The left is trying to find a way to avoid talking about the Solyndra scandal. For example, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones advises his readers to spin Solyndra as just another free market failure: “There was no scandal in the loan process, and there’s nothing unusual about having a certain fraction of speculative programs like this fail. It’s all part of the way the free market works.”
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Drum’s excuse is laughable. But it’s also bad for the cause he wants to advance. If you still believe, as most on the left do, that we need government spending to create jobs, your only fallback thus far in the face of the failed stimulus has been the Paul Krugman line: that we ought to have spent more. That argument itself has failed because of our increasingly urgent debt problem.
Solyndra could provide the left with an alternative: the argument that Obama was right to spend, but he spent corruptly, and therefore unwisely. That’s a line that would let Keynesians separate the theory of the stimulus from its execution. It also would allow the left to attack corporate special interests–something it is quite eager to do, rightly or wrongly, when a Republican is in power.
If they care about their beliefs, Drum and the left ought to join Republicans in the call to investigate Obama’s apparent fraud in Solyndra. Thus far, most have chosen to make Solyndra a partisan issue, on which they must cede no ground–perhaps because of an overriding, almost theological belief in the power of “green jobs” and solar energy. Regardless of the reason, that strategic mistake ensures that when Obama fails, big-government liberalism will fail with him. This conservative will shed no tears.
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