Republican senator John Ashcroft of Missouri remembers the momentum behind the tobacco bill last spring. Nearly everyone — that is, nearly everyone in Beltway political and media circles — insisted there was a “tidal wave” of popular support for the measure, so much that “it could not be restrained.” Senate passage, Ashcroft was told, was “inevitable.” Yet, alone among the 20 members of the Senate Commerce Committee, Ashcroft took a chance and voted against the bill, which was sponsored by GOP senator John McCain of Arizona, approved by Senate majority leader Trent Lott, and promoted by the Clinton White House. Later, and hesitantly, a smattering of Republicans took to the Senate floor to undercut the bill without opposing it outright. Finally last week, despite lingering fears that their action might backfire, most GOP senators joined to kill the bill.
They needn’t have worried. True, the press reaction to the defeat of the McCain bill was that Republicans had put themselves in harm’s way for the congressional elections this November and might even lose control of the House. We don’t think so. Rather, the lesson from snuffing out the tobacco bill is that when Republicans are bold, confrontational, and conservative, they strengthen themselves politically. In other words, Republicans benefit when they act exactly the way the media, liberals, and the Washington establishment say they shouldn’t. And of course there was a bonus from acting this way in the tobacco fight: Republicans blocked the most egregious piece of liberal legislation in years.
Polls bear out the rewards of GOP assertiveness. Since March, when Republicans began taking a more confrontational approach, both toward Clinton and on policy issues, two things have happened: Public approval of President Clinton has slipped, and support for congressional Republicans has grown. Take the latest national survey by the Pew Research Center, which is hardly a right-wing outfit. Clinton’s standing? His approval rating fell from 71 percent in February, to 65 percent in late March, to 59 percent in the first week of June. For Republicans, the so-called generic number — Do you intend to vote for a Democrat or a Republican in this fall’s election? — has turned sharply in their direction. In March, Democrats led 52-40 percent. Now it’s down to 46-44 Democratic. And among likely voters, there’s now a 48-44 percent Republican advantage.
Republicans have done a lot more than merely oppose the tobacco bill. Clinton, for instance, was supposed to own the education issue. Instead, Republicans rejected his education program and passed their own, without prompting a political backlash. Now the president finds himself in the perilous position of vetoing the popular education IRAs fashioned by GOP senator Paul Coverdell. On taxes, House speaker Newt Gingrich has gone from initially agreeing with Clinton to use the budget surplus to bail out Social Security to advocating a $ 100 billion tax cut. No backlash — indeed, Democratic senators are scrambling to show they’re for cutting taxes, too. Republicans, beginning with Ashcroft and House whip Tom DeLay, have also attacked Clinton for stonewalling and lack of accountability in the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. This was said to be a certain loser for Republicans, who’d been seen as viciously partisan in piling on a popular president. Yet the backlash hasn’t come.
The sad truth is that many Republicans are scared of being conservative. What they fail to understand is that America remains a deeply conservative country. Consider the question pollster Richard Wirthlin has been asking for decades: In politics today, do you consider yourself to be a liberal or a conservative on most issues? (Wirthlin doesn’t give his respondents the option of answering “moderate.”) As they have for years, Americans say they are conservative. Last week’s Wirthlin poll had it at 58-33, conservative over liberal.
Party identification, on the other hand, is about evenly split. That’s why Republicans usually do better when the choice presented to the voters is an ideological one, conservative versus liberal, rather than a merely partisan one, Republican versus Democrat. But Republicans have a tough time understanding this. Clinton at times understands it well. This is why his greatest achievements are conservative ones: a balanced budget, welfare reform, perhaps partial privatization of Social Security next year.
We don’t give congressional Republicans (except Ashcroft and DeLay) much credit for acting as they did for the right reason. It was largely the failure of their earlier strategy of cooperation — a failure manifested both in poor polls and grass-roots dissatisfaction — that prompted them to be more confrontational and conservative. When the poll numbers on tobacco legislation tanked, they moved. When James Dobson of Focus on the Family marched on Washington and demanded attention to social issues, they began taking up the agenda of social conservatives. When Gary Bauer and others leaned on them to deal with religious persecution and other human-rights abuses in China, they responded.
But however they got there, Republicans now find themselves in an enviable position. They know, or at least should know, what works politically. So the agenda for the rest of 1998 is clear: Confront Clinton and the Democrats, push conservative issues, and don’t be timid. Return this year’s surplus to working Americans in tax cuts or personal-investment accounts. Eliminate the marriage penalty or pass an across-the-board reduction in individual tax rates. Take up partial-birth abortion and school choice. Confront the administration on its weak China policy and its insufficient defense spending. Rewrite the proposed patient’s bill of rights so it’s not a backdoor step toward national health care. And keep the tobacco bill from rising again. “We’re not a majority party for nothing,” Ashcroft says. It’s time to prove him right.
