Annie
Diamond Member
- Nov 22, 2003
- 50,848
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Something too often forgotten about leadership; by definition those active are usually the most informed and opinionated. They made a choice to join and get involved for reasons, that eventually come back to those that ignor them.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110007351
http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110007351
The GOP Could Lose in '06
Have congressional Republicans lost their way?
Monday, October 3, 2005 12:01 a.m.
With Rep. Tom DeLay's forced departure as majority leader, Newt Gingrich says, the Republican Party stands at a crossroads as important as any it has faced since nominating Ronald Reagan for president in 1980. "It must decide if it is going to be a party that fundamentally reforms government or one that merely presides over existing institutions and spends more money," he says. Which path the GOP now takes may determine not only how much damage it suffers in next year's elections but also whether it can hold the White House in 2008.
Mr. Gingrich knows something about dramatic intersections. He helped lead the 1994 GOP takeover of Congress from a Democratic majority that had associated itself with tax increases and a government takeover of health care. In 1996, the Democrats partly recovered when his party let President Clinton seize the moral high ground during a government shutdown. Two years after that, a Republican Congress preoccupied itself with the Monica Lewinsky scandal and adjourned just before the midterm elections by passing a budget-busting spending bill. Demoralized GOP voters stayed home, allowing the Democrats to pick up more seats. Mr. Gingrich stepped down shortly after that, turning over the Speaker's gavel to Dennis Hastert.
Since then Mr. Hastert and his fellow GOP leaders have skillfully used their narrow majority to win an amazing number of close votes without having to negotiate much with Democrats. But gradually the fear of losing their majority has also begun leading them to behave more and more like the big-spending Democrats they unseated. "Holding the majority used to be viewed as a means to an end--the end being promoting freedom and limited government," laments Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona. "Now, holding the majority seems to be an end in itself--holding onto power for the sake of holding onto power."
The loudest warning was sounded in November, 2003. At the behest of the White House, Mr. Hastert and then-Majority Leader DeLay held a floor vote open for three hours early one morning while they browbeat GOP members to pass a prescription drug benefit that was the largest expansion of an entitlement program since LBJ's Great Society. "It was a watershed event, the moment when Republicans who stood for limited government realized they were the enemy of their own leadership," Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma told me.
Since then the GOP's love affair with big government has intensified. This summer Congress passed a $286 billion highway bill stuffed with 6,373 pork-barrel projects inserted by individual members, many so marginal they have drawn national ridicule. All this was abetted or even led by a Bush White House that has yet to veto a single bill and whose officials have apparently adapted the old New Deal slogan "tax and tax, and spend and spend, and elect and elect" into merely "spend and spend."
The ouster of Tom DeLay last week came over a dubious Texas indictment on campaign finance violations. But he was in hot water with the conservative base before that for a series of bizarre statements opposing budget cuts to pay for the costs of Hurricane Katrina relief.
He first claimed with a straight face that the GOP Congress had "pared [federal spending] down pretty good; I am ready to declare ongoing victory." He then dismissed calls for delaying the start of the prescription drug benefit for a year by claiming it was designed to save money in the long run. "Postponing a reform that is going to implement fiscal restraint doesn't make a whole lot of sense," he lectured fellow members. Finally, he reacted to news that Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi would give up some specific transportation projects in her San Francisco district to help pay for Katrina by defending the projects in his own district. "The highway bill is an important part of building our economy," he told reporters. Mr. DeLay seemed to be channeling Richard Nixon, another big spender, who once foolishly claimed, "We are all Keynesians now."
Talk like that has demoralized much of the Republican base. With nearly all Democrats and two-thirds of independents reacting negatively to the Bush presidency, Republicans need to keep GOP voters in the fold. But only 78% of Republicans express approval of Mr. Bush, down from well over 90% at the time of his re-election. With only 32% of Americans believing that the country is headed in the right direction and only 33% approving of the job Congress is doing, the GOP has reason to worry. "By an eight-point margin, voters are now more likely to call themselves Democrats than Republicans; there was no gap in self-identification a year ago," notes political handicapper Charlie Cook.
