Republicans don’t usually talk much about the 2008 financial crisis. It’s a reminder of the sour conclusion of the last Republican presidency. It’s a reminder that President Obama inherited an economy in a terrifying free-fall. And it’s a reminder of Republican opposition to Wall Street regulation and reform.

At last night’s Fox Business debate on the economy, Republicans had to talk about the crisis. It was a reminder of why they don’t like doing that.

After all, the bank bailouts that helped fix the crisis also sparked the fury that helped launch the Tea Party—and GOP candidates buck the Tea Party at their peril. But the Wall Street reforms that Congress passed in 2010 are almost as popular with voters as Wall Street bailouts are unpopular, and the GOP candidates don’t support those either. It’s an awkward situation, and since the bailouts and reforms have both been surprisingly successful, the candidates often ended up in factual, logical and political cul-de-sacs trying to bash them.

Jeb Bush, a former Lehman Brothers adviser, said the biggest banks now hold less capital and take more risks because of the Dodd-Frank financial reforms; in fact, their Tier One capital levels have doubled from about 6% to 12%, while leverage in the financial system has been cut from about $16 trillion to about $9 trillion.

John Kasich, a former Lehman Brothers banker, seemed unaware that FDIC insurance protects ordinary depositors at failing commercial banks.

Ben Carson, asked whether the biggest banks should be broken up, said no, but also that they shouldn’t be allowed to “enlarge themselves at the expense of smaller entities,” then added some word salad about low interest rates and 18th-century entrepreneurship and the cost of soap that did not signal deep knowledge about the banking sector.

Marco Rubio claimed that new government regulations have increased the size of the biggest banks, when in fact new surcharges for the largest institutions are encouraging megabanks to get smaller. It’s true that JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo are larger than they were before the crisis, but that’s mostly because they absorbed Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual, Countrywide Financial, Merrill Lynch and Wachovia during the crisis, helping to prevent a financial cataclysm from becoming a financial calamity.

Led by Ted Cruz, the candidates blasted the bank bailouts as an assault on unwitting taxpayers, even though the unpopular rescues ultimately turned a profit for taxpayers, while helping to prevent a second Great Depression. They blasted Dodd-Frank as a protection racket for too-big-to-fail banks, even though markets no longer seem to think they’re too big to fail; the implicit subsidy that allowed megabanks that seemed like probable candidates for bailouts to borrow at lower rates has virtually disappeared.

The conservative American Action Network anticipated the mood on stage with a mid-debate commercial portraying the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a Soviet-style oppressive bureaucracy. Carly Fiorina enthusiastically echoed its message, describing the CFPB as a first step on the road to socialism, “a vast bureaucracy with no congressional oversight that’s digging through hundreds of millions of your credit records to detect fraud.” But polls suggest that most Americans like the idea of a government agency protecting them from financial swindles by payday lenders, credit card companies, and for-profit colleges—and it’s not clear how aligning the party with the swindlers will be good politics next fall.

Kasich was the one candidate who departed from free-market orthodoxy on the crisis, declaring there was too much greed on Wall Street, and that the financial industry needed an ethics lesson. “Yes, free enterprise is great, profits are great, but there have to be some values that underlay it,” he said. But complaining about greed on Wall Street is like complaining about aggression in the NFL. It comes with the territory. The big question is how you want to monitor it and regulate it.

There wasn’t much enthusiasm for that kind of government activity on stage last night. As Alan Greenspan acknowledged in his famous congressional testimony, the crisis was a terrible advertisement for laissez-faire economics—and straying too far from laissez-faire economics can be a terrible idea in a Republican primary. This is one reason that in the previous debates, only Donald Trump brought up the crisis on his own, to remind voters that it happened on Jeb Bush’s brother’s watch.

Of course, the other reason Republicans don’t like to talk about the crisis is that it muddles their message about Obama-era malaise. “We’re not simply going through an economic downturn,” Rubio said last night. “We’re going through an economic transformation.” In fact, we’re not going through a downturn at all; we’ve had 68 consecutive months of private-sector employment growth, producing 13 million new jobs. The GOP wants to focus on modest wages and modest growth today. It doesn’t want to remind Americans that economy was shedding 800,000 jobs a month and contracting at an 8 percent annual rate in January 2009, and that the housing market, stock market and auto industry were all in the tank.

The bipartisan bailouts helped prevent the situation from getting worse and helped pave the way for recovery. But bailouts are still a dirty word in politics. Even Kasich, who chided his party for pandering to populists with unaffordable tax cuts and unrealistic deportation plans, said he wouldn’t bail out a failing megabank. Still, when Cruz pressed him, he grudgingly admitted that a responsible executive who wanted to avert disaster would have no choice. The crowd booed him.

“Here’s what I mean by that,” Kasich stammered. “When you are faced, in the last financial crisis, with banks going under, and people who put their life savings in there, you got to deal with it. You can’t turn a blind eye to it.”

Obama would agree. George W. Bush would agree. But it’s not clear that Republican primary voters would agree.

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