The GOP sets its course for austerity – The Washington Post by E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Mourdock’s success is decisive proof, if any more was needed, that the Republican Party has lurched far to the right of where it once was. Lugar was regularly described in the course of his reelection campaign as a “moderate.” But he is not a moderate, and never has been. He is a conservative who happens to be civil. Lugar earned a lifetime rating of 77 percent from the American Conservative Union. If being more than three-quarters to the right puts you in the “middle” of the political spectrum, it’s a very skewed measure.
Being a good tea party Republican, Mourdock is all about slashing government spending without regard to the impact of the cuts on the economy or on those who need government help. …
This gets us to the irony: Right now, it’s conservatives who want to follow the Western European path of austerity that voters in France and Greece rejected last weekend. The Obama administration, by contrast, has chosen a distinctly American path that kept austerity at bay. As a result, the American economy has climbed out of the Great Recession more quickly than most of Europe.