoming members, what they were saying, I knew that they would push the debt limit increase into a crisis – they could just not help themselves. US credit rating or no, they would do that and that’s what decided me to find an exit strategy. MK: When it comes to cutting a deal to expand the debt ceiling one more time, the citizens are attacked for holding politicians accountable – I don’t think its about holding moderate republicans accountable, I think its about holding all politicians to the same standard. GB: I’ve heard for decades that the public doesn’t believe politicians – they say one thing when they are running for office they go to Washington they do something else – where here were people, most of them businessmen, or entrepenuers who said look, when I say I'm going to go to Washington lower your taxes and cut government spending you can count on me, that’s actually what I’m going to do… MK: To me, bi-partisanship is code words for insiders inside the beltway in Washington DC cutting a deal behind closed doors. AS: I mean these guys are purists, and the thing that will destroy and has destroyed the Republican party through the decades of my existence is that they give eachother the saliva test of purity. And then they lose and then they bitch for four years and wonder how they lost… BB: The culture of congress was quite different in the 1980’s … remember that the Republicans did control the senate of six of his eight years and the leadership in the house was more ‘old school’ – the idea that you opposed what the other party was for but you didn’t throw up insurmountable road blocks…Tip O’Neill for example, could have killed the Reagan tax cut (he was the speaker of the house by the way) could have killed the Reagan tax cut in 1981 using parliamentary procedures if he had wanted to but he didn’t think that was right, he felt that Reagan’s policy proposal, even though it was wrong, was worthy of being voted upon and let the people speak and let the members of congress vote their consciences or whatever…and that view is clearly not the case today. Specter: There is a general feeling that the United States Government is broken, that the gridlock is intolerable and that Washington is a madhouse mess. VO: One of the biggest factors in the rise of the Tea Party movement was conservative media in the form of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel… DS: The media is one of several elements that’s created such an ideologically driven hyper-polarised electorate. RRJr: Remember that most republicans just watch Fox News … most of the republican electorate they don’t listen to MSNBC they look at CNN, they don’t look at ABC or any of that stuff – Fox News…you go to the middle of the country turn on television in a hotel – it’ll be tuned to Fox, you might not even be able to GET other cable networks in the middle of the country – it’s all Fox. So these people are getting their news filtered through Rupert Murdoch’s weird little universe. DS: We all want to talk to, read from and listen to the smartest people in the word. Who are the smartest people in the word? The people who agree with me. And if cable television and talk radio and the internet can provide me with an information environment that only reinforces what I already believe rather than challenge it, what you do end up with is these two ideological cul-de-sacs in which somebody with whom you disagree is no longer your opponent but your enemy. SH: I think Barack Obama’s biggest problem is that he’s never run a business, he’s never met a payroll that I know of, he hung out with a lot of radical people, I think he’s a rigid ideologue and I think he’s wrong and I think America gave him the benefit of the doubt on his background associations, record appropriately. RRjr: They think Obama is this, this Muslim, Kenyan, Manchurian candidate who is out to impose sharia law and that he doesn’t have a legitimate birth certificate and god knows what else ML: It’s a tribute to how well Republicans can get their narrative before the public – in nice easy sound bites – most people don’t realize that for the average taxpayer their taxers have been cut even relative to the low tax rates under George W Bush, so they’re paying less taxes, and yet they think their taxes were raised under Obama – its an amazing piece of mystification. VO: So how have the combined forces of Fox News, The Tea Party, social conservatives and the Norquist tax pledge changed the Republican party? Specter: It is by no means the Party of Reagan, President Reagan welcomed moderates into the White House… Simpson: I thought the Republican party was simply government out of your life, the precious right of privacy and the right to be left alone. That sounds like a pretty good clarion call, a certain trumpet. It I had to go before the central committee of 63 people in Wyomning to get on the ballot they wouldn’t put me on the ballot. EM: It is correct that the Republican party is more conservative than it was when Ronald Reagan became President and when he ran for the Presidency and I think overall that’s a good thing because what the Republicans stand for in terms of limited government, in terms of free markets in terms of individual liberty, in terms of strong national defense – these are important principles and goals for the country. RRJr: It’s a different party now and a different agenda. You know, the republican party has always been the party of corporate America, its always been the party of the wealthy and the rich and it was when my father was there too, he didn’t think of it that way – he went along with a lot of stuff that helped corporate America and pandered to corporate America but that wasn’t what he thought he was doing – these people for the most part and I’m not just talking about the Tea Party but the leadership of the Republican Party – they know exactly what they are doing – they are bought and paid for by corporate America and they are happy about it. JF: The Republican party of the early Reagan era at the time seemed somewhat narrow because the Democrats thought that it wasn’t inclusive racially as much as the democrats aspired to be it certainly seems very broad by comparison to the republicans of 2012. ML: The establishment is to the left of the Tea Party but the establishment is to the right of where it was five years ago, ten years ago or twenty years ago… so the entire centre of gravity has been pulled rightwards. JF: We’re having the worst of both worlds wen it comes to the situation of the current Republican party – their situation is bad from their own point of view because on current trends they’re on a path to becoming a permanent minority party for any sort of national election – if the fastest growing demographic groups in the united states are latinos and young people and women and Asian americans and some highly educated people those are all the areas where republicans are at a huge disadvantage relative to the democrats. Simpson: And if we go down in flames this trip it’ll be because women and gays and lesbians have looked at a party which is small and shriven. PB: Demographically America is changed and is changing and we’re moving toward a time when very soon the Hispanic population which is now at 50 million by the middle of century is going to be 135 million – these folks basically vote two-to-one democratic – there’ll be a time when Texas goes the way of California and that’s the end of the republican party as we know it. JF: Their path is bad for them, its also bad for the country as a whole because they are likely to retain significant power in the senate so they can maintain this blocking force in the senate so they are putting themselves into a minority but they are also having the power to obstruct the entire country from getting things done, so it would be better, another Reagan – a Reagan with sort of a tent-building, base expanding strategy would be better for the party and better for the country. Simpson: It doesn’t matter who wins, the real issue is that if people cant step up and be patriots and pull together instead of pulling apart it wont matter whose to blame, but left me tell you the democrats will get just as much of the blame as the republicans because the American people will be so damned fed up with these jerks… that are in office and didn’t have the guts to step forward and do something for their country as citizens, American citizens that are cherishing a party – how can you cherish a party over your country? Those people dont deserve any kind of acknowledgement, but only pity. End credits begin. |