Does Anyone Care About the Deficit?

On Wednesday, Ezra Klein asked if conservatives care about the deficit. Well, they did in the 90's and as Newt Gingrich knows, it didn't turn out too well.

Ezra Klein tweeted a challenge on Wednesday, asking if there is any evidence (any at all!) that conservatives care about the deficit.

A bit of context: the question is important to Ezra Klein (and Matt Yglesias) for a few reasons.  First, they want Democrats to do more deficit spending, because the economy is bad and what we've done so far hasn't worked.

Second, they want the Democrats to admit that the earlier stimulus would have worked better if they weren't constrained by deficit fears.

Third, the concern they think is holding moderate Democrats back is a fear of Republican challengers using the deficit issue against them.  But, if Republicans are perceived as hypocrites on the matter, hopefully it would mitigate that effect.  Thankfully for them, there is plenty of evidence that Republicans are hypocrites on the matter, as was detailed by Yglesias in his post.

And yet, it's not working.

That being said, there was a time that Republicans cared more about the deficit than they did in the Bush and Reagan years.  It was called, "The Gingrich Years."

You might remember how that worked out.  Exhibit A:

Gingrich did two quite interesting things that indicate that conservatives, at least at the time, cared about the deficit: he led a shutdown of the government, and negotiated the Balanced Budget Act of 1997.

You cannot say that he didn't pay a price for that: Gingrich was rightly blamed for the government shutdown, which was perceived as bad governance rather than hardball politics.  (The Balanced Budget Act was overshadowed at the time by... other matters, shall we say, and it took a few years to work, or at least seemed to, for a time.) Long story short, conservative Republicans lost in 1996, lost in 1998, and turned to a leader that, for all his faults, would avoid being portrayed as Uncle Scrooge on the cover of Time.  The rest is history.

Is there a lesson in this for liberal Democrats? I don't know.  But, happily, I'm not in the business of giving liberal Democrats advice.  So, it's up to them.