There’s an old joke about the woman who comes to the doctor and
says, “My friend is pregnant and was embarrassed to come and ask
you where to get an abortion, so she sent me to ask instead.” To
which the physician replies: “Why did she need to trouble you to
come? She should have come herself and told me that she was asking
for a friend.”
Or the one about the Jew who goes to a non-kosher butcher but
can’t openly ask for the pork. So he always points to it and says,
“I’ll have some of this.” One week he comes and the pork is sold
out. “We’re out of this,” says the butcher. “But,” he adds,
pointing at the ham, “we do have some of that.” The Republican
Party has begun lately to ignore these jokes at its own peril.
Yes, indeed. It is a simple and widely known fact of American
political life (closely mirrored in the left-right divides of other
countries as well) that there are no secret Democrats but there are
lots of secret Republicans. And Republican behavior of late has
begun to alienate that very invaluable but invisible component of
their electoral victories. You see, if there’s one thing that
secret Republicans have in common, it is this: they are
cheapskates.
Now, it is difficult to fashion a profile of a shadowy figure.
The Unabomber looked as much like his FBI sketch as Walter Matthau
looked like Marilyn Monroe. We cannot put much of a face on the
secret Republican. This phantom of the political opera leaves
precious little spoor. We know only one thing for sure. He finds
his taxes taxing and he believes that Washington is wasting
tons.
This was dramatized to me when I lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, in
the '90s. The politicians had a trick of routing money away from
the truly needy and then putting new levies on the ballot for those
causes. For example, they suddenly announced a vote on a new levy
for the mentally retarded. I was one of the few unabashed
Republicans who openly voted “No.”
People challenged me for my insensitivity. “What happened
yesterday?” I asked. “Were they throwing the retarded into the
street? Of course not. They were one line item in the allotment to
hospitals and social services. The one group of people that this
levy will definitely not help is the retarded. They will merely
have a replacement source of funding. It’s the newly freed money
from the regular social services budget that will now be the object
of a tussle between various powers that be and wannabe.”
Most people professed horror. What a heartless fellow! They
recoiled in shock. They walked off mumbling. They kept their
distance. But the next time around when that levy came up, it got
trounced. Even then, no one would admit to having cast a negative
vote. Who wants to be the patron devil of the retarded? A few
hard-line Darwinists, maybe, trying to cull the herd, but certainly
no one who aspires to see his name in a sentence that includes the
word “compassionate” without the word “not.”
The closet Republican may be gay. The behind-the-scenes
Republican may be ahead of the fashion curve. The unbeknownst
Republican may be known as a celebrity. The clandestine Republican
may come from an ethnic clan who most think are destined to be
Democrats. And the surreptitious Republican may mouth syrupy words
about wonderful government services. They only know one thing for
sure. They are mad as Hell at taxes and spending and they’re not
going to take it anymore. But then again, there’s no need to
advertise. The neighbors might not understand.
Right now the “base” is riled up. Conservatives are grumbling
more and more loudly about the runaway spending at a time when
Republicans control both the executive and legislative branches of
government. These folks are beginning to feel really let down.
Their party seems to be raising political money and distributing
government money in the styles of excess that the Democrats modeled
during their tenure as leaders of those branches.
The party leaders, Bush and the Congressional Republicans both,
are waving off the concern about the base defecting. They are
convinced that — itself a dubious proposition — the base has
“nowhere else to go.” I have stated elsewhere that this is off
base. Republican base voters will not vote Democrat but if angered
they will stay home. Today, however, let us grant for the sake of
argument that the base will not be budged by the budget.
But there is one guy and gal that will go; they may be gone
already. They are the secret Republican voters who loudly espouse
their fealty to the notion of government collecting and disbursing
unlimited bounty; then, they pull the curtain of the voting booth
shut and vote R for Restraint. They may ham it up but they don’t
like pork. These folks have a choice, and if the spending is not
reined in forthwith, they will abort.
