“A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on
the support of Paul,” said the English writer George Bernard Shaw.
Mitt Romney would agree. His post-election analysis of Obama’s
success at bribing voters ran along the same lines. “What the
president’s campaign did was focus on certain members of his base
coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the
government, and then work very aggressively to turn them out to
vote,” Romney told disappointed donors last week.
Desperate to appear piously contrite and malleable in the eyes
of voters, Republicans pounced on Romney’s remark, calling it
“insulting” and “stupid.” The same Republicans who backed Romney on
“electability” grounds now treat him as a hopelessly impolitic
embarrassment to the party.
But in working themselves up into a lather over his remark, they
didn’t refute it. Their truth-defying pandering is far more
troubling than Romney’s comment. Obama obviously did collect votes
by promising free contraceptives, forgiven loans, food stamps, and
so on. If the Republicans plan to recover from defeat by imitating
Obama and joining him in a bribery contest, they don’t deserve to
win, and they won’t win. Given the choice between two demagogic
parties, the American people will choose the one that is better at
it, the Democrats.
Defeated Republicans, who seek to get back into the good graces
of the people through flattery and pandering, sound as pathetic as
the 19th-century French politician Alexandre Ledru-Rollin. Asked
where the people were headed, he replied, “I do not know, but I am
their leader, so I must follow them.”
If that’s the GOP’s idea of leadership, it won’t be of much use
to the country once it does get back into power. Two parties
seeking to win elections on the same false principles will just
hasten America’s collapse.
The national GOP should take a look at California to see what
happens to a party that abandons principle for power: it ends up
with neither. Oblivion, not resurgence, is the legacy of Arnold
Schwarzenegger’s moderate GOP.
At a time when our political discourse needs if anything to
widen, the chattering class demands it narrow. The parties must
grow ever closer together. “Compromise” is the mark of “mature”
politicians. “Cooperation” is what’s needed now. All this prattle
ignores that America’s deepest problems bear bipartisan
fingerprints. America’s trillions of dollars in debt and
mushrooming entitlement crisis are nothing if not monuments to
bipartisanship. The drive to narrow the debate and reduce
differences between the parties contributes to a culture in
which these problems will never be solved. Both parties, under
this culture, compete for empty wins as they lose a
country.
Obama practices enlightened bribery, as members of the dominant
elite see it, and they exhort Republicans to do the same. Dirty
politics is fashionable again, as evident in Steven Spielberg’s
Lincoln. The movie casts Lincoln as a briber who used
patronage jobs to win votes for the Thirteenth Amendment. The movie
glories in compromise and low practical politics — none of which
is meant to diminish the audience’s respect for Lincoln or his
Congressional allies. On the contrary, they are all the greater for
it. The movie’s dunces are the pols who refuse to compromise. The
movie, based on a Doris Kearns Goodwin book, is designed to be
“relevant” to modern audiences, which is to say it flatters modern
liberals who consider themselves moral giants even as they use
scummy means to get what they want. Instead of rising to Lincoln’s
level, liberals prefer to bring him down to theirs. He apparently,
judging by this movie, was just like their other corner-cutting
heroes: FDR, LBJ, JFK, and now Obama. Why isn’t Goodwin as charmed
by Nixon’s low tactics?
Obama recently enjoyed a private screening of the movie and no
doubt identified with its hero. The more shallow and ignoble
America’s pols become, the more they fancy themselves Lincolnian.
Were Lincoln alive today, he would find the level of demagoguery in
American politics unfathomable and the quality of compromise
degrading and myopic. Only liberals could kid themselves into
seeing Obama’s politics of bribery and envy as a new birth of
freedom.
