Seeking to capitalize on the righteous indignation voters are feeling toward President Barack Obama and his Congressional allies, a group of Republican politicians is dusting off an old playbook.

Led by former GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich – Washington’s preeminent “Reformer in Name Only” – this group’s plan is to bring back the “Contract with America,” the 1994 policy platform that helped propel Republicans to majorities in both the U.S. House and Senate in 1995. In unveiling his first draft of such a document, Gingrich spoke of “the clarity, the positive focus, and the election results of the 1994 contract.”

He obviously wasn’t able to speak about the post-election results of the contract, because those are frankly few and far between.

Nonetheless a second contract, according to Gingrich, “would be a powerful unifier for all those who are tired of the corruption and waste of Washington and the alien views of the secular-socialist coalition seeking to radically change America.”

Well, well. That’s tough talk – but once again, it’s all pre-election. And while Republicans are great at campaigning on limited government talking points, they’ve proven positively awful when it comes to governing according to those principles.

After all, the “corruption and waste of Washington” didn’t stop when Gingrich and his Republican Revolutionists rode into town, far from it in fact. And as for the “secular-socialist coalition,” didn’t Gingrich recently endorse a secular socialist (over a limited government Conservative Party candidate) in a New York Congressional race?

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

That should be America’s response to a “second contract.”

Gingrich’s 1994 plan was actually dead before arrival, meaning that the Speaker and his committee chairmen broke their balanced budget promises early on in their first appropriations process – literally days after arriving in the capital.

“We got our people into leadership,” the late Paul Weyrich, a long-time Gingrich ally, complained in 1996, “but we are not getting different policies.”

Indeed the two signature “accomplishments” of the Republican Revolution were partisan distractions – a politically-motivated government shutdown and the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. And of course after Clinton came the big government era of “Bush Republicanism,” which has been an unmitigated fiscal disaster.

Also, remember how the Gingrich contract was going to replace career politicians with “citizen legislators?”

Well more than a decade-and-a-half later, there are still nearly two dozen Republican members of the class of ’94 serving in the U.S. House. Six others have gone on to become U.S. Senators, including Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a staunch supporter of Obama’s “cap and trade” energy tax.

Gingrich’s “second contract” doesn’t mention a word about term limits, incidentally.

“The Republicans have stopped being reformers,” former congressman John Kasich lamented shortly after the GOP was routed from power in 2006. “They’re practicing politics as usual.”

“We had succumbed to the temptation of things that we had criticized the Democrats for,” U.S. Rep. Dan Lungren added.

Indeed, Democrats won control of Congress in 2006 by pledging to restore fiscal sanity in light of Republican budget excesses – and Obama won the presidency in 2008 by promising tax cuts to the middle class.

Clearly, these “bread and circus” centrist diversions (neither of which the Democrats were ever serious about implementing) masked a sinister socialist agenda, but should Republicans be the ones we trust to make a course correction? And more importantly, can America afford the consequences of another aborted “Republican” revolution?

Much more promising a reform effort than Gingrich’s top-down contract, in my opinion, is a grassroots movement by tea party activists to create a Contract From America – a document springing up in cities and towns across America rather than originating from the corrupt centers of power in Washington, D.C.

Or for that matter the Mount Vernon Statement, which challenges candidates to pledge their allegiance to the fundamental foundations of Constitutional governance.

Ultimately, though, Republicans and Democrats alike will be judged not by their promises but by their votes – which will either protect taxpayers and promote their liberties or continue down the same bipartisan path of excess and interventionism.

Howard Rich, chairman of Americans for Limited Government, is a Liberty Features Syndicated writer.

As America loudly repudiates the leftist agenda of President Barack Obama and his Congressional allies, a group of partisan GOP opportunists is busy promoting a theory of “Republican revisionism.”

What does this theory hold?

Namely, that the GOP wasn’t “all that bad” – and certainly not as bad as the socialist hordes who have ostensibly pushed America to the brink of financial ruin over the last year. In advancing this theory, the GOP is looking to recast itself as a party that can be trusted with your tax dollars – while simultaneously attempting to reframe the legacy of the President (and dozens of other GOP politicians) who couldn’t be trusted with your tax dollars.

This effort is most clearly visible in the GOP’s recent attempts to co-opt the Tea Party movement. It can also be seen within the opportunistic machinations of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has been pushing a new “Contract with America” in spite of his obvious betrayal – and subsequent scuttling – of the original movement fifteen years ago.

The GOP’s new revisionist message was summed up in a billboard that appeared recently on Interstate 35 in Wyoming.

