Just for the record, I think John McCain and Sarah Palin may be headed for an upset election win that will rival Truman’s 1948 victory over the inevitable Thomas Dewey. Considering everything else that has happened in the 2008 presidential race, a comeback victory by one of the biggest underdogs of all time would be a fitting conclusion.
But regardless of the actual outcome Nov. 4, there seems no reason to doubt that such an upset is the best outcome Republicans and conservatives can reasonably hope to see. Regardless who wins the White House, Democrats are going to increase their majorities in both the Senate and House, so even if McCain-Palin somehow pull off a presidential win, the next four years will be marked primarily by majority Democrats pushing massive expansions of federal taxes, spending and regulation and a President McCain constantly seeking to compromise. The net result will be more Big Government and the GOP minority in Congress will barely be relevant.
Such a dreary four years will be another bitter fruit of the period of 2001-2006 marked by the abandonment by the Republican majority in Congress and the Republican president in the White House of the traditional values and limited government principles that put them in office. They had six years of control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue in which to deliver on their promises to bring the federal Leviathan under control and return power to individual Americans.
And, as Red County’s Scott Graves points out today, the time will have come for a fundamental, top-to-bottom re-assessment of what it means to be a Republican, conservative or libertarian:
“Republican leaders utterly failed in their stewardship of the Republican brand. It is a failure best reflected in their support of bigger government and outrageous spending, their inability to enact meaningful government reform, their lack of urgency in finding solutions for illegal immigration, social security, and energy independence, and their complacency with respect to the deterioration of the link between the Republican brand and traditional American values.”
The internal debate within the GOP about its future is already in full swing and indeed has been going on for years, beginning even before the Democrats retook power in Congress two years ago as libertarians chafed at a continued alliance with social conservatives. And traditional establishment GOPers found themselves increasingly alienated from the party’s grassroots by their inability to see the damage done to their credibility and that of the party by earmarks and other perks of power in Washington.
With a McCain-Palin defeat now assumed in the minds of many on the Right and among the GOP establishment, the search for somebody to blame, for a scapegoat, is already well underway, too. Patrick Ruffini points to the potential paralells between Howard Dean circa 2004 and Palin in the coming post-Nov. 4 environment, but notes the more likely outcome:
“Yet, there is a big risk coming up in 15 days. If McCain-Palin loses, and the conventional wisdom hardens that Palin was a big part of the reason for it, the GOP will learn the wrong lessons from 2008. It will be said that McCain should have picked an uninspiring establishment VP. If we listen to Brooks, Noonan, and Frum, the next time out, the establishment will be emboldened in its natural distrust of happy warrior populists like Palin who bring their own political base to the table. And if the establishment wins this argument, get ready for a 2012 candidate who will be even more incentivized to engage in elite-pleasing, base-enraging behavior on spending, immigration, and stuff like the bailout.
“Never mind that many people believe this was precisely the problem with the top of the ticket in 2008. (And the top of the ticket is kind of more relevant to what happens than the bottom half.)”
I have argued for more than two years that the GOP’s fundamental problem is it is no longer a credible vehicle for enacting desperately needed conservative reforms that enjoy widespread support in the American electorate that remains basically Center-Right in orientation. Nothing that has happened since I wrote this post on Tapscott’s Copy Desk the day after the 2006 has changed my view in this regard.
The next three months will determine the ultimate destiny of the GOP and thus of the two-party political system that has dominated American public policy for two centuries.
