Roll Call: David Hawkings: 'Could Margaret Thatcher Win a GOP Primary?'

Source:Roll Call- with an inside look into the mind of David Hawkings. Enter at your own risk.

"An abiding aphorism for the Republican Party’s rightward shift is that Ronald Reagan  couldn’t win a party primary today. Something very similar could be said of Margaret Thatcher.

The ocean of hagiography that poured out from congressional conservatives after her death Monday belies a simple truth. A quick read of the Thatcher record reveals a lot of daylight between the way she ran Britain in the 1980s and the way the GOP would run the federal government now.

To be sure, there is enough similarity to support the effusive nature of the tributes from the American lawmakers, so many of whom came of age when she was prime minister and view her as an ideological and stylistic role model for the current age of unapologetically confrontational politics.

“There was no secret to her values — hard work and personal responsibility — and no nonsense at all in her leadership,” said Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, who might expect to be remembered with a similar sort of epitaph someday. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., hailed her as “an iconic symbol of the transformative power of conservative ideas.”

Beyond that, it’s undeniably true that Thatcherism’s central tenets are at the core of what the members of today’s GOP espouse almost universally: Nations do best when the hardworking and self-reliant are given plenty of individual liberty and economic freedom to pursue prosperity, and such democracies have a duty to repel aggression by governments that would control the lives of their people. 

It’s that mission statement that Republicans have in mind when they cite, as they often do, one of the many maxims attributed to Thatcher: “You have to win the argument before you can win the election.”

And so, as a comprehensive assessment of her record is spooled out, many senators and House members may be taken aback by evidence that her free-market vision was not quite as unambiguous as her eulogists describe.

Most jarring — to a GOP that has spent so much energy in the past three years trying to stop, repeal or replace Obamacare — Thatcher never wavered in her support for Britain’s government-run health care system, which really does live up to the Republican “socialized medicine” epithet. While Thatcher privatized many other government-run industries, from airlines to steel mills, the National Health Service she left alone, hailing it in her memoir as “a service of which we could genuinely be proud” for both its cost-effectiveness and quality of care.

Hill Republicans who say that cutting taxes and spending is the best way to stimulate growth will be disappointed to learn that Thatcher’s fiscal record doesn’t support them. Government spending as a share of the British economy increased during the first seven years of her administration, and taxes were a 2 percent bigger share of the country’s gross domestic product when she left office in 1990 than when she arrived 11 years before.

The main reason is that her signature 1979 income tax cut was revenue-neutral, paid for by almost doubling the country’s value-added tax. That earned her derision from economist Arthur Laffer, godfather of the modern congressional GOP theory of “dynamic scoring.” And during last year’s presidential primaries, when Mitt Romney said he’d be open to a national sales tax as part of an IRS overhaul, the Newt Gingrich campaign derided such talk of “European socialism.”

It’s that mission statement that Republicans have in mind when they cite, as they often do, one of the many maxims attributed to Thatcher: “You have to win the argument before you can win the election.”

And so, as a comprehensive assessment of her record is spooled out, many senators and House members may be taken aback by evidence that her free-market vision was not quite as unambiguous as her eulogists describe.

Most jarring — to a GOP that has spent so much energy in the past three years trying to stop, repeal or replace Obamacare — Thatcher never wavered in her support for Britain’s government-run health care system, which really does live up to the Republican “socialized medicine” epithet. While Thatcher privatized many other government-run industries, from airlines to steel mills, the National Health Service she left alone, hailing it in her memoir as “a service of which we could genuinely be proud” for both its cost-effectiveness and quality of care.

Hill Republicans who say that cutting taxes and spending is the best way to stimulate growth will be disappointed to learn that Thatcher’s fiscal record doesn’t support them. Government spending as a share of the British economy increased during the first seven years of her administration, and taxes were a 2 percent bigger share of the country’s gross domestic product when she left office in 1990 than when she arrived 11 years before.

The main reason is that her signature 1979 income tax cut was revenue-neutral, paid for by almost doubling the country’s value-added tax. That earned her derision from economist Arthur Laffer, godfather of the modern congressional GOP theory of “dynamic scoring.” And during last year’s presidential primaries, when Mitt Romney said he’d be open to a national sales tax as part of an IRS overhaul, the Newt Gingrich campaign derided such talk of “European socialism.” 

From Roll Call

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