It was at a somber gathering of conservative poo-bahs at The Heritage Foundation two years ago where I first heard the question posed in the headline. It was Richard Viguerie’s ironic response to Paul Weyrich’s weary observation that the GOP desperately needed new ideas and leaders in the wake of the Democrats’ regaining power in Congress.
Surveying the doleful results of yesterday’s election this morning reminded me of that scene, as well as how similar things look today, compared to how they looked for the GOP on the mornings-after LBJ’s 1964 landslide and Jimmy Carter’s 1976 victory over Jerry Ford.
When I first came to Washington, D.C. in 1976 to be assistant editor of Conservative Digest magazine under its founding editor Lee Edwards, there were 37 very lonely Republicans in the Senate and 144 mostly irrelevant GOP representatives.
There was widespread talk of a permanent Democratic majority in Congress, and Carter was widely expected to join with House Speaker Tip O’Neill and Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd in seeking passage of Big Labor’s two top legislative priorities, Common Situs Picketing and repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act’s Right to Work provision.
But within a year Big Labor was bitterly disappointed after Congress refused to enact either Common Situs or Right to Work repeal and Carter went on to become a national joke as president. So Republicans made important gains in Congress in the 1978 election and Ronald Reagan won an historic victory in 1980, ousting Byrd and the Senate Democratic majority in the process.
Lesson: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
There will be much more analysis and assessment of the GOP defeat in 2008 in the months ahead, but I offer these initial observations about the lessons to be learned by both parties:
First, Millions of white Baby Boomers saw in Barack Obama an opportunity to prove once and for all that they were not racists. Most Americans long ago tired of incessantly hearing that they are bigots, so voting for Obama was an historic opportunity to put an end once and for all to the Left’s favorite stereotype of American society. (Many of these voters will be rudely surprised in the months ahead if they find they are still being portrayed as racist.)
Lesson for Democrats – That’s not a mandate for “redistributive change” or the “progressive agenda” or any of the rest of the familiar nostrums about American “imperialism” abroad or bigotry at home. So how about we repeal all those now-obsolete Affirmative Action quotas now? (This is the issue that will spark that rude awakening referenced in the preceding paragraph.)
Second, it wasn’t fair but, despite his several virtues, John McCain represented to most voters the Republican past, the party of the George Bushes, the War in Iraq and pork barrel gone wild. Perhaps the biggest surprise here is that McCain was able to make a race of it at all.
Which brings us to Sarah Palin. No incident during the 2008 campaign better illustrated what ails the GOP than the RNC spending $150,000 at Saks Fifth Avenue and other expensive stores to dress Palin “properly” for the campaign trail. (And yes, I know, the eventual total was much less than $150,000 because of returns, but the amount spent wasn’t the issue, the places it was spent was the damaging point.)
For the most part, the people who have been running the GOP in Washington for the past decade have little understanding of the values and priorities that motivate the rank and file who contribute most of the money, walk the precincts and do the real work of a campaign.
Lesson for the Republicans – Palin connects with real people as one of them because she is. She has that rare gift of speaking with candor and grace in the common manner. People who confuse Palin’s appeal and virtues for a lack of experience or intelligence have no business running a political party that presumes to some day regain the trust and active support of its rank and file.
Third, conservative truths about limited government, individual freedom and American exceptionalism are just as true today as they were before the ballots were cast Tuesday. We’ll hear lots of nonsense from Democrats and their bosom buddies in the mainstream media in the weeks ahead about America being ready for a progressive agenda.
Don’t believe a word of it. There is a simple reason that Barack Obama’s likely most frequently repeated promise during the past three months was his line about providing a tax cut for 95 percent of working Americans.
When House Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid forget – as they surely will – why their chief executive could not possibly have been elected without speaking in the language of tax cuts, it will again be clear that America remains a center-right nation.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog on dcexaminer.com.
