The beginning of a new year is often a time to look forward and
look back. The way the future looks, I prefer to look back — and
depend on my advanced age to spare me from having to deal with too
much of the future.
If there are any awards to be given to anyone for what they did
in 2012, one of those rewards should be for prophecy, if only
because prophecies that turn out to be right are so rare.
With that in mind, my choice for the prediction of the year
award goes to Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal for
his column of January 24, 2012 titled: “The GOP Deserves to
Lose.”
Despite reciting a litany of reasons why President Obama
deserved to be booted out of the White House, Stephens said, “Let’s
just say right now what voters will be saying in November, once
Barack Obama has been re-elected: Republicans deserve to lose.”
To me, the Republican establishment is the 8th wonder of the
world. How they can keep repeating the same mistakes for decades on
end is beyond my ability to explain.
Bret Stephens said, back at the beginning of 2012, that Mitt
Romney was one of the “hollow men,” and that voters “usually prefer
the man who stands for something.”
Yet this is not just about Mitt Romney. He is only the latest in
a long series of presidential candidates backed by a Republican
establishment that seems convinced that ad hoc “moderation” is
where it’s at — no matter how many of their ad hoc moderates get
beaten by even vulnerable, unknown or discredited Democrats.
Back in 1948, when the Democratic Party splintered into three
parties, each one with its own competing presidential candidate,
Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey was considered a shoo-in.
Best-selling author David Halberstam described what happened:
“Dewey’s chief campaign tactic was to make no mistakes, to offend
no one. His major speeches, wrote the Louisville Courier
Journal, could be boiled down ‘to these historic four
sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish.
You cannot have freedom without liberty. The future lies
ahead…’”
Does this sound like a more recent Republican presidential
candidate?
Meanwhile, President Harry Truman was on the attack in 1948,
with speeches that had many people saying, “Give ‘em hell, Harry.”
He won, even with the Democrats’ vote split three ways.
But, to this day, the Republican establishment still goes for
pragmatic moderates who feed pablum to the public, instead of
treating them like adults.
It is not just Republican presidential candidates who cannot be
bothered to articulate a coherent argument, instead of ad hoc
talking points. Have you yet heard House Speaker John Boehner take
the time to spell out why Barack Obama’s argument for taxing
“millionaires and billionaires” is wrong?
It is not a complicated argument. Moreover, it is an argument
that has been articulated many times in plain English by
conservative talk show hosts and by others in print. It has nothing
to do with being worried about the fate of millionaires or
billionaires, who can undoubtedly take care of themselves.
What we all should be worried about are high tax rates driving
American investments overseas, when there are millions of Americans
who could use the jobs that those investments would create at
home.
Yet Obama has been allowed to get away with the emotional
argument that the rich can easily afford to pay more, as if that is
the issue. But it will be the issue if no one says otherwise.
One of the recent sad reminders of the Republicans’ tendency to
leave even lies and smears unanswered was a television replay of an
old interview with the late Judge Robert Bork, whose nomination to
the Supreme Court was destroyed by character assassination.
Judge Bork said that he was advised not to answer Ted Kennedy’s
wild accusations because those false accusations would discredit
themselves. That supposedly sophisticated advice cost the country
one of the great legal minds of our time — and left us with a
wavering Anthony Kennedy in his place on the Supreme Court.
Some people may take solace from the fact that there are some
articulate Republicans like Marco Rubio who may come forward in
2016. But with Iran going nuclear and North Korea developing
missiles that can hit California, it may be too late by then.
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