The Republican Plan

With Republicans positioned for major electoral gain in 2010, Newsweek is taking a look at how the party would govern if they were in power. The center of any Republican agenda would be tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts, but the article notes that anti-spending and anti-taxation fervor among the party's faithful could make it near impossible to address the deficit without touching Social Security and Medicare, which are extremely popular. "Small-government Republicans come down squarely on the side of smaller deficits... Sounds great. Except that no one in either party has figured out how to do that in a way that won't cause a rebellion among the voters," the article states. The author notes that there's significant agreement between Obama and Republicans on both foreign policy, with the president presiding over an increase in troops in Afghanistan, and education, where the president's support for charter schools and providing incentives for school reform on a state level has GOP roots.