Political Commentary

Are The Republicans Ready To Govern?

9 Comments

Probably not:

In the normal course of politics, after a party has its clock cleaned as badly as Republicans did in 2008, the losers go off to recover — off to the desert — while the winners go on to govern. For the defeated, regaining the political momentum can take years.

Normally, we should be in the early stages of that process. Instead, it appears that Republicans are about to retake one, and perhaps both, houses of Congress. The normal cycle of defeat and renewal has been speeded up considerably.

Why? Because Democrats have been screwing up faster than Republicans can recover. The GOP might not be fully ready to govern, but voters are increasingly convinced that Democrats don’t deserve to. The Democrats’ willful defiance of the public’s wishes on Obamacare, on federal spending, and on other government-expanding initiatives has changed voters’ priorities. In the urgency of the moment, throwing Democrats out is more important than determining whether Republicans are fully ready to take control.

Yup. At least we can hope that they’ll stop digging. It would be disastrous to allow the current reign of Democrat insanity to continue.

[Update a while later]

The tea started brewing under Bush:

If the Democrats had properly understood the Tea Party movement, and if they had seen the water coming to a low boil during the Bush administration, they might have avoided their present fate. There are two steps to their misunderstanding of the Tea Party. First, the Bush administration was wrongly viewed as thoroughly and quintessentially conservative. Second, the public’s eventual rejection of the Bush administration was viewed as a repudiation of conservatism and a fundamental political realignment of the electorate (perhaps even the basis of a permanent Democratic majority in “America the liberal”). The important point is this: many who now comprise the Tea Party were not Bush die-hards, but disapproved or largely disapproved of the Bush administration’s big-government tendencies. Of course small-government conservatives and independents, when Obama took those tendencies and magnified them threefold, went from frustration to outrage.

To take the first point, President Bush was alternately viewed as a scheming arch-conservative or else a congenial dunce manipulated by scheming arch-conservatives. In his famed “Case for Bush Hatred” in 2003, Jonathan Chait (in spite of the fact that Bush had increased government spending in his first three years at a rate unseen since Lyndon B. Johnson) wrote that “Bush would like to roll back the federal government’s spending to something resembling its pre-New Deal state.” James Traub concurred in the New York Times magazine, writing that “today’s Republican party is arguably the most extreme — the furthest from the center — of any governing majority in the nation’s history.” Examples could be added, but anyone who remembers the Bush administration will surely recall that he was painted as conservatism’s avatar.

The point is not exactly that President Bush was not a conservative, but that his administration precipitated a crisis of conservative identity within the Republican coalition. While Bush could identify with conservatives culturally from Kennebunk to Crawford, and while his judicial appointments and stances on ethical issues gave conservatives reason to support him, he took an activist view of government in the foreign sphere, leveraging the American military to transform the world order in pursuit of democracy, and in the domestic sphere, leveraging the American government to transform the social order in pursuit of conservative virtues.

When Governor Bush articulated his vision for “compassionate conservatism” at a speech to the Manhattan Institute in 1999, he rejected the typical Republican “disdain for government,” and sided with Benjamin Franklin, arguing that “the general opinion of the goodness of government” is foundational to America. The government must concern itself with the “human problems that persist in the shadow of affluence,” and conservative ideals should be utilized in the interest of “greater justice, less suffering, more opportunity.” Bush even criticized the Republican-controlled Congress for “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.”

It’s ironic that the Democrats were done in by their Bush derangement.

9 thoughts on “Are The Republicans Ready To Govern?”

  1. Bush was no friend of civil liberties, had no trouble with big government (and making it bigger), was too fond of foreign intervention, and was in no way a free market conservative or “The Great Deregulator.” Few want all that to return (much of it hasn’t left yet, of course as Obama could easily be labeled as Bush 2.0).

    One serious problem for the Democrats today is that they’ve lost the understanding they had in the 90s that America is essentially pragmatic and center-right and won’t tolerate crazy schemes or hard lurches to the left. Throwing caution to the wind and going extra crazy is going to cost them big. And the usual claims that the GOP loves the rich, is racist, and exercises some sort of free market excess when in office rings especially hollow right now.

  2. One serious problem for the Democrats today is that they’ve lost the understanding they had in the 90s that America is essentially pragmatic and center-right and won’t tolerate crazy schemes or hard lurches to the left.

    What hard lurches? Obamacare is what the Heritage Foundation was proposing in the 90s, and what Romney passed in Massachusetts. The problem isn’t that the Democrats has moved left, it’s that the GOP is moving right faster than the Dems (or many GOP politicians) can follow.

  4. it’s that the GOP is moving right faster than the Dems (or many GOP politicians) can follow

    No. We the people have decided they can’t just live their lives knowing other will curb their stupidity. They are now involved (but not all of them, that will come later.) Self education is the key. The tea party hasn’t even gotten started yet.

  5. What hard lurches? Obamacare is what the Heritage Foundation was proposing in the 90s, and what Romney passed in Massachusetts. The problem isn’t that the Democrats has moved left, it’s that the GOP is moving right faster than the Dems (or many GOP politicians) can follow.

    What Romney passed qualifies more as a crazy scheme than a hard left lurch. It was tried, it was already failing hard when Obamacare went through.

    Jim, cite the Heritage Foundation example so we can compare it to Obamacare. I’ve heard these sorts of claims before, but I have yet to see anyone compare Obamacare matches with these alleged plans of the 90s.

  6. Jim, cite the Heritage Foundation example so we can compare it to Obamacare.

    An excerpt from Hugh Hewitt’s Romney book:

    This brilliant bit of legislating was born from a partnering between Romney and his policy team with the conservative Heritage Foundation. Put simply, the problem of the uninsured is a problem for everyone, as the uninsured still consume health care and the costs of that care must be covered from somewhere, usually general fund tax revenues and in the form of higher premiums assessing the covered population.

    Of the approximately half-million uninsured in the Commonwealth as 2006 opened, however, about 200,000 were healthy ‘risk takers’ who preferred spending dollars on Red Sox tickets or good and services other than premiums for health care insurance that they figured they probably wouldn’t need until pregnancy or their middle years arrived.

    What Romney and Heritage discovered is that in fact thousands of these risk-takers end up needing health care, and of the expensive sort. They don’t have insurance, so the state and the medical care providers eat the costs, which means the taxpayers and/or premium payers eventually get the bills.

    To this group of people who are able to insure themselves but unwilling to do so, the Romney plan gives no choice but lost of encouragement: beginning in January of 2008, they must either insure themselves or be subject to a costly fine. There are provisions the assist in making insurance plans widely known and some common purchasing power deployed as well, but it is primarily a stick that is wielded in their direction.

  8. And here’s a comparison of ObamaCare to the 1993 GOP response to HillaryCare, which was based on Heritage Foundation work. Over the following 17 years the Dems adopted almost all of the 1993 GOP proposal.

  9. Jerry Pournelle said this first I think; that the only problem with chucking out the Nuts is that you end up with the Creeps instead. Neither group gives a s**t about the people they are elected to serve.

    Unfortunately the only way to avoid this is to get involved in politics – and most people would rather watch soaps, brainless action movies and/or football games than go to political meetings. So the only people who do the latter are those who are going to get something for themselves because of it.

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