These are characters from a by-gone age. An age when character and principle mattered, and men staked their reputations and careers on it. An age foreign to the one we find ourselves in. An age when Republicans lived up to the meaning of their party. When did it go wrong? When did the change occur? How did we come to a point when Republicans would be racing to catch-up to the big spending, government expanding, truth-denying recklessness that the Democrats arrived at with the onset of the Obama Age.
By the time President George W. Bush muttered at a press conference, in the midst of the 2008 economic cataclysm, "I'm abandoning free-market principles in order to save the free market system" the metamorphosis was complete. The most prominent leader of the Republican party, the president of the United States himself, had reached a moment when he no longer understood the principles he represented.
Following the defeat of presidential aspirant Mitt Romney in November 2012, conservative nationally-syndicating radio talk show host Erick Erickson mused that the Republican party had steadily abandoned every one of its economic principles over the span of the Bush and Obama presidencies. The last principle to fall was low tax rates, deceased January 2013, by the leadership of the House speaker, John Boehner.
The fact most Republicans prefer to forget is, the worse fiscal and monetary policies of the Obama administration had precedent in the Bush era. Under George W. Bush, the public became accustomed to speaking of the national debt in terms of trillions. It was Bush who continued Clinton's policy of using the Federal Reserve to force the nation's lenders to make loan requirements too easy for incompetent applicants to qualify for mortgages. Therefore, it was Bush (Obama never tires of reminding us) who set the stage for the economic meltdown the American people have yet to free themselves from.
The Republican party has faced defeat and humiliation in three of the last four election cycles. They lost control of the Congress in 2006 and the presidency in 2008. They regained rule of the House of Representatives in 2010, thanks to the enthusiasm for fiscal conservatism generated by the Tea Party movement. The GOP failed to regain the Senate and the presidency in 2012, and have blamed everyone else but their own party for it: Mitt Romney; Richard Mourdock; Todd Akin; the Tea Party; the meanness of the Obama campaign; the media, and finally, the American people themselves, who have become so selfish, any candidate who doesn't shower them with financial entitlements can no longer be electable. Rush Limbaugh summed up the attitude thus, "It's hard to beat Santa Clause."
In defeat, the GOP's infighting has intensified. Fiscal conservatives were purged from key committees during the last "Fiscal Cliff" battle. Presently, social conservatives feel they are against the wall as Libertarians are painting them with the Mourdock and Akin brush. The latest act of schism has the establishment moving to neutralized the influence of the Tea Party movement.
A new body, the Conservative Victory Project has been launched by prominent Republican party donors and has the backing of such Republican lions as Karl Rove. The group has been created with the expressed purpose of protecting Republican incumbents from primary challenges in 2014.
The only Republicans to face primary challenges in the last four years have been fixtures of the establishment like six-term Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, who enthusiastically went along with Obama's auto bailouts, among other fiscal blunders. Lugar was defeated by primary challenger Richard Mourdock, whose candidacy was flushed down the drain in October 2012, when he made a comment plausibly twisted into "God intended women to be raped." Meanwhile, another Republican challenger destroyed his bid for a Missouri senate seat with his own pro-life explanation which ended up in "the female body" when raped "has a way of shutting down" to prevent pregnancy.
Since the Republican establishment's primary challenges have lately come from Tea Party-backed candidates (i.e. ones who are serious about fiscal responsibility, constitutionally-limited government, and free markets), the best educated guess is, the Karl Rove-backed group is out to neutralize the influence of the Tea Party in primary challenges of Republican incumbents in the 2014 midterm elections.
To target the Tea Party as the culprit behind the failure of Republicans in 2012 shows a party as unwilling to take responsibility for its own mistakes as the Obama Democrat leadership currently ruling two-thirds of the American Government. Akin and Mourdock had Tea Party backing, but they were Republican-approved candidates.
The truth is, the Republican party performed poorly in the 2012 elections because its leaders and aspirant leaders failed to launch campaigns reflecting 21st century circumstances. Even worse, since the election, Republican House and Senate leaders have shown themselves out of touch with the principles for which they claim to stand, and unwilling to take a stand on solutions they know to be ones the country desperately needs.
On election night 2012, after learning his party would retain control of the House of Representatives, House Speaker Boehner declared there was "no mandate for tax hikes." Less than two months later, Boehner supported a bill that raised income and investment tax rates on every American earning over 200,000 a year, and the Social Security tax of every single American drawing a paycheck.
The 151 House Republicans who voted against the Boehner betrayal were no match for the Boehner House coalition of ALL Democrats and several dozen Republicans. All the same, Boehner was overwhelmingly re-elected by his party to continue representing the American people in the House of Representatives. Senate Republicans such as Georgia's Saxby Chambliss and a host of others followed Boehner's lead and voted for passage of the 2013 tax hikes in the U.S. Senate.
Thus we have come to the point in which the 21st century Republican leadership in both the presidency (under Bush) and in the U.S. Congress has miserably failed the American people in its promise to deliver sound governance. Still, Karl Rove persists in his pretensions of electoral expertise, despite the fact that he has grossly misjudged the public pulse in the elections since 2006.
Until then, Rove was hailed as "Bush's Brain", a brilliant wizard who knew what it took to win. His reputation was based on helping George W. Bush's success, first in the Texas governorship in the 1990's, and later, in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 (assuming we forget Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 and won re-election in 2004 by the slimmest margin of any second term president).
The reason Rove did well for Republican success in the 1990's and early 2000's is because he was the last beneficiary of the Atwater playbook in Republican politics. Lee Atwater was a student of Nixon's campaign strategy and the brain behind George H.W. Bush's win of the presidency in 1988. The Atwater playbook worked well in the late 20th century, when the American electorate was overwhelmingly center-right.
