How did the Republicans fall so fast, so completely?
In an article published on the morning of election day, “Will GOP
Learn from This?” Michael D. Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato
Institute, correctly predicted that Republicans were heading
straight for a full-scale electoral wreckage: “The Republican
Party is on the verge of its second consecutive election debacle.
In two years, the GOP will likely have lost the presidency, more
than a dozen Senate seats, and more than 50 seats in the House
—- if it’s lucky. Republicans will have gone from controlling
every arm of government to controlling none.”
How’d it happen? Was it that the stingy Republicans didn’t
promise enough free tuition, didn’t promise to send free money
(labeled as a tax cut) to everyone who doesn’t pay any federal
income taxes? Were Republicans defeated because they allowed
Obama to outbid them on giveaways? Won’t Santa Claus always pull
more votes than Scrooge?
Republicans, in this view, won’t get back on track until they up
the ante and start promising free books to go along with the free
tuition. At one of Obama’s college rallies in which he was
listing the problems he’d eliminate with a new trillion in
government spending, a girl yelled “expensive textbooks” as her
particular dilemma to be solved by some spreading of the wealth.
“That too,” replied Obama.
Hence, regarding how the GOP can resurrect itself, there are
those who are already arguing that Republicans can only beat big
government liberalism by way of big government conservatism.
“On the other side of this debate are those who believe that
Republicans lost precisely because they abandoned their
principles and commitment to limited government,” writes Tanner.
“Those arguing for a return to smaller government say that after
eight years of a Bush administration that increased federal
spending faster than any president since Lyndon Johnson, created
the first new entitlement program in 40 years, increased federal
control over education, and added 7,000 pages of new regulations
to the Federal Register, Republicans had lost the ability to
differentiate themselves from Democrats.”
Continues Tanner: “These Republicans believe that America is
essentially still a conservative nation. They point to polls
showing that, even in the midst of an economic meltdown and a
Democratic landslide, voters by a 2-1 margin continue to identify
themselves as conservatives rather than liberals. They therefore
want the Republican Party to return to its Reagan-Goldwater roots
of support for smaller government and less spending.”
In last Tuesday’s election, CNN reported that exit polls showed
that “43 percent of those surveyed believe that government is
doing too much.”
A Zogby poll in the 2006 Congressional elections found that 59
percent of voters described themselves as “fiscally conservative
and socially liberal” —- a basically libertarian position in the
sense that it’s saying that government is simultaneously
overbearing in both what it takes out of our wallets and how much
it seeks to control our behavior.
The problem for Republicans is that they’ve lost their claim to
be fiscally conservative. On the day President George W. Bush
took office, the national debt stood at $5.727 trillion, the
total accumulation of 232 years. In September, the Treasury
Department reported that the debt had nearly doubled to $9.849
trillion (not counting the Wall Street bailouts).
That’s a 50-year high, measuring debt as a percentage of gross
domestic product, and the biggest increase in debt under any
president in U.S. history.
On the Democratic side, the latest example of massive fiscal
irrationality was the party’s attempt to deliver “affordable
housing” by way of forcing banks to give loans to people who
couldn’t afford them, thereby creating the mortgage crisis that
directly contributed to the current financial meltdown.
With both parties failing the test when it comes to fiscal
responsibility, why wouldn’t voters who are fiscally conservative
and socially liberal go with the party that’s socially liberal?
The comeback strategy? The winning ticket isn’t big government,
whether in the form of fiscal liberalism or social illiberalism.
“The era of big government is over,” Bill Clinton declared in his
State of the Union Address on January 23, 1996, reacting to the
public’s opposition to his wife’s 1993 overreach on health care
and the subsequent 1994 midterm elections in which Republicans
took control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate
for the first time in 40 years.
