Polling on the Republican Future

Yesterday I posted on The Daily Kos (I have a diary over there), with respect to David Broder's pre-election column, in which Mr. Broder said that the Republican's power would be exaggerated because of the size of their victory in the House. Aside from my comments, I posted a poll, asking readers this question:

Do you believe that the Republicans' gains in Congress mean that they will dominate our politics for the next five years?

I received 55 responses, as of 5:20 PM Mountain Standard Time today. The responses were:

Yes 8

No 42

Not Sure 5

I know that the Daily Kos is a liberal site, but I think it's interesting that such a large majority of the respondents to my question do not believe that the Republicans have put themselves in the catbird seat for as long as five years.

An Election Pre-Mortem by David Broder

A lot of people were predicting the results of the general election on Tuesday, November 2, and most of them were right about the general results:

The Democrats lost big.
In particular, the more conservative Blue Dog Democrats lost dramatically.
The Republicans did well.
The effects of the Tea Party movement were ambiguous.

David Broder, in his column in the Washington Post, attempted not a prediction, but a pre-mortem. (Or a premature post-mortem - take your pick.)

Broder's key point is that any analysis which concludes that this election spelled "doom for the Democrats and a shift to the right in our politics" will be wrong. He thinks this for several reasons: the size of the shift to Republicans in the House will lead us to exaggerate the extent of their power; the voters are very skeptical about both parties; neither party has a compelling spokesman on economic issues (though Broder mentions that Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin "has assumed the role of analyst and provocateur); neither party has compelling spokesmen on the other leading issues of the day, either.

All of these are valid points, and all of them taken together mean that Tuesday's election wasn't nearly so dramatic break with the past as the talking heads, and many Republicans would have us believe. I think John Boehner had it right when he said that this wasn't so much a victory for the Republicans as the public giving them one last chance to get it right. And I think Mitch McConnell was dead wrong when he said that the most important task for the Republicans is to defeat President Obama. That's exactly the kind of thinking that could make the Republicans' gain in power very short-lived.

We live in interesting times, folks.

Catching Up with April Posting: Republicans

Is the Republican Party sticking its collective head in the gas oven? Are Republicans swallowing the tailpipe of an idling Lincoln Continental? Is the conservative movement so blinded by its hatred of the left and its own self-righteousness that it is failing to see clearly?

I would say "Yes!" to all of the above. David Frum, former Canadian, former Bush speechwriter, conservative policy wonk was apparently fired by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) for saying something like this. And Ron Radosh, in this reflection on l'affaire Frum, is singing to the same sheet music. Tactically speaking, American political parties must appeal to the broad squishy center of the political spectrum. Frum questioned Republican tactics in the healthcare debate, and he no longer works at AEI, because conservatives don't want to hear that they need to change. If they wanted to change, they wouldn't be conservatives, would they?

Next time you see a stegosaurus in the park, ask him how that refusal to change thing worked out.

(The title of this piece? It's April 4 and this is my fourth post in the month of April. Now I have to go do my daily Bible reading.)

Are We Nostalgic for 1934?

In general, people may not have a lot of fondness for 1934. It was smack in the middle of the Great Depression, and things were pretty bad. But, as Daniel Gross points out, it was better than in 1930 or 1932, and the economy was growing. So Mr. Roosevelt's party, the Democratic Party, the party of Woodrow Wilson, didn't lose seats in the House and Senate, as conventional wisdom says the president's party must in the off-year. No, the Democrats gained seats, increasing their majorities, and positioning themselves to carry out the "Second New Deal."

Can this happen again? A lot depends upon just exactly how much the numbers move between now and November, but the Republicans should beware of counting their chickens before they are hatched. Of course, it the Republicans are disappointed in the fall, think how unhappy the Tea Party patriots, Fox News, Sarah Palin, and members of various armed militias are going to be!

A Missed Opportunity?

The other evening our kitchen phone rang, and I, standing right by it, answered the call. I found myself, as so often these days, talking to a computer. In this case, the computer was programmed to have pre-recorded questions played for my enjoyment, and, depending upon my answers. This represents advances in voice recognition software we don't really appreciate because they are so often used in either intrusive or obstructive ways.

The first question the computer asked me was, "Are you a tea party patriot?"

I replied, "No."

The computer then asked me, "Do you support Sarah Palin?"

Again, I said, "No."

The computer then muttered some jargon and hung up.

Afterwards I realized that, had I responded affirmatively to either question, or to both, I would probably have been treated to additional questions. Those questions might very well have provided me some insight into matters of concern to the fringe of the Republican Party. I missed a great opportunity to learn something about the priorities and the thinking of Tea Party/Sarah Palin supporters!

