Whether you’re Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, or Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., or maybe someone who is actually electorally more vulnerable, you’re in a lose-lose situation when you find yourself in front of a hostile, screaming crowd.
If you leave, you’re a coward. If you stay, the footage is used to insinuate that you’re unpopular. That’s true even if you just won re-election with 70 percent of the vote two months ago, and your hecklers are so far from normal people that they’re shouting at you about “patriarchal privilege,” as in Chaffetz’s case.
At CPAC this morning, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker reminded conservatives that you can indeed succeed in such an environment — but not if you’re excessively worried about the optical outcome. You need to build a case for yourself, even if it means making the protestors even angrier.
No, there’s no dignified way to deal with the kind of heckling and death threats that Walker received, and that most Republicans are likely to receive before 2018. In Wisconsin, Walker recalled, left-wing goons even showed up to disrupt a Special Olympics event just because he was participating in it. At one point, he recalled, “they literally glued the doors shut of an elementary school where I was going to speak to the children.”
But rather than anguish over whether to hide or shout down hecklers who are trained to resist all attempts at constructive engagement, Walker went on offense on policy.
The boldness of his reforms paid off when they worked. That’s what made the protestors vanish. His signature reform, Act 10, allowed him to completely fix the state’s budget problems while keeping local governments flush with cash. It was so popular by 2014 that his re-election opponent did not even campaign on repealing it, just three years after 100,000 people had descended on the capitol in protest.
In hindsight, the protestors in Madison were revealed to be as out-of-touch with reality as they really were.
Walker had the benefit of low-hanging fruit. But the current Congress has that benefit as well after eight years of anemic economic growth. And it needs to take a page from his playbook. You can’t withstand an angry, bitter, heckling opposition without changing things in big ways and giving people a few months to appreciate the benefits of what you’ve done for them. You have to have enough faith that your ideas will work, and implement them in a smart enough way that they won’t fail because of your own incompetence. In Walker’s case, he was able to turn Wisconsin from a hopelessly Democratic swing state to a Republican-dominated one in three short election cycles.
You also need to accept that this strategy won’t work 100 percent of the time — especially if, as in President Barack Obama’s case, your ideas prime you for failure. But the right ideas don’t always work, either, if you put them into action in a half-cocked manner.
In the much lower-risk environment of Kansas, Republican Gov. Sam Brownback signed a tax cut that went quite a bit further than he’d wanted, at the urging of conservative allies in the legislature. He ended up with a big budget mess that dogs him now, five years later. His conservative faction got wiped out in last year’s elections. Yesterday, he narrowly avoided having his fellow Republicans in the state legislature repeal his tax reforms over his own veto. His popularity is now in the range of 20 percent, something on par with Chris Christie’s.
So yes, there are risks. But for an incumbent party to succeed against ferocious protests — the way Walker did, the way Reagan did back in the day — there’s no route that doesn’t involve producing dramatic results. If Republicans fail to act on Obamacare out of fear or indecision, then dozens of GOP House members and governors and potentially hundreds of state legislators will suffer the consequences in 2018.
