Posted on 12/14/2006 8:37:44 PM PST by neverdem
The Republicans handed libertarian votes--and the elections--over to the Democrats.
At the Democrats’ official election night party in Washington, D.C., all eyes were on Florida—for about 10 seconds. At 8 p.m. network exit polls confirmed that Rep. Katherine Harris, for this crowd the arch-villain of the 2000 election, was lopsidedly losing her bid for a Senate seat. The partygoers cheered the news. Then they turned their attention to races that carried at least a whiff of suspense.
They shouldn’t have dismissed Florida so quickly. Less than two years earlier, the Sunshine State had shown the first symptoms of the malady that would defeat the GOP in races from California to New Hampshire. Republicans had convinced themselves that socially conservative “values voters” were the key to maintaining and extending their power. It was in Florida that the strategy started to crumble, reminding any politician who cared to listen that a lot of voters just want the government to leave them alone.
The town of Pinellas Park, not far from Harris’ old House district, contains the hospice where Terri Schiavo died. The battle between the brain-damaged woman’s parents, who wanted to keep her on life support, and her husband, who wanted to remove it, had bubbled up into Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature before. But in March 2005, emboldened by the GOP’s 2004 victories, Tom DeLay’s House and Bill Frist’s Senate elbowed into the controversy. President Bush broke off a stint in Crawford, Texas, to sign emergency legislation to keep the feeding tube attached.
It was one of the worst political miscalculations of the decade. Immediately after the Schiavo push, approval numbers for Bush and his party started to plummet. Polls showed not just Democrats but Republicans and independents opposed to the Schiavo intervention. Republicans responded by assuming the polls were wrong. The country had re-elected them, hadn’t it? Of course voters were foursquare behind the idea of legislatively re-attaching a feeding tube to a brain-dead woman.
The president’s ratings reeled into the 40s, then the 30s, and never really recovered. The numbers for the GOP Congress fell even further. And on election night, voters turned out the most socially conservative Congress in decades while taking a two-by-four to socially conservative initiatives in the states. A ban on all abortions was defeated in South Dakota. Missouri legalized stem cell research. And while seven states passed gay marriage bans, Arizona became the first state ever to reject one. In most of the states where the bans did pass—South Carolina and Idaho being the exceptions—voters elected Democrats to major statewide offices anyway. The ballyhooed effect of gay marriage bans on conservative turnout, credited by some for George W. Bush’s 2004 victory in Ohio, fell utterly flat.
These defeats wouldn’t have come as a surprise if not for the consensus, minted hours after the 2004 polls closed, that Republicans were building a permanent majority on the backs of conservative evangelicals. The TV networks’ exit poll showed 22 percent of voters naming “moral values” as the key to their ballots. In the hands of a Republican caucus defined by the born-again Tom DeLay in the House and the big-government conservative Rick Santorum in the Senate, this was a mandate; it encouraged them to indulge their invasiveness on privacy and other civil liberties issues. The party didn’t just support national ID cards and warrantless wiretaps. With impunity, it campaigned against Democrats for opposing those measures.
Early in the 2006 cycle, Democrats spotted the opening they’d been given. They recruited candidates for every Republican seat in districts that had voted for John Kerry over George W. Bush, and they started to criticize the conduct, and sometimes the very fact, of the Iraq war. They got multiple adrenaline boosts from the GOP’s scandals, starting with the corruption allegations against DeLay, which the leadership took pains to overlook until he was actually indicted. They maintained leads as the incumbents cupped their hands over their eyes and ears and refused to consider any shifts in their approach to Iraq.
That strategy ended on November 7, with the defeat of many hot-button ballot measures and with heavy losses in House, Senate, and state races. The liberal Northeast was scrubbed almost clean of Republicans: From Pennsylvania through Maine, the Democrats picked up nine or 10 House seats. (At press time, one race in Connecticut was going to a recount.) And the rout continued in the Midwest and the Plains. Four years earlier Kansas had elected an ultra-conservative attorney general named Phill Kline, who used the power of his office to snoop into the medical records of patients at abortion clinics. He was crushed, 58 percent to 42 percent, by a Republican who switched parties to challenge him. And while Kline went down, Republicans lost an eastern Kansas House seat in a district that had voted for Bush over Kerry by 20 points.
There were lessons in the races the Republicans did win too. In the Mountain West, Republican candidates had their margins slashed dramatically. Idaho’s 1st District, which gave Bush 70 percent of its vote, handed only 50 percent to a doctrinaire conservative. Wyoming’s sole House seat gave its Republican incumbent a win by less than 1 percentage point. In state after state, Republican support plunged.
