Posted on 12/24/2010 10:09:23 PM PST by neverdem
A short two years ago, the Democrats basked in the glow of their dynamic new president, elected by their largest popular-vote margin since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, accompanied into office by a fiercely Democratic House of Representatives and a veto-proof Democratic Senate. A long two years later, after the party in power had delivered prodigious deficits and debt, relentless 10% unemployment, and the folly of Obamacare, the voters threw a little Tea Party and heaved scores of Democratic legislators and 400 years of seniority into the drink.
What had seemed to many liberals the beginning of a Democratic electoral realignment—40 fat years of bigger, more ambitious government—ended in what President Obama called a shellacking. (Shellac [verb, slang]: to beat somebody repeatedly with hard blows; to defeat somebody easily or decisively.) What had looked to Republicans like the beginning of a long exile proved a short interlude leading to GOP control of the House, tidy gains in the Senate, and historic increases in its number of state legislators and governors. These Wilderness Years, from 2006 to 2010, didn't allow for much wandering. One wonders if the party actually has learned its lesson, or will soon be longing again for the fleshpots of Egypt.
The GOP has been here before, after all. In many ways the midterm election is a familiar story of American voters' backlash against the Democrats' undivided control of government. Four times in recent political history the Democrats have held sway simultaneously over the House, the Senate, and the presidency. LBJ ushered in the Great Society after his 1964 landslide buried the Capitol in Democrats, Jimmy Carter frittered away his party's control of all three branches from 1976 to 1980, Bill Clinton tried to pass Hillarycare during his turn at unified Democratic control from 1992 to 1994, and Obama had two years to try to transform America. In every case the public deeply, and quickly, regretted its decision to entrust the Democrats with undivided government. And in the elections of 1966 and 1968, 1980, 1994, and now 2010, the voters executed an about-face.
Conservatives like to say America is "a center-right country," and Gallup confirms that conservatives enduringly outnumber liberals. But this center-right country has the strange habit of going on a three-branch Democratic bender about once a decade. It leaves a nasty hangover, with plenty of revulsion at the senseless, hurtful, and expensive misadventures we get into. Still, we keep doing it, and only once in all those years did the people in their wisdom entrust the Republicans with undivided government—during George W. Bush's term. That experiment ended in 2006. There's little reason to conclude, then, that the midterm repudiation of the Democrats prefigures a lasting endorsement of, much less a new electoral majority forming around, the GOP. Overall, the situation seems like the post-1968 norm that political scientists call dealignment: the public doesn't seem willing to trust either party with undivided control of the government for very long.
Nonetheless, two new facts obtrude themselves into our political calculations. One is the Tea Party, the other America's enormous deficit, debt, and unfunded liabilities. The Tea Party has not only energized the Republicans, it has given them a new purpose: to cut government back to constitutional size. The draconian cuts some of the Tea Partiers have in mind remind me of the late Joe Sobran's blithe declaration, "Anything called a program is unconstitutional." The problem is that such freewheeling libertarianism soon runs up against the habitual bias of American conservatism—the aversion to sudden, far-reaching, and unnecessary change, felt by lots of people who aren't card-carrying Republicans. Successful right-wing enterprises, like the rebuke of the Democrats in this election, are usually compounded of these two kinds of conservatism. Rand Paul and the Tea Partiers have announced bracingly that they're here to take back their government; but what do they plan to do with it once they've got it back? It won't be easy to exert constitutional control over it, and in that endeavor they'll need both a more nuanced grasp of the Constitution and popular support, too.
Here the other new fact comes to bear. The financial cataracts of our day may sweep everything before them, including the aversion to change. California, Illinois, and New York are insolvent or likely soon will be, harbingers of national distress if spending continues unabated. In the end, conservatives may have little choice but to adapt the American social contract to help foster a new, more responsible era.
Charles R. Kesler is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and professor of government at Claremont McKenna College.
Eighty percent in a recent poll have beliefs consistant with American Exceptionalism.
Unless the R’s show some leadership and the Tea Party shows some endurance, the Left will take over for good. They have done an amazing amount of damage in the last 4 years, and the R’s simply pretended to step on the brake.
Drat, I don’t know how I misspelled consistent.
Considering the numbers the rats had and our RINOs in the Senate, I think the pubbies did a fairly decent job of stopping the rats in the last 2 years. There's no cap & tax, no DREAM Act, let alone amnesty. The rats have to defend 23 Senate seats in 2012 and a similar number in 2014 in places that usually vote for the GOP for President.
Conservatives and Republican Victory
The Republican Party has a real chance, because of the unusually good composition of the 2012 and 2014 Senate elections, to acquire something that Republicans have never had before: a filibuster-proof Senate.