“Miss me yet?” a smiling picture of former President Bush asks passing motorists.

In a word? “No.”

What this theory of “Republican revisionism” lacks is even a tangential basis in fact. That’s because Republicans – at least prior to the election of a Democratic Congress in 2006 and a Democratic President in 2008 – were engaged in precisely the same policies they now spend all of their time railing against.

Honestly – why do you think they were booted out of power in the first place?

Republicans are no strangers to massive government overreaching.

For example, President Bush responded to the September 11 terrorist attacks by creating a huge new government bureaucracy, implementing an Orwellian domestic wiretapping capability and engaging our military in two costly foreign wars with no defined objectives and no exit strategy.

Meanwhile, he supported the unconstitutional suppression of free speech by signing so-called “campaign finance” reform, dramatically stifling the ability of the public to criticize incumbent politicians. Fortunately, the Supreme Court has since overturned several of McCain-Feingold’s most anti-First Amendment provisions.

Bush and his cronies loved pork barrel spending, too. In 2005 – over the strenuous objections of taxpayer advocates – he signed a massive $286 billion transportation bill that included 6,371 pet projects inserted by Republican and Democratic lawmakers. The bill was a pork-fest that dwarfed previous Democratic transportation boondoggles.

Why did a Republican President sign such a monstrosity?

“The president has to work with the Congress,” a Bush spokesman said at the time.

In case anyone forgot, Republicans controlled both the U.S. House and Senate in 2005.

Bush and his GOP allies also fought to create new entitlement spending – including a prescription drug benefit to Medicaid that has cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. They federalized education with No Child Left Behind, although erasing the “soft bigotry of low expectations” has done nothing to bridge America’s achievement and innovation gap with the rest of the world.

Perhaps most revealing, for the vast majority of his administration, the “conservative” Bush kept his veto pen in his pocket – refusing to wield the one potent weapon (other than the bully pulpit) that could have been employed on behalf of American taxpayers.

As a result of Bush’s fiscal recklessness, budget surpluses turned into deficits and a $5.7 trillion national debt soared to $10 trillion. Also, Republicans are quick to forget that Bush is on the hook for a considerable portion of the unsustainable spending that is currently driving our debt even further into the stratosphere.

Indeed, Bush cemented his anti-free market legacy in late 2008 with the passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and tens of billions of dollars worth of automotive bailouts – additional examples of his kneejerk tendency to resolve every crisis faced by the nation with an unprecedented expansion of government power and taxpayer debt.

Was Bush a better steward of your tax dollars than Obama?

Yes – but that’s the problem. Getting mugged worse the second time around doesn’t absolve the first thief of his culpability.

The simple, unavoidable truth is that Bush and his GOP allies were fiscal liberals, and no amount of “Republican revisionism” can erase that fact.

A year after it was passed, it has become painfully obvious to anyone with open eyes that the massive federal “stimulus” – along with several other trillion-dollar government interventions in the free market – has utterly failed to turn around America’s economy. In fact, all this massive infusion of taxpayer cash has done is deprive our consumer-driven private sector of much-needed oxygen, while sending our annual deficits and national debt soaring to previously unthinkable heights.

It’s the classic Washington approach to the economy. When times are good, politicians in both parties spend excessively. When times are bad? They spend uncontrollably.

As a result, at a time when families and small businesses were – and are still – forced to go without, government continues to grow by obscene levels, using every excuse in the book to justify its largesse.

Among those excuses?

“Green Jobs.”

I wrote on this issue just last month, making the fundamental point that investing billions in “Green Jobs” had failed to stimulate the economy (or create jobs), and that Barack Obama’s pledge to invest billions more in “Green Jobs” was the wrong answer moving forward.

This month, we’re discovering in detail why that is true.

According to a series of new reports, billions of dollars in “stimulus” money that was supposed to go toward creating “Green Jobs” here in America instead went to foreign-owned companies – who “created or saved” the vast majority of their jobs overseas. Obviously there is nothing wrong with America investing in foreign businesses, as protectionism is a recipe for disaster.

According to an ABC News report, though, almost $2 billion in “stimulus” funding has been spent so far on wind power, and yet 80% of that money has gone to foreign-owned companies.

“Most of the jobs are going overseas,” researcher Russ Choma told ABC. “According to our estimates, about 6,000 jobs have been created overseas, and maybe a couple hundred have been created in the U.S.”

In fact, despite receiving this windfall of “stimulus” cash, the U.S. wind manufacturing sector actually lost jobs in 2009, according to a year-end report by its professional association. Also, most of the jobs “created or saved” in America have been temporary construction positions, or “management” hires.

