Why the Republicans REALLY Lost

At least Republicans now know where the "Bridge to Nowhere" leads: to the political wilderness.

--George Will in today's Washington Post column (and elsewhere via syndicate)


Over in Tim Blair's comment section, a guy named Dave S. said this:

"The Republicans lost and the Democrats won for the same reason -- they distanced themselves from their base. "

That's the sentence of the year, in my opinion.

--via Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds

Post-mortems continue to pile in, particularly now that Virginia Senator George Allen's sad and unnecessary loss, largely attributable to the Washington Post's vile, month-long "macaca" pile-on, has handed leadership of the Senate over to Harry "The Real Estate Mogul" Reid. Riffing on Donald Rumsfeld's surprisingly swift "resignation" (which is the cover for a sacking in Federal government circles), much of the punditocracy is attributing the Republican Congressional losses to "Bush's War." But while lefty media types (and George Will, whose irrational hatred of both Bush I and II takes over most of the column I've cited above), steeped in the "lessons of Vietnam," like to attribute the Republican losses to Iraq, we at HazZzMat think they're barking up the wrong tree. Hugh Hewitt would agree:

Four columns in the Washington Post --by Dionne, Novak, Broder and Ignatius-- achieve Beltway perfect pitch: The election was a rejection of Iraq, Rumsfeld, partisanship, and pork. The quartet are singing from a Beltway hymnal that has been around forever. We can only hope that the president and his party smile, thank them for their advice, and get back to the war with the realization that history bleeds the party in power after six years, and this time it wasn't so bad. Embracing Beltway dogma is a return ticket to the '86 results when America woke up to a loss of eight Republican seats and a 55-45 Democratic Senate, and a Democratic House majorrity of 258 to 187.

Iraq, or at least the misperceptions of Iraq fed to the public by the MSM, aided and abetted by the ever helpful terroristas, certainly lurked in the background. No one likes to see our guys and gals come home in body bags with no apparent end in sight (except Osama and the Baathists, who employ this as their strategery). But the real reasons for this minor Republican thrashing (terminology defined later) lie elsewhere.

But look, let's face it. Neither Dems nor Republicans have an unshakeable majority in this country anymore. What each party needs to do to nab a national election is to hold their base and then snare enough "independents" to go over the top. It's somewhat easier for Dems to do this because their base appears to be larger (buttressed by Jewish and black voters who proved once again that their voting patterns are entirely irrational and against their own self-interests) and because many of these "independents" are, in fact, wavering Democrats at heart.

But Republicans can capture these swing voters, too, as they first did with Newt Gingrich's and Dick Armey's famous "Contract With America" in 1994. In that document, strongly inspired by the highly-intelligent Gingrich—the closest individual the Republicans have ever had in terms of an informed party theoretician—this document set out, clearly and forcefully, a Republican credo that represented, in a highly significant way, the beliefs, values, customs, and culture that most Americans still longed to embrace, even as the Democratic left was doing their level best to spirit it away.

A substantial number of today's Americans have a libertarian streak in them whether they realize it or not. While paradoxically attracted to the notion of "big government" solving their problems, they inherently realize, like the libertarians, that such cradle-to-grave cossetting comes with a high and ever-increasing price tag in terms of dollars as well as the significant loss of personal choice and flexibility. (They only have to look toward Europe to view a failed socialist Utopia.) And when they see this, they draw back in horror and look for a party that will pull government back rather than enmesh it ever more deeply in their daily lives. That, the Republicans promised to do.

Likewise, in a strongly-related matter, the public has always known, even while enjoying the fruits of their local Congressman's earmarks, that raising taxes and redistributing income only strengthens Federal control over local and individual control, and is kind of a Robin Hood pyramid scheme gone mad: the ultimate re-election machine for hardened politicians who use seniority to steal money from weaker locales represented by freshman politicians who can't defend their own turf. Thus, the public thrives on lower Federal taxes because lower taxation puts more money in their pockets, helps stretch the family budget, and, most importantly, limits the ability of all politicians to redistribute income. The public always wants lower taxes, at least on the Federal level. And that, the Republicans promised to do.

In a related matter, Americans realized that the abuse of the seniority system in both houses of Congress, led to corruption and overspending. As did the ritual election of the same people year after year due to gerrymandered districts making it almost impossible for a challenger to overcome an incumbent. Americans had themselves determined that term limits were the way to go. And that, the Republicans promised to do.

They also promised balanced budgets, strong fiscal management, enhanced rewards for savings, anti-crime legislation, tort reform, welfare reform, and social security reform. All this, the Republicans promised to do. And in support for these objectives, beginning in 1994, the electorate voted for them again and again and again. The only time they lost their Senatorial majority during the last 12 years was for a brief period of time in 2001-2002 when Democratic tricksters stole the Senate by getting a leftist Vermont senator, disguised as a Republican, to switch parties, allowing the Democrats to reorganize the Senate after the Republicans had won it again in 2000.

The Republicans lost this year quite simply for the reason that, beginning with their abandonment of term limits, their own enthusiasm, at least in the House, for the pledges that had brought them to power in 1994, had long been waning.

It's only human. Redistributing the wealth of others to your friends is fun. And for Democrats, it can be done without cost because it's what their still post-Rooseveltian constituency expects. Republican fat cats in the business community enjoy this kind of gifting as well, but the electorate, including "independents" who can be persuaded to vote for Republicans, most assuredly do not.

The Republicans, over the last 4 years or so, decisively abandoned the principles that had won them 12 nearly-unbroken years of Congressional control. (They even began to abandon their opposition to the cult of affirmative action in Michigan according to this report.) And so it was primarily for this reason that, this past Tuesday, they paid a heavy price. Although their loss was not exactly the landslide debacle the MSM had predicted: only a Dem majority of 1 in the Senate and a roughly 2-dozen Democrat majority in the House. The conduct of the Iraqi Conflict was also an ingredient in this loss, but not the major one the netroots have proclaimed it to be.

I.e., with an inspiring candidate at the top of the ticket in 2008, the Republicans can easily come storming back, particularly if the somewhat conservative freshman Democrats can't prevail over the Marxist tendencies of their out-of-touch netroots leadership. But the Repubs can only score a comeback if they do, indeed, "come back" to the kind of moral (read "no more Foleys") and fiscal (read "no more bridges to nowhere") leadership they exercised in the last half of the 1990s.

By 2006, the Republicans on the Hill had become fiscal Democrats. And the voters threw them out. There's actually a lesson for both parties in that exercise. As Hugh Hewitt concludes:

The country expected a lot from the majorities it gave the Republicans in 2004, and it got very little...Team Pelosi is a high price to pay, but two years is a very short time. If the Republicans elect the right leadership, recruit the right candidates, and select the right nominee for the White House in '08, they will be back in the majority two years from now. And then they may well be prepared to use it to legislate and
confirm as opposed to posture and profit.