They have the accursed RINOs and conclusively demonstrate their lack of leadership, lack of political will, and the lack of ability to articulate their core beliefs.
Most are nothing more than political opportunists and the worst group of incompetents resides in the U.S. Senate. Words cannot describe the duplicity of these scumbags.
Census: Fast growth in states with no income tax
Thanks to unexpectedly large gains in state legislatures, Republicans stand to control the redistricting process in 18 states with 204 House districts, while Democrats will control it in only seven states with 49 districts. That doesn’t guarantee continued Republican majorities, but it’s probably worth 10 to 15 seats.That doesn't include the effect on independent voters of many big, insolvent states going hat in hand to D.C. begging for bailouts. Don't be so glum. The GOP just got an unprecedented 60 % of the white vote. Merry Christmas!
Most are nothing more than political opportunists and the worst group of incompetents resides in the U.S. Senate.
That's why I think the Tea Party movement will stick around. Even the rats have minimal expectations for the economy. Piling up debt won't help.
2006 & 2008 did a number on RINOs, especially in the House. The remainder left in the House had safe seats. Senators have to compete statewide.
A George Bush grew government like crazy with DHS and TSA and RX Drugs. And spent like a drunk sailor.
Despite all the claims of wild spending during the Bush years, the Bush administration was a picture of fiscal constraint compared to what has followed.
The spending only really started to skyrocket when the Dem Congress was voted in. And Congress holds the purse strings.
I’d like to see some graphs comparing Bush and Clinton spending.
You are right...spending was under control in the Bush years until Dems took Congress in 2006. I have seen the charts. It was political manipulation the left accomplished by running the deficit out of control (gas prices, etc) and blaming it on Bush.
You are trapped in the- good cop- bad cop- scenario. Bust out of it.
A George Bush grew government like crazy with DHS and TSA “
Do you really think that either of these departments would have even been created if 9-11 had NOT happened?
Blaming Bush for spending money to keep us safe from the radical/crazy Muslims hardly seems fair.
Are you stating unequivicably that a Democrat President would not have done these things to try & counter the Muzzies????
I Personally wish that he had rounded up all Muzzies & shipped them back to the Middle East——but he didn’t.
This is the only worthwhile thing in the whole piece, and it's a quote from someone else. Milquetoast! These people need to be hanging from lamp posts for what they've done to our nation.
No. But we sure did not need the TSA and DHS. Huge steps tward totalitarianism. He did not reduce the size and scope of the government in any way. Only increased the intrusion.
I have often described choosing between the two major parties as like being strapped down in the back seat of a car headed toward a cliff as Thelma and Louise were. The only choice you have is that you can change drivers once in a while. Both drivers keep heading toward the same cliff but the Democrats drive much faster while the Republicans drive slowly and take little side trips to the left or right before they resume travel toward the cliff again. We are now so close to the cliff that it is within sight.
Add to that the fulfillment of home ownership to millions who could not afford a home. So how far off really were the Clinton's? They succeed in "feeling the pain" for millions, even if it was on the backs of the rest of society??
Top this all off on damaging the republican party by making the populace blame the republicans for bankers "greed". This moved the republican platform to the left. So who won those years????
You made a number of great points that could be turned into an excellent vanity, maybe even a best seller!
I'm not sure how the right keeps the initiative. The right is basically reactionary, at least since the Republicans opposed slavery in this country. After the Civil War, the right had nothing until the modern conservative movement arose in response to the mayhem of the 1960s. One of the few things in our favor is the fiscal horror show courtesy of the left. Combine that with all of the left's fraud and siding with our enemies, and we may be able to keep a majority of the independents with us for a long time to come.
Anyway, it probably makes for a better postmortem story ...
Well, that's a thread by itself.
A lot of investment bankers behaved unethically, and some very prominent Republicans, led by Phil Gramm, assisted, enabled, and untrammeled them from some Depression-era regulatory legislation by repealing it outright, and proving Glass and Steagall right in the first place.
Then there's 'Rat co-ownership of the whole Cloward-Piven bad-mortgage business, which force-fed bad loans into the marketplace and started the whole fetid cycle in which the rating companies soiled themselves by uprating bargeloads of garbage loans, and investment bankers unethically peddled them to widows-and-orphans investment managers.
We owe Frances Fox Piven a public execution, and lots of other people long prison terms (Bawney, Slick, Chris Dodd) -- including IMHO Phil Gramm, who enabled IMHO again the Democratic majorities of 2006 and the Obama presidency of 2008 by making the GOP the official butt-boy of the 2007 'Rat-infested home-mortgage implosion.
The MSM deserves a whipping, too, for -- as you say -- trying to unload it all on the Republicans.
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