The real job creation (or job salvation, to use Obama’s disingenuous math) has taken place beyond our borders.

Consider these examples, courtesy of a recent report from The Watchdog Institute:

Eurus Energy America, a subsidiary of a Japanese-owned firm, received $91 million in “stimulus” funds and created only 300 to 400 temporary construction jobs. Permanent jobs created? Less than a dozen.

EnXco, a French-owned firm, received $69.5 million in “stimulus” funds and yet produced only 200 construction jobs and “about a dozen” permanent positions.

A-Power, a Chinese-owned firm, is in line to receive nearly $450 million in “stimulus” funds – for a project that will create thousands of Chinese jobs but only a few dozen American positions.
Cannon Power Group, an American-owned firm, received $19 million in “stimulus” funds but spend most of that on German-made turbines. So far they have created fewer than 300 construction jobs and “20 to 30” permanent positions. Cannon is in line to receive another $150 million in “stimulus” funds, by the way.

In case the trend isn’t clear, America’s massive investment in “Green Jobs” has been a colossal, costly failure – unless you’re looking for work overseas. For all the promises of the Obama administration, here at home these taxpayers billions have amounted to little more than a few thousand temporary construction positions and a few hundred management jobs.

In fact, there’s a good chance that the government employees hired to promote “Green Jobs” outnumber the actual permanent “Green Jobs” created. However you do the math, these positions are obviously a mere drop in the bucket compared to U.S. job losses in the wind manufacturing segment of the energy economy alone, to say nothing of the millions of lost jobs nationwide.

Worse still, the lunacy isn’t stopping. We are continuing to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into this failed framework, which uses American sweat to create permanent positions (and profit) for foreign companies.

Frankly, it’s time for Obama to come clean on the “Green Jobs” scam – and to explain why his so-called “transparent and accountable” administration didn’t catch it sooner.

“We’re not going to save our way out of this recession. We’ve got to spend our way out of this recession.” – U.S. Majority Whip Jim Clyburn

Just days before Congressman Jim Clyburn had the “audacity” to admit what D.C. politicians were actually doing with our tax dollars, U.S. President Barack Obama had the cowardice to continue concealing government’s unprecedented generational larceny.

“It is critical that we rein in the budget deficits that we’ve been accumulating for far too long,” Obama said in unveiling his latest effort to distract American citizens from a looming fiscal Armageddon.

Of course, after proposing a so-called “budget freeze” in his State of the Union speech, Obama rolled out the “Mother of all Boondoggles” (for now, at least), a $3.8 trillion spending plan for the coming fiscal year that includes a record $1.6 trillion deficit (on top of the $1.4 trillion deficit government will run in the current fiscal year). By the end of this month, the Treasury now projects that the U.S. will hit its $12.4 trillion debt ceiling, coming on the heels of a vote last week in the Senate to raise the debt ceiling from $12.4 trillion to $14.294 trillion. And just this week, Moody’s warned that the nation’s Triple-A rating could be in jeopardy “if the current upward trend in government debt were to continue and become irreversible.”

“It would be a terrible mistake to borrow against our children’s future to pay our way today,” Obama said – but then he did just that, endorsing a spending plan that grows government by hundreds of billions of dollars when the nation can least afford it, and when the country’s first major entitlement bubble is about to burst.

According to a new CBO report, Social Security outlays will exceed revenues for the first time in 25 years in 2010 – and a wave of red ink is rapidly building up behind this immediate tipping point as the program will run permanent deficits beginning in 2016. Meanwhile a similar Medicaid implosion is on the horizon, and on top of these brewing disasters we have the hundreds of billions of dollars America must devote to interest payments on its mushrooming debt.

Yet amazingly, with the same sleight of hand that his so-called stimulus “created or saved” imaginary jobs (in non-existent Congressional districts), Obama now claims that federal deficits will begin to magically decline by 2012 – although even his rosiest numbers don’t envision annual deficits falling below $1 trillion until after 2020.

Where will our national debt be at that point? $24 trillion?

That’s classic Washington calculus though, isn’t it? Nothing ever gets cut from government, as we just have politicians who promise to borrow less of your money at some point in the increasingly distant future. But that point in the future never actually arrives, because there is invariably some emergency or perceived social obligation which crops up to justify yet another massive expansion of government.

In addition to excluding such politically-correct contingencies from his spending plans, Obama also erroneously claims that future deficits could be reduced if only the U.S. Congress were to pass his socialized medicine proposal – with its estimated $2.5 trillion price tag.

Only according to Obama’s asinine arithmetic do spending explosions and entitlement expansions equate to future savings.

