Republicans finally have reason to like the polls after four years of unrelenting bad news.
But like a preseason top-10 football team, the optimism might only last until the first quarterback sack.
In just six months, the GOP has clawed its way back from near irrelevancy. It has closed a 10-point gap in the generic ballot for the 2010 House election and become competitive in contests in previously safe Democratic states like Delaware, Illinois, New Jersey and Connecticut.
Some of that can be credited to pragmatic candidate recruitment. With the exception of misreading the strength of Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, the Republican establishment has made smart bets on which candidates would run well in various jurisdictions.
The candidacy of middle-of-the-road Rep. Mark Kirk in Illinois, for instance, might have ignited a range war in years past. This was a state party that offered up provocateur Alan Keyes against Barack Obama for Senate in 2004 in a cheesy bit of racial profiling. Now, the tantalizing thought of having a Republican — even a squishy one — in the president’s old seat seems to have suppressed most cannibalistic instincts.
Another reason for the improvement is that in an era of a $1.42 trillion deficit, being labeled as the “Party of No” has turned out to be a great blessing.
Americans saw the Democratic majority begin a string of staggering initiatives this year. But a stimulus that does not hold down unemployment, not to mention huge outlays for a nation-building plan in Afghanistan that is already on the shelf, has made Americans wonder whether unilateral Democratic rule is prudent and wise.
The real cost estimates for the party’s health care plan now stretch into the trillions of dollars, and will only grow as special interests put the squeeze on a politically weak Senate majority leader and president. Taxpayers know that higher taxes and inflation will be the price of the Democrats’ good intentions.
Rahm Emanuel persuaded his party to paint Republicans as obstructionists at a time of crisis. But if government action is seen as contributing to the crisis, obstructionism is a virtue, not a vice. Had Democrats proved moderate and competent, the “Party of No” rap might have worked. So far, the Republicans have been able to shrug it off.
But it’s not that Republicans are winning. It’s that Democrats are losing.
Obama has shed more than 20 points in his job-approval rating since inauguration, and the 11-point drop in the approval for his handling of foreign policy since June (now 48 percent in the latest CBS poll) suggests something between panic and anger over his Afghan dithering.
While the president waits for a politically advantageous moment to abandon his “war of necessity” stance on Afghanistan, Democrats must grimly march forward with his health care proposal. They know that 70 percent of voters in the last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll said the plan would not improve the quality of their care. But it’s too late to turn back now.
What really has Republicans fired up, though, is the latest poll from Fox News that found only 43 percent of Americans would vote to re-elect Obama in 2012.
But just as Democrats came to realize with their 2004 flop, “Anybody but …” isn’t an effective strategy, especially against an incumbent who may struggle to govern but who excels at campaigning.
Republicans must remember President Lincoln’s rejoinder to Ohio Sen. Benjamin Wade, who said that “anybody” could command the Union army: “Anybody will do for you, but not for me. I must have somebody.”
Right now, the leading Republican for 2012 is a talk show host who left the Arkansas governor’s mansion almost three years ago and is starting a tour for his first Christmas book.
That doesn’t mean that Mike Huckabee will be the nominee, but it does mean that the party is heading for an ugly time. Huckabee makes a good “anybody” to 29 percent of Republicans, but the party will soon have to have “somebody.”
Former front-runner Mitt Romney is meddling in the New York gubernatorial primary in an effort to block old foe Rudy Giuliani. Sarah Palin is getting ready for a rebranding with a new book and political action committee. Will she try to be queen or kingmaker? Tim Pawlenty is making all the right moves but hasn’t shown whether he can connect viscerally with voters who aren’t so “Minnesota nice.”
The egos and ambitions of Republican contenders have been inflamed by Obama’s vulnerability. But without the kind of heir apparent they had in 1980, Republicans may struggle to capitalize on the second coming of Jimmy Carter.
Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