“The libertarian West,” Hotline Editor Chuck Todd wrote in a post-election column, “is a region that is more up for grabs than it should be. And it’s because the Republican Party has grown more religious and more pro-government, which turns off these ‘leave me alone,’ small-government libertarian Republicans.”
The decline isn’t entirely the Republicans’ fault. They just created an opening for their opponents to exploit. The Democrats in the libertarian West, tenderized by the wipeouts of the 1990s, reassessed their positions on the Second Amendment, public land, and taxes, and reintroduced themselves to voters. In the Bush years, they gave stronger support to civil liberties than most of their Republican competitors. At one Montana debate, GOP Sen. Conrad Burns lambasted Democrat Jon Tester for wanting to “weaken” the PATRIOT Act. Tester shot back that he didn’t want to weaken it: “I want to repeal it.” Tester won the election.
Of course, the PATRIOT Act isn’t a “social issue.” That’s part of the point. The Bush-Rove iteration of the Republican Party, with its tight focus on social issues and its coordination with religious groups to turn out votes, fell dramatically short with an electorate for whom other subjects had more salience. In future elections, that skeptical segment of the country will only grow larger. The libertarian states of Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada are growing as the Deep South and the Rust Belt stagnate. And young professionals in Republican killing fields like Virginia and Ohio are getting more socially liberal, not less.
Election-night spinners tried to argue that the new congressional class consists of “conservative Democrats.” But while the newly elected Democrats include several relatively libertarian supporters of the Second Amendment, even their most conservative members, such as Pennsylvania’s senator-elect Bob Casey Jr., support the morning-after pill and some stem cell research.
The GOP’s fundamentalist myopia, combined with its sorry record on spending and corruption, has made Grover Norquist’s “Leave Us Alone Coalition” a bloc that’s up for grabs. In Norquist’s formulation, the coalition includes “taxpayers who want the government to reduce the tax burden, property owners, farmers, and homeowners who want their property rights respected.” Voters like these are now willing to entertain alternatives to a Southern-dominated, religious GOP.
They proved that in Pennsylvania, where Casey felled Rick Santorum—the only senator who actually flew down to Florida to join the Pinellas Park circus—in an 18-point landslide. On Election Day, the Philadelphia Inquirer found a voter willing to explain why Santorum lost. “I don’t know what happened to him,” said Roby Lentz, a Republican. “He quit representing me when he showed up at Terri Schiavo’s bedside.”
David Weigel (dweigel@reason.com) is an assistant editor of Reason.
The article is wishful thinking.
The bottom line is that the democrats had to pretend to be conservatives to get their (as Sen. Johnson proves) their razor thin majority.
Registered Libertarians are just useful idiots for the left whether they do it knowingly or not.
"I don't think it's a big deal for libertarians to let us social conservatives have a few things while they get what they want."
There were more than a "few things" on that list that qualify as conservative issues, and the fact that not all of them do, and that some may even be considered "other than conservative" means that the administration was accomplishing things for all facets of the GOP membership.
A Republican administration is a coalition made up of social conservatives, economic conservatives, evangelicals, neocons, libertarians, neolibertarians, moderates, paleocons, and even some Democrats; I may have missed a few. To think that this coalition exists for the sole purpose of fulfilling the agenda of one segment of it at the expense of the rest is very short-sighted, and even downright naive.
No individual segment of that coalition can muster enough votes to elect enough of their own, at enough levels of government to advance their cause and their cause alone...we all need one another, so once elected, every segment of that coalition deserves its due from the people they helped elect.
Yes, politicians work for the people who put them in office...they work for all the social conservatives, economic conservatives, evangelicals, neocons, libertarians, neolibertarians, moderates, paleocons, and even Democrats who voted for them, but that's not the whole picture.
Once elected, they work for even those Americans who DIDN'T vote for them.
How presumptuous of you to assume you know the heart of every politician who spoke out on behalf of Terri. Just because many may ultimately cater and pander and serve their own interests doesn't mean that many are not trying to cater and pander and serve someone who really is in jeopardy of dying.
The Schiavo incident was a debacle because it was a pre-ordained defeat. It didn't enliven "values voters"; quite to the contrary ...
Just to let you know: Not everything done on the Hill is enacted w/an ulterior motive--a political maneuver geared to "enliven" or deaden a certain segment of the base. Just because we think "it happens all the time" doesn't equate to happening all the time w/every representative.
pre-ordained defeat
Hey, that's life, and that's death. Your life by mortician standards is a "pre-ordained defeat." So should nobody do anything on your behalf? You're a "lost cause," anyway? What a cynical view.
