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HOT TOPIC
Republicans DeLayed
The GOP leadership deficit is one of ideas, not ethics.
Saturday, October 1, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
The Tom DeLay indictment has Democrats believing they can play the ethics card to retake Congress. But with the 2006 elections still 13 months away, the more immediate and important question is whether Republicans can use their leadership turmoil as an opportunity to remember why they were elected.
In liberal Beltway mythology, the GOP took the House in 1994 because Newt Gingrich shrewdly used Jim Wright and Dan Rostenkowski to portray Democrats as corrupt. That's about one-tenth of the story. The real reason Democrats were ousted is because they raised taxes after saying they wouldn't, and they promoted a liberal policy agenda (HillaryCare/gun control) that they couldn't find the votes to pass. The Gingrich Republicans responded with the Contract for America of conservative proposals, and what might have been a mild midterm rebuke of Democrats became an epic change of power.
The real danger for Republicans now isn't ethics; it is that, like those 1994 Democrats, they seem to have grown more comfortable presiding over the government than changing it. No one typified this more than Mr. DeLay, who has always been more fiercely partisan than he is conservative. Among the GOP House leaders who took power in 1994, Dick Armey was the genuine idea man. Mr. DeLay provided the political muscle of fund-raising and vote-counting.
Every Congressional majority needs both kinds of Members, but in recent years the GOP Congress has become mostly about its money and muscle--and the incumbency it helps to sustain. The policy and intellectual fervor, such as it was, has all but vanished. Nothing typified that more than Mr. DeLay's comments on September 13, when he declared post-Katrina that there was nothing left in the federal budget to cut. They had already trimmed all the fat. This prompted Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.), one of the newer fiscal conservatives, to wonder whether he and Mr. DeLay were serving in the same Congress.
In those same remarks two weeks ago, Mr. DeLay invited those calling for offsets to pay for hurricane-relief spending to present him with some. But when the House Republican Study Committee launched "operation offset" to do just that, the GOP leadership tried to quash the effort.
Here are the depressing facts. Domestic discretionary nondefense spending is up 70% since 1994. Spending growth slowed in 1995 and 1996 as the Republican-controlled House pushed for a balanced budget. But spending began to rise rapidly again in the later 1990s, as Republicans and Bill Clinton "compromised" by spending more on both of their priorities. And the gusher has continued under President Bush, as Republicans have failed to trim domestic pork to pay for the necessary increases in defense.
Except for the 2003 tax cuts, we can't think of a single recent major policy accomplishment. There have been smaller victories--trade bills, some modest tort reform, and now some judges approved. But the drive for major reform has stalled. Mr. Bush was a co-conspirator in passing the 2003 Medicare drug bill that is the largest expansion of the entitlement state since LBJ's Great Society. But even when Mr. Bush has pressed for reform, as he did this year on Social Security, Republicans on Capitol Hill have whined and resisted. If Mr. Bush failed to mobilize the country, it was in part because Congressional Republicans were so vocal in their caterwauling.
The real leadership deficit on Capitol Hill is one of ideas, not ethics. In the absence of any policy ambitions, Congress has drifted and the Democrats' ethics complaints have filled the vacuum. The one thing Republicans did pass and then brag about during the August recess--the $286 billion highway bill--has now boomeranged as its 6,371 "earmarks" have been exposed as petty and self-serving after Katrina. This is what happens when Republicans try to become the party of government.
The path back to public approval, and re-election next year, is to return to their principles. Respond to the economic damage of Katrina by making energy exploration and production less burdensome. Help sustain the current expansion by making the Bush tax cuts permanent, repealing the death tax as they've promised for years and taking a stab at larger tax reform. If Social Security is too daunting, then turn to health care, by passing free-market reforms that lower the cost of insurance so employers can give larger wage increases instead of paying ever more for health care. And restore Medicaid to the program for the poor that it was designed to be instead of a middle-class subsidy for long-term care.
We could go on. It's not as if the agenda that Republicans ran on in 2004, or for that matter 1994, has been fulfilled. The question is whether Republicans still believe in that agenda, or whether their main ambition now is simply to stay in power. If a year from now voters continue to believe the answer is the latter, no amount of money or muscle will save Republicans at the polls.
Demoralized Dems
Why the party has so little faith in its political prospects.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Howard Fineman
Newsweek
Updated: 5:53 p.m. ET Sept. 28, 2005
With George W. Bushs presidency mired in the muck of hurricanes and doubts about the war, youd think Democrats would be bursting with energy, eagerly expecting to regain power. But, in a roomful of well-connected Democrats the other night, I was struck by how gloomy they were. They cant stand Bush, but didnt have much faith in their own partys prospects.
Why? Well, some of the reasons they articulated are short-term and tactical; some are purely personal; others more philosophical; and I have a few myself:
Supreme divisions
The presidents nomination of John Roberts was a ten strike, knocking apart whatever united front the Dems might have been able to muster on judicial issues. However genial and cerebral he may be, Roberts also is a board-certified conservative, blessed by the James Dobsons of the world.