Some Republicans, viewing the rise of voter discontent with alarm, are making panicked calls for the party to back off on making the Bush tax cuts permanent and also supporting grandiose Katrina rebuilding programs. They are ignoring one of the great principles of economics: many of the consequences of a decision are not always immediately obvious. As the 19th-century French economist Frederic Bastiat put it, "There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: The bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen."
Take the minimum wage. Raising it boosts the income of some low-skilled workers, but it also puts others out of work if their skills don't justify the higher pay. A similar effect occurs with free trade. The economic dislocation it causes is identifiable and "seen," less so its benefits and the new jobs it creates.
There is a political corollary to Bastiat's "seen and unseen" principle. Elected officials tend to focus on the visible benefits of government spending, not how the money might be better spent if left in the private sector. Similarly, they pay far more attention to the highly visible opposition that develops against any move to cut government spending or reform programs. They tend not to notice often cynical "silent majorities" that could be assembled to back reforms if convinced they would really happen. In his book "Demosclerosis," Jonathan Rauch describes "government's progressive loss of the ability to adapt" as concern about the general public interest recedes and special interests became more visible and able to engage in gridlock.
There is real "unseen" political fallout from the failure of leaders to tackle genuine problems, especially if they are members of a party that claims to be skeptical of big government. The easiest thing for people to do in these cynical times is not to vote; even in last year's intensely fought presidential election over 40% of eligible adults stayed away from the polls. "The Bush-Kerry race showed that it's now far more important to motivate people on your side to get to the polls than it is to sway a shrinking group of often indifferent undecided voters," says Michael Barone, a co-author of the Almanac of American Politics.
GOP-leaning voters are often not highly visible or "seen" in the fray of political combat. They tend to be too busy to write letters to the editor or show up at protests. They are more focused on what they regard as the serious business of living: family, jobs, faith. They are often an "unseen" majority, making their presence felt only on Election Day, if they believe their vote will make a difference. If they think there is little real difference between what the two parties will do such voters can easily stay home--and do.
Republican congressional leaders are still engaging in happy talk, claiming there is no danger of losing either house of Congress next year. Rep. Tom Reynolds, chairman of the GOP's House campaign committee, notes that elections are held in individual districts and that the latest Pew Research poll found that voters still approved of the job their individual congressman was doing by 57% to 25%. But what if many of those who "approve" do so only mildly, and their failure to vote is outweighed by angry Democrats turning out in higher numbers? It's happened before in midterm elections--in 1998, when disillusioned Republicans stayed home, and in 1994, when Democrats were upset at the incompetence of their party.
All this leaves a vacuum for straight-talking leadership in the GOP. It's safe to say that for the 2008 presidential race the shaky record of Washington Republicans enhances the stature of non-Beltway Republicans such as Rudy Giuliani and Massachusetts' Gov. Mitt Romney. Virginia's Sen. George Allen, a former governor who has been increasingly critical of his party's congressional leadership, is now appealing to voters as an outsider.
But, ironically, the candidate who may benefit the most from the current discontent among Republicans is Sen. John McCain, a Beltway media darling who has often been unpopular among conservatives for his apostate views. But since Mr. McCain doesn't depend on the Bush White House or his party's leadership for favors, he is liberated to blast away at their abandonment of principle.
At a dinner last month with editors of The American Spectator, he called for revisiting the bloated highway bill and for outright repeal of the prescription drug bill--"a program that no voter understands and will usually oppose once they do." It's a sign of the failures of Republican leaders to follow conservative principles that Mr. McCain is becoming the most visible opponent of business-as-usual in Washington right now.
Michael Continetti, a writer at the Weekly Standard who is writing a book on the modern Republican Party, worries that a decade in political power might have "exhausted conservatism's fighting spirit, lowered the movement's intellectual standards and replaced a healthy independence with partisan water-carrying." That sounds an awful lot like a description of what the last period of one-party rule did to liberals in 1993 and 1994. Back then they ignored the "unseen" political consequences of their actions and thereby convinced the electorate they no longer deserved that power.