I think I'll survive the disappointment.

The Republicans' Chances in 2010

The attached article from Slate's daily news summary will take you to the Wall Street Journal's piece debunking the notion that 2010 might be another 1994. Here's a direct link to the WSJ's web page.

Either way, for the nation's foremost conservative journal (The Spokane Spokesman-Review? I don't think so.) to be so pessimistic about the Republicans' chances at this point in the midterm race indicates that the GOP is in serious trouble. And who among us doubted it?

Two things really struck me in Seib's article. One is that seven of the 40 Senate Republicans, that's 17.5%, are retiring. The other is a great map showing Democratic districts in which McCain took a majority of the Presidential vote. Those districts, by and large, abut Republican areas of the country. If the Republican thinks the Democrats who hold these districts are vulnerable, I'd flip that thought over. Those Democrats ran ahead of President Obama when the Republicans had a relatively attractive candidate. They're supposed to do better with no one leading the ticket? I don't think so.

Where Is Olympia Snowe Going?

The saddest part of this article is the "good riddance" response from a conservative source. Maybe there are Republicans who think it's good for the party to run sitting office-holders out of the party, but I believe that those people have lost sight of the purpose of a political party.

Years ago, numerically-inclined political scientists figured out that you could set up a "Guttman scale" of Congressional votes, ordered from liberal to conservative, and specify just where any given member fell on that scale. For example, only the most liberal members would vote for a single-payer healthcare system, and only the most conservative would vote against the nomination of Ray LaHood for Transportation Secretary. The Republicans seem to be trying to confine their party to those few loyalists scoring a perfect "10" on that scale.

This sort of exclusion is making the Republican Party into a regional party, one whose partisans will fit the same space on the electoral map as did supporters of George Wallace and Strom Thurmond.

A while back I published an essay by Dave Drake about his feelings of having been abandoned by the Republican Party. Apparently, Olympia Snowe feels the same way.

The Failure Caucus: A Good Name

I'm back with another Moneybox column by Daniel Gross from Slate. In this column, Gross identifies a number of groups he designates as part of the "failure caucus." It is hard to believe that any Americans, especially those sworn to public service, would be so cynical, and so hard-hearted, as to want to delay economic recovery, simply in order to paint the administration as a failure.

Here's the key paragraph on the political front: "That risk is highest for the political division of the Failure Caucus. The conventional wisdom on the right holds that President Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress are setting themselves up for a big fall through their overreaching. But I'd argue that it's the Republican Party, which was always on the side of greater growth, higher stock prices, and more wealth, that has painted itself into a corner. Many Republicans opposed the initial bailouts because they were conducted by an unpopular Republican president in conjunction with a Democratic Congress. (In Todd Purdum's Vanity Fair article, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson conspicuously praises congressional Democrats and conspicuously says little about congressional Republicans.) Then they doubled down with virtually uniform opposition to the Obama stimulus bill, which had been watered down to attract Republican votes. In order for Republicans to be vindicated politically, the bailouts and the stimulus—and the economy at large—must fail. Thus considered, every positive data point, every sign of stabilization in the housing market, every rise in the S&P 500, every TARP repayment, is something of a rebuke. As the clouds part, the historic party of economic sunshine is in the strange position of praying for rain."

I think "failure caucus" is a good name for these self-interested prophets of doom, and I think it particularly appropriate that a picture of John Boehner, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, is at the top of Gross's column.

Does History Repeat Itself?

The affair that has led Senator Jon Ensign to resign his leadership post in the U.S. Senate has some uncanny similarities to a scandal that dogged Alexander Hamilton more than 200 years ago. As you will see from the accompanying article in the Washington Post, it appears that the husband of the woman with whom Ensign had the affair demanded a payoff from the Senator. Was this extortion, or was he, in effect, pimping out his wife?