No one doubted that at least a few Red State Democrats would vote for him, but the defection of Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont (no less), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, was a stunnerand a demoralizing one for the party faithful.
Democrats are vowing to remain unified over Bushs next pickwhich almost certainly will be a woman, a Hispanic or both. So the party could find itself in a tough political position once again.
Lack of star power
These things go in cycles, I guess, and its hard to be glamorous when you are in the minority in both houses of Congress. That said, its incontestably true that the Democrats simply arent blessed with much charisma in the leadership ranksunless you consider Angelina Jolie a Democrat.
The GOP has Rudy, Colin, Arnold, McCain and Condijust to name a few: big, bold, controversial characters. Good copy if nothing else. The more or less official roster of titular Democratic leaders includes Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean and 2004 nominee John Kerry. Nuff said.
Hillary love and fear
The purported inevitability of Hillary Rodham Clinton excites some Democrats, but deeply depresses some others, both inside and outside the Beltway.
Her forcefulness and talentnot to mention her well-oiled money machinebring respect from party insiders and outsiders alike. But there is an undercurrent of unease about the "Back to the Future" quality of another Clinton candidacy. Do we really want to relive the Clinton Years? Under their breath, even many Clinton acolytes tend to say NO.
A house divided
Andy Stern of the Service Employees International Union is a brilliant agitator, and he has all but single-handedly crippled the AFL-CIO by taking his union and several others into a new group called the Change to Win Federation.
Sterns rationale, in part, is that the Democrats are taking rank-and-file workers for granted. Does that mean Change to Win will consider endorsing Republicans (as the Teamsters, another member of the Stern Gang, sometimes do)? No wonder Dems are gloomy.
War waffling
I spent some time with Cindy Sheehan the other day, and I was struck by her impatience with the Democrats.
Why are they so afraid? she wanted to know. She had just met with Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, and described both as cautious in their statements, with Reid saying that the Dems had no choice but to push for a drawdown of U.S. troops and Hillary remaining largely mum.
Frankly, I was surprised that Reid and Clinton met with her at all. The Dems are afraid of their own shadow on the Iraq war. Most of their leadership voted twice for the conflictthe authorizing resolution and the money to support it. And none of them has come out, flat out, to say that they made a mistake.
Do they believe in the aims of the war or not? If they fault the execution of the war, precisely what would they do differently now? The silence is thundering.
Missed opportunities
And then there are all those issues that got swept awayand swept off the front pagesby the storms: the Karl Rove/CIA leak investigation; the FDA controversy about over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill, and the subsequent resignations from the agency; the on-again, off-again debate about rejiggering Social Security, and even the investigation of what went wrong with FEMA's hurricane response. All were juicy issues for the Democrats to dig into, but the opposition party failed to muster a united voice.
Vision and passion
I led my last NEWSWEEK piece with an anecdote about President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. When a huge hurricane hit New Orleans that year, he hustled down to Louisiana and was on the scene within a day, offering the full resources of the federal government to help get the region back on its feet.
I thought it was an instructive contrast to Bushs too-little, too-late personal response to Katrina. But the anecdote contains a lesson for Democrats, too: LBJ stood for a big ideathe healing power of government. He was in the mist of his Great Society presidency.
What Big Idea would a Democratic presidency be about? No one seems to know, which is perhaps the main reason why the party faithful in that room seemed so lost.
NATO AIR said:I agree with the diagnosis (and I posted that howard fineman piece on the dems earlier this week, a damning.. and good one)
If Rudy was smart, he would start brainstorming with some of the good fiscal and defense hawks in the House GOP, as well as some of the reasonable social conservatives in the Senate (like Sam Brownback and Jon Kyl) and begin to craft a new strategy for the GOP, centered around what he would want to do in his presidency.
McCain could also try this, but I don't think enough of the social conservatives respect him.
NATO AIR said:I agree with the diagnosis (and I posted that howard fineman piece on the dems earlier this week, a damning.. and good one)
If Rudy was smart, he would start brainstorming with some of the good fiscal and defense hawks in the House GOP, as well as some of the reasonable social conservatives in the Senate (like Sam Brownback and Jon Kyl) and begin to craft a new strategy for the GOP, centered around what he would want to do in his presidency.
McCain could also try this, but I don't think enough of the social conservatives respect him.
Kathianne said:Sorry I stepped on your thread, I thought these two went well together. McCain cannot carry the base of the GOP, he's 'compromised' too many times for publicity alone.
I think you may be right about Guilliani.
I am not so concerned about the social, if Guiliani won, it's more than likely that the GOP would still control the legislature. I also believe that we are heading in the direction of more state control, regardless of who wins.OCA said:Have you two paid any attention to Giuliani's positions? Defense speaking he's as conservative as they come, socially he's to the left of Barney Frank.
Kathianne said:Simply because they have even less than a few:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9516671/site/newsweek/page/2/
Hagbard Celine said:I can't believe you guys! John McCain would be an awesome president for everybody. He's so moderate. In fact, I would be hardpressed to choose between him and Hillary.
