Republicans Aren’t Ready
Having grown up on Warner Brothers cartoons, it’s easy to see the predicament the Democrats are in as being akin to Wiley E. Coyote when he’s just run off a cliff and hangs in the air a second before plummeting to the ground. All the Democrats need is to flash a little “Help!” sign before falling out of power in at least one of the branches of government they hold today. The problem? The Republicans aren’t the Roadrunner, sticking out his tongue and chirping “Meep! Meep!” before the Coyote plummets. No, the Republicans are much more like the Coyote himself after a fall, at the bottom of a body-shaped hole – so the analogy must end there.
What concerns me less than ten months out from the midterm election is that the Republicans are not ready for power of any sort, let alone as a credible opposition party that can block legislation and offer alternatives. The Republicans still haven’t figured out what they did wrong. Like the Democrats they’ve taken to blaming George Bush for their ills without realizing that they fully supported his policies that the rank and file had trouble swallowing during his tenure.
Take Compassionate Conservatism for example. Old fashioned conservatism is by its very nature compassionate; it teaches people to be responsible for themselves. If they screw up, they pay the consequences – but if they succeed, that success and the rewards that follows are theirs to keep. There is nothing compassionate about a government that keeps a man in poverty by giving him handouts; and where is the compassion shown to those who work hard only to have the government take an increasingly larger share of the fruit of their labor?
Here in rural North Carolina many are on disability. These people hire expensive lawyers like Binder & Binder who advertise during the work day on Fox News to convince the government to pay them pittances – $500 a month or so – so that they don’t have to work. The problem? Very few of these people are so sick that they can’t hold a job, and receiving a disability check dooms them to poverty for the rest of their lives.
How is that compassionate?
The problem for the Republicans is that they’ve strayed so far away from their conservative ideals that they