The Reynolds Affair, as it was called, is described in the Wikipedia article on Alexander Hamilton:

In 1791, Hamilton became involved in an affair with Maria Reynolds that badly damaged his reputation. Reynolds' husband, James, blackmailed Hamilton for money, threatening to inform Hamilton's wife. When James Reynolds was arrested for counterfeiting, he contacted several prominent members of the Democratic-Republican Party, most notably James Monroe and Aaron Burr, touting that he could expose a top level official for corruption. When they interviewed Hamilton with their suspicions (presuming that James Reynolds could implicate Hamilton in an abuse of his position in Washington's Cabinet), Hamilton insisted he was innocent of any misconduct in public office and admitted to an affair with Maria Reynolds. Since this was not germane to Hamilton's conduct in office, Hamilton's interviewers did not publish about Reynolds. When rumors began spreading after his retirement, Hamilton published a confession of his affair, shocking his family and supporters by not merely confessing but also by narrating the affair in detail, thus injuring Hamilton's reputation for the rest of his life.
At first Hamilton accused Monroe of making his affair public, and challenged him to a duel. Aaron Burr stepped in and persuaded Hamilton that Monroe was innocent of the accusation. His well-known vitriolic temper led Hamilton to challenge several others to duels in his career.

I note, by the way, a couple of examples of bad writing in this Wikipedia article. "Touting that" is not an expression that works. "Claiming that" or "asserting that" would be better. Also, the phrase "did not publish about," is awkward. Publish usually takes an object, as in "did not publish the information they possessed about him."

In any event, Ensign has provided yet another example of the hypocrisy that seems to be rife in the Republican party. Hypocrisy, it has been said, is the tribute vice pays to virtues. The Republicans, it appears, can praise virtue; they just don't know how to practice it.

Se Habla Espanol?

Here is how Ruben Navarette, Jr., sees the Republican loss of Hispanic support in 2008.

Specifically, there are five things that Republicans did which cost them Hispanic support.

They made language and culture the issue rather than illegality, which irked U.S.-born Hispanics who might otherwise have stayed out of the fray;

They didn’t condemn the racism in their ranks on the part of those who believe that Hispanic immigrants are inferior to the immigrants of old;

They let the debate digress from one that was anti-illegal immigration to one that was anti-immigrant to, finally, one that was anti-Hispanic;

They fell into the trap of offering simple solutions to what remains a complicated problem; and

They either assumed that Hispanics were not in play or that they could win some of those votes on the cheap with a spattering of Spanish ads.

Yes, indeed, Ruben, the Republican Party needs to be more open and welcoming. But as long as they think that nominating people like Sarah Palin is a good idea, I'm not holding my breath. I don't associate a pit bull with lipstick with a big, sincere, welcome sign. More like, "Beware of Dog!"

But Mr. Navarette makes one important point. In 2004, John Kerry did as badly among Hispanics as any Democrat since they started tracking these figures. It would be unwise of any party to take the Hispanic vote for granted. Moreover, it would be unwise for any party or candidate to treat the Hispanic vote as a unitary bloc. As this country's largest minority, Hispanics are going to swing elections for years to come. But they don't all swing the same way.

Did the Right Do Itself In?

John Hawkins asserts that conservatives are largely to blame for the defeat of their positions, and their candidates, in the November elections. His take is that conservatives didn't stand up and complain soon enough, or effectively enough, when President Bush and the Republican Congress went for non-conservative programs. In fine, he says, liberals are more passionate about their causes than conservatives are about theirs. Conservatives need to take to heart the old slogan: We work harder.

I'll agree with part of that diagnosis. Certainly conservatives were not all fired up for John McCain, and the Republicans in Congress took a beating, too. Hawkins also notes that tax cuts don't play well when about a third of the electorate are already exempt from Federal income taxes. He mentions that sniping at Democratic health care plans is insufficient. These examples make a different, more important point, than lack of conservative verve. As I have often said, "enthusiasm is no substitute for competence."

I think there are lots of passionate conservatives out there. The problem is that their passions blind them to the fact that no one shares their concerns. Take abortion - please. The five people in the United States who think that abortion is a very important issue are as passionate as all hell about it, but very few other people are willing to vote for or against a candidate solely on the basis of his or her views on abortion. Similarly, the people who think that the Second Amendment is the sole bulwark against our government in Washington painting the capitol red and becoming the second Kremlin are really excited about that issue, especially when they're off their meds. But who else cares?

The real problem with the conservative "movement" is that it isn't a movement at all; it's an agglomeration of little groups of people who are very concerned about these niche issues. They're passionate, all right, but they're too much like the man who leapt upon his horse and rode off in all directions. The reason a lot of people miss the old Republican party, the party of Dwight Eisenhower, is that it focussed on issues of real importance and broad interest. Sound fiscal policy, a strong national defense, development of the national infrastructure, and a rational tax policy benefit everyone, even those who don't support those things at a given time. That party was capable of turning into a majority whenever its prime issues gained some salience with the electorate. The current edition is drifting off into membership in the tin-hat league.