Every abortion that happens is a "pre-ordained defeat," eh? So give up trying to protect the next generation? Just designate the womb and hospital rooms with so-called human vegetables as kill-free zones?
ndt wrote: "A perfect example of the distain (sic) for freedom that has grown in the GOP and as I said before, note that he/she appears to be a "values voter"."
I reread post #20. Libertarians aren't supposed to be anarchists. If you believe individual freedom trumps everything else, then you are more properly classified as an anarchist. In that case, I agree social conservatives have disdain for your position. OTOH, if you are libertarian, then you have more in common with social conservatives than Democrats. Can you imagine any of them actually reducing the size of government? I can't.
The Democrats might give you greater liberty to have homosexual sex or kill the unborn, but even if you support these supposed "freedoms," be prepared to be told what to eat (no trans fat, you know), stop smoking (uh, tobacco is EVIL), turn in your guns (you don't need those, we'll protect you), surrender your SUV (SUVs are EVIL), give up your job (sorry, can't afford to hire you with all the new regulations, minimum wage increases, and mandatory medical insurance), sacrifice control over your private property (can't have you digging there, that's a wetland), and hand over your paycheck (wouldn't be fair for you to have more than anyone else).
And since you could never in a million years prove that, what does that make you? A sucker of the MSM, right!
If you're talking about Fred Phelps, then you're not even dealing with somebody who would identify as Republican. Phelps was a rather large supporter of Democrats. The whole movement he leads is a ruse to turn people away from the so-called "religious right", and their pseudo-identification with Republicans.
Luis Gonzalez wrote: "To think that this coalition exists for the sole purpose of fulfilling the agenda of one segment of it at the expense of the rest is very short-sighted, and even downright naive."
I certainly agree. That WOULD be short-sighted and naive, but who are you talking about? It reads like a straw man argument to me.
Luis Gonzalez wrote: "Once elected, they work for even those Americans who DIDN'T vote for them."
Theoretically, I suppose that's true. Do you really, seriously think politicians see it the same way? I'm sure Nancy Pelosi will now support restrictions on abortion, since, as speaker, she serves both red and blue states.
"Are you serious? The topic was freedom of religious speech. You want to see that squelched? Are you a fan of "hate speech" legislation, because that is exactly what was being proposed."
Huh? The topic was values voters versus libertarian and social moderate/fiscal conservative elements in the Republican Party. Perhaps I misread your previous post. I was only trying to point out "libertarian" doesn't mean you believe individual freedom trumps all else. Hate crime legislation? That's brought to you by those great champions of individual liberty--the Democrats.
I don't disagree with you. I would just point out that the Republican leadership tended to betray the social conservatives as well as the fiscal conservatives.
The media constantly try to split the conservative movement, and they do a pretty good job of it. It's not the fault of religious conservatives that Bush was a big spender. It's the fault of the Republican leadership and the RINOs. Karl Rove, among others, I'm sorry to say. It can't be stopped unless the whole conservative movement unites on the points they have in common. Their bottom lines are not incompatible.
Strange that they can only ever garner 1-2% of the vote in any given election....
I don't disagree with you. I think both fiscal conservatives and social conservatives need to work together on these problems. Stuff like building up the Department of Education and adding prescription medicaid was absolutely insane, from any rational point of view.
A social conservative should agree that the worst place to put responsibility for the education of our children is in a massive and unaccountable federal bureaucracy. The Catholic bishops, who seem to support this sort of thing, should be re-educated in the Catholic principle of subsidiarity: that things should be done as much as possible on the local level.
ndt wrote: "No attempt to tell me what the GOP is going to do for me, only that I should be afraid to the democrats."
If you are trying to make the point Republicans lost because they didn't articulate why they are the better party, I can agree with that. However, I think I already made it quite clear why Republicans are better. By listing all the things Democrats do to restrict individual liberty, the implication was quite clear--libertarians are better served by Republicans.
Prove what?
CDL wrote: "The whole movement he (Fred Phelps) leads is a ruse to turn people away from the so-called "religious right", and their pseudo-identification with Republicans."
I didn't know that. Does he really profess to be a Democrat? I just hope people realize fundamentalist Christians are not the horrible, intolerant, bible-thumping monsters the MSM makes us out to be. Seriously, I think some people are intentionally trying to tear the Republican Party by dividing us. In the article, for example, I can almost sense the author's glee...those terrible "values voters" are the reason the Republicans lost. No single faction of the party is responsible for the defeat! Until we stop pointing fingers and learn to work together for the 90% of issues we have in common, we are doomed to remain the minority party.
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