This fiscal lunacy is clearly not what the American people want. Yet even though they held up unmistakable “STOP” signs in elections in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama and his Congressional allies are ignoring the message and pushing the pedal to the floor as they drive this nation off of a fiscal cliff.

Obama’s rampant spending isn’t even the gravest danger, either, as his budget threatens to exacerbate the damage by putting future economic growth in a stranglehold.

While Obama claims to have placed “jobs” at the top of his priority list, his budget raises taxes on capital gains and hikes upper income tax brackets as part of an effort to pump more than $460 billion into government’s coffers – mirroring the faulty “payment plan” behind his socialized medicine proposal.

And while soaking the rich makes for great populist rhetoric, it doesn’t create jobs – in fact, it ensures that job creators keep what little money Washington leaves them with buried in their back yards, not making payroll.

With his presidency on the ropes, Barack Obama is portraying himself to the masses as a deficit hawk focused on improving our economy.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

His unprecedented spending binge would stab at the very heart of job creation in this country, while plunging this nation deeper into a deficit spiral from which it might never ever be able to escape.

Barack Obama’s “Panic Week” has come and gone, but did his White House learn anything from the historic repudiation of his leftist agenda? Putting the question another way, has Obama made the necessary course corrections or is he still refusing to hear the message that America is sending him so loudly and clearly?

Given the Democratic Party’s stunning defeat in Massachusetts, its November losses in New Jersey and Virginia and its increasingly bleak 2010 electoral prospects, one would think Obama has no choice but to follow the route Bill Clinton took to the right sixteen years ago when he stared down similar circumstances. After all, with the exception of passing his so-called “economic stimulus” bill, Obama has been unable to get any major legislation through the U.S. Congress – this despite the presence of a sizeable Democratic majority in the House and (until recently) a filibuster-proof Democratic “super-majority” in the Senate.

Imagine how tough he’ll find the sledding now.

Unfortunately, Obama remains completely tone deaf to the will of the people. In fact, the only thing that has changed in his White House as a result of these repeated electoral setbacks is the way he is pursuing his socialist agenda.

“Hope and change” obviously didn’t work, so now it’s time for some good old-fashioned “smoke and mirrors.”

After picking their jaws up off the floor following Sen.-elect Scott Brown’s shocking victory in Massachusetts – a race in which Obama’s intervention actually moved voters away from Democrat Martha Coakley – the very first thing the White House brain trust did was to “elevate the role” of a professional political operative. In fact, Obama’s “elevation” of former campaign manager David Plouffe signaled right away that any attempt on the part of his administration to recalibrate its political compass would be purely cosmetic in nature.

In fact, just three days after his party’s Massachusetts defeat, Obama was out looking for “low hanging fruit,” or a convenient enemy that all Americans – but particularly independent voters – could join him in opposing. He quickly found that enemy in Wall Street bankers, who are the same “fat cats” who then-Senator Obama supported via the TARP bailout, ironically.

Now boasting that he was “ready for a fight,” Obama proceeded to propose a new tax on these financial institutions – one that a recent Rasmussen Reports poll found was supported (conditionally, at least) by 56% of Americans.

Of course that poll also found that nearly 70% of Americans oppose extending the tax to banks that did not receive bailout money – while 72% believe that bailout recipients like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be required to pay any new tax, as well.

Next up on the agenda for Obama’s crass populist propagandists? Spending.

Because polling has consistently shown that independent voters are leery of government’s unsustainable deficit spending, Obama’s next move was to unveil a so-called “freeze” on budget growth. Unfortunately, his “freeze” only applied to 17% of the budget, and whatever “deficit reduction” it purports to accomplish would be completely consumed by growth in entitlement spending – as well as hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments that taxpayers are forced to pick up as a result of our skyrocketing national debt.

Yet while these two populist stories were being pushed by the White House press office, behind closed doors top Obama administration officials were working harder than ever to resuscitate the very radical policies that spawned all this voter angst and distrust in the first place.

Just four days after Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, for example, Obama’s chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel met with a group of Senators at the White House in an effort to revive “cap and trade,” Obama’s massive energy tax hike. Similarly, Obama has been meeting regularly with Congressional leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in a no-holds-barred effort to ram his socialized medicine proposal through Congress – despite its collapsing public support and weakened legislative position.

Clearly a string of defeats for Obama – including a historic setback in Massachusetts – has done nothing to deter him from his leftward march.

Of course the silver lining is that the more stridently Obama pursues these objectives in the face of mounting public and Congressional opposition, the more strident public and legislative opposition becomes toward him.