Majority leader Dick Armey’s Feb. 26 memo to his fellow House Republicans starts with the words, “Many of you appear disappointed,” and reading what follows it’s easy to understand why. Has there ever been a more dispiriting call to arms?
First Armey lectures his more exuberant colleagues: “Drama is not the purpose of the Congress . . . This year is very different from last year. . . . Making progress on the Republican agenda doesn’t require us to create fireworks.” Next he explains what making progress on that agenda does require. Legislating, maybe? Nope. Been there, done that. Now that “we have settled in as the majority party . . . we have to engage the American people in a broad debate over the role of government in our lives.”
Some voters, it occurs to us, might think that congressmen, when they’re not too busy “settling in,” should engage each other in broad debate over the role of government, but that would be second-wave thinking. No, ” restoring individual freedom will depend on a broad communications effort that must begin this year,” which sounds like code for lots of focus groups and advertising. And for those members who had hoped to spend, say, six or nine months in Washington before gearing up full-time for the ’98 elections, no such luck: “I intend to push every member and every committee to work inside and outside the Congress to make sure that the American public knows what we are doing. . . . Never again should we enter a major debate without the plan and resources to drive our message” — i.e., let’s all go raise some more money to pay the focus-group consultants and ad writers (the one group in the Republican party, by the way, that has good reason to be cheered by the Armey memo).
Finally, after a desultory exposition of the “agenda” that will be communicated — “This Spring, Bill Goodling will bring the Family Flexibility Act to the floor so that parents can have more time with their children . . . Tom Bliley will streamline the Superfund program, so that money goes to cleaning up toxic dirt. . . . Sonny Bono is working on a bill that will limit judicial activism.” The memo concludes on this ringing note: “I know some members are frustrated at the slow start. But this year is setting the same pace as the average Congress following a Presidential election.” That’s certainly good news. No reason to be frustrated.
