It wasn’t too long ago that Republicans were talking about “permanent majority” and the great unraveling of the Democratic Party.
Here in the Twin Cities, though, the Republicans seem pretty sheepish.
They even applauded — albeit awkwardly — when erstwhile Democrat Joe Lieberman praised the bipartisan accomplishments of Bill Clinton on Tuesday night. You could see delegates looking at each other and asking with their eyes: “Is this OK?”
The price of hubris for the GOP is being exacted in bizarre and cruel ways these days, but the thought of the ladies with the big, sparkly elephant pins applauding the record of Slick Willie has to be near the top of the list.
A party that was going to be all things to all voters is now willing to do almost anything to avoid the fate of seeing the nation governed by a pair of liberal, Democratic senators who are currently floating 6 or 8 points ahead of their nominees in the polls.
So how did the GOP get here?
Honest self-appraisal is the key to success in politics, as in most things in life.
In Washington this basic concept is often more cynically known as “managing expectations.” When politicos talk about managing expectations, they mean that they’re softening up voters and the press for one of their candidate’s weak spots.
Humility prevents politicians from creating unrealistic expectations.
George W. Bush won the balance of his presidential debates by making sure that voters knew how little to expect from him as a debater and orator.
That wasn’t a very hard argument to make. And when Bush managed to look cogent against Al Gore and John Kerry on the debate stage, voters who had been concerned about the intellect of the Republican nominee found their concerns allayed.
It was a theme we saw again and again in 2000, 2004 and congressional elections of the 1990s. Republican candidates didn’t promise dazzling results, but rather competency and an appropriate sense of self compared with the overweening and overreach of Democrats.
But in governing, Republicans lost their humility.
A war that fought to knock out one of the greatest malefactors in the uncivilized world at a time of rising threats was instead cast as a transformative effort to bring democracy to a region unversed in its tenets.
It may yet happen, but in the first three years it has looked like overpromising and underdelivering. Victory may prove a balm to those concerns, but the results so far have usually reinforced the Democrats’ claims.
It’s been on the domestic front, though, that the absence of humility has been the most notable.
In the first 25 years after Richard Nixon’s big-government Republicanism flopped, the GOP articulated a new vision for a restrained, limited government. Ronald Reagan outlined an ethic of governance that said that the government was problem and that the American people were the solution.
It certainly worked. And by the mid-1990s the Republicans had cornered the market on common sense and a humble attitude toward the role of government.
But in the pressure cooker of congressional elections, Republicans afraid of short-term setbacks decided to up the ante.
By granting a prescription drug benefit to some, Republicans opened themselves to the idea that pills and nostrums for all were a responsibility of the government. Those still paying for drugs felt they were getting the short end of the stick.
By making the president the equivalent of the national superintendent of schools through No Child Left Behind, Republicans suggested that it was the responsibility of the federal government to see to the education of every boy and girl.
Rather than having the local school board feel the heat for a bad teacher, voters wondered why the new federal plan wasn’t working.
The list goes on from there, but the fanciful beast that was big-government conservatism consistently came up short on results and with voters. The desire to blunt the issue of the day every two years led Republicans with expectation far out of control for the long term.
Hubris cost the party much of what it had built for a generation, but among the anxious elephants sheltering together here on the prairie, it seems that the message has finally gotten through.