To paraphrase, the Atwater playbook went like this,
Attack your opponent's character and record in all the ways it shows vulnerability. The American people will see your opponent as unfit for the office he seeks. Therefore, you've won.
The Atwater playbook succeeded in destroying the presidential candidacies of Democrats Michael Dukakis (in 1988, with the Willie Horton add, showing the governor as a man who furloughs convicted murderers to roam the streets for prey before returning back to the slammer after committing another atrocity) and of John Kerry (in 2004, with the swiftboat adds, displaying the senator's Vietnam comrades telling Americans of how Kerry disgraced the service with his anti-war rhetoric in the early 70's).
Despite its effectiveness in the 20th century, the Atwater playbook collapsed for Republicans in the midterm elections of 2006, and has failed ever since, in part because the Democrats have stolen the playbook, used it for their own benefit, and have used a sycophantic media as a shield to block Republicans from making effective use of it. In doing so, the Democrats discovered a critical weakness in the Atwater playbook, mainly that it is heavy on offense and poor on defense.
In 2012, Barack Obama let the media take care of his defense while he smeared Republicans as wanting "dirtier air and dirtier water" and "for kids with Down's syndrome to fend for themselves." Mitt Romney took the blows to his record as an uncaring, vulture capitalist, and put up little defense of his Bain Capital record, which was on the whole a success in business management and job creation.
The bottom line is, the Republican party could afford to win elections by destroying opponents so long as America had a center-right electorate. That meant, from the Nixon era to the early 21st century (excepting the Watergate election of 1976 and the third party split of 1992) the Republicans could count on an electorate largely in agreement with its style of governance.
With tax breaks for job creators and strong defense policies, Republicans held the confidence of investors and wage earners alike. But beginning with the ruinous fiscal policies of the Bush presidency and ending with the disgraceful tax policies of the Boehner House of Representatives, the Republican party had abandoned its core free market principles, acquiesced in the catastrophic fiscal and tax policies of the Obama administration, and now finds itself looking like a party of hypocrites. This state of affairs looks discouraging for a GOP hoping for an electoral comeback in 2014 and 2016.
Meanwhile, a new generation of voters, with no memory of Reagan's peace and prosperity, or the collapse of Soviet-style big governance in the world, came of age under the shadow of war and joblessness. In their suffering, their hopes and fears were opened to whichever candidate promised something different.That's the reason the American people brought Barack Obama to power.
Tragically, his rule has done nothing to satisfy their hopes. Their ears are open for a new message from a new messenger, but they haven't heard it from Republicans, and they haven't seen it in the actions of Republican leaders in the highest echelons of power. All they've seen is duplicity, hypocrisy, incompetence, and corruption.
Voters under the age of forty have no first-hand recollection of Republican-led prosperity, but they've experienced Republican-led failure. An eighteen year-old voter in 2012 was born in 1994, and turned fourteen when Barack Obama became president. Should the GOP assume these voters know and understand the Republican plan for restoring America to its former greatness?
If not, the case for fiscal responsibility, constitutionally-limited government, and free markets, was not made by Republican candidates for the presidency and the congress in 2012. If Mourdock and Akin made the case, they destroyed themselves by stepping into the morass of social issues that has sucked-down conservative reputations for as long as anyone can remember. Rick Santorum made a principled stand on traditional marriage and the supposed social harm of contraception, but he ignored the U.S. Constitution when explaining how he would change Washington.
Mitt Romney campaigned as an economic manager, who would steer the country to safer waters, but he put little effort into explaining
- how and why free markets were the only road to prosperity;
- how the current administration has shredded constitutionally-limited government and why freedom itself demands a return to constitutional principles;
- how the Obama government continues to push the national debt up to catastrophic levels and what Romney would do to defuse this ticking debt bomb.
Much hindsight attention has focused on Mitt Romney's failure to explain his candidacy to Hispanic voters. The real failure is Romney's lack of explaining his candidacy to ANY voters. Instead, he invited us to consider his portfolio as a job creating C.E.O. The American people do not want to see portfolios. We want leaders who will speak to us.
The 21st century Republican party is an elephant in quicksand, writhing and reacting to the pressures squeezing it from all sides. Each reaction only strengthens the vortex sucking it downward, to oblivion. The only way out for the GOP is to be proactive rather than reactive.
Instead of waiting for President Obama and Senate Leader Reid to make the first move, and then react to it, the Boehner House could take the bull by the horns and pass bills reflecting the principles Republicans stand for, dare the opposition to veto it, and broadcast their case for reform directly to the American people. In this way, the GOP could set the terms of public debate the way the Gingrich House did in the Clinton era.
The American people are inspired by courage not puny, pathetic whining about how Americans failed to deliver their votes in the last election. The American people are sick to death of the lies, the hypocrisy, the infighting, and the buck passing the GOP has displayed for us in recent years. The American people crave honest government. This means the GOP must clean up its act in a hurry if Republicans want to win in 2014.
In spite of everything working against it, the Republican party has a treasure-trove of political and economic principles that have been historically verified with success. In all the years America had a vibrant democracy and a booming economy, it was fiscal responsibility, constitutionally-limited government, and free markets that drove the engines of the pursuit of happiness.
Democrats understood this as well. Long before Reagan, President Kennedy cut tax rates after being advised by a British official that high taxes hurt an economy, and therefore, starve a government of revenue. After Reagan, President Clinton recognized a balanced budget was crucial for a government to live within its means and strengthen its credit in the world economy. All along, this case had already been made by nearly every Republican of prominence in the 20th century.
21st century circumstances demand a GOP that is willing to return to its core principles in word and deed. This party must enthusiastically explain these principles to an uninitiated American electorate. Only then, will the elephant emerge from the quicksand and restore America to its place as a shining city on a hill.
Patriot Thought