The Republican Future

I just posted here an article by David Drake, author of Hammer's Slammers, Lord of the Isles, and Some Golden Harbor, as well as many other science fiction and fantasy novels. Dave is a terrific writer, and I've known him for many years. But that's not why I posted his reflections on the Republican Party. Dave's writing skills make the article a pleasure to read, but the main reason I wanted to post Dave's piece is that it expresses so well my own feelings, and those of a lot of other former Republicans.

In the movie A River Runs through It, the narrator notes that his father, a Presbyterian minister, used to say that Methodists were Baptists who could read. (By the way, as far as I can tell, the line does not appear in the story on which the movie was based.) For some years now, I have referred to myself as a Republican who can read. This was my way of distinguishing myself from the ignorant, superstitious, anti-intellectuals who have come to dominate the Republican Party.

In the history of American politics, stupidity has not been a monopoly of the Republican Party. In fact, for most of the twentieth century, the center of ignorance and superstition was the Southern Democratic party. The Democrats, after all, nominated William Jennings Bryan for President, and were represented in Congress by such paragons as Theodore Bilbo, Huey Long, and James Eastland. It was the movement of white southern Democrats to the Republican party in the wake of the civil rights revolution that transformed the GOP into the party of medieval superstition. Oddly enough, it was Richard Nixon, that most intellectual of Republican Presidents, who decided to exploit the disaffection of southerners from the Democratic Party.

In the wake of Barack Obama's victory, the Republican Party has some serious decisions to make. The GOP may be on the path to permanent minority and irrelevance trodden by the Federalists and the Whigs. Avoiding that dead end road will require good decisions - decisions of a quality we can't expect from Sarah Palin and her ilk.

What Have They Done with My Party?

The title comes from the question plaintively asked some months before the 2008 presidential election by a friend who's a businessman. Like me he's well on the wrong side of Fifty, and like me he was raised a Republican. I think we'd both describe ourselves as conservatives (note the small c).
Max Hastings, a right-wing British journalist, put it in a slightly different fashion when he noted during the campaign (I'm paraphrasing) that the Republicans had become the party of the poorly educated, superstitious, and rural. You only have to listen to one of Sarah Palin's campaign speeches to see that he has a point.
The Republican Party my friend and I identified with was the party of business. Republicans were neither exciting nor cuddly, but you could trust the economy to them and expect them to avoid foreign military adventures. We liked Ike.
In 1983 I became rewrite man for Newt Gingrich on the book which became Window of Opportunity. Newt is a very smart, very dynamic man; working with him was both an honor and an education.
In the course of our first meeting, Newt told me that he was going to engineer a Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Thank goodness I didn't say, "Right, and pigs will fly," but I certainly thought it. I was colossally ignorant, though in 1983 most people would have agreed with me. The only smart thing I did during the exchange was to keep my mouth shut.
Newt continued to work from within to change the Republicans from a party of the elite and privileged (people like me, not to put too fine a point on it) into a real populist movement. In 1994 he achieved his end: Republicans took control of the House.
There has been quite a lot of movement since then, but not--from the vantage of hindsight--a great deal of progress. The House Republicans didn't seem to know what to do with their victory. Newt himself left the House and elective politics. His economic mantra had been, "Reduce the national debt." His majority spiraled into a wasteland of tax cuts and deficit spending.
The populist majority fell away, not so much in anger as boredom. Quite a lot of people dislike Bill Clinton, but very few would say that it was worth shutting down the government of the United States to delve into his sex life.
What remained isn't the Republican Party of Eisenhower (or Dewey and Taft): it's a populist fringe. It certainly represents a significant portion of the citizens of the United States, just as the Taliban represents a significant portion of the citizens of Afghanistan, but it isn't the business party, the Safe Hands party.
It's a party which has turned away from people like me and my businessman friend. And, though he worked with the fringes too in putting together his majority, I believe it's a party which is equally alien to Newt Gingrich,.
It's a shame. I still like Ike.

Dave Drake

The Nominee at Play

Last night on Washington Week in Review (PBS), Jeanne Cummings commented that she didn't think any questions about Sarah Palin's life were off limits. After all, Governor Palin had been offered, and had accepted, a position with the potential to make her President of the United States in the near future, and we know very little about her. We need to know as much about Governor Palin as possible, especially considering that her running mate, Senator McCain is 72 years old, and that her career has been short* and in a rather obscure part of the country.

The image above is one which the Governor obviously enjoyed having captured. One presumes this is one of the ways in which she likes to be seen. In any event, it may be useful for all of us in considering how we want to vote in November.

*Governor Palin has held statewide office for even less time than Senator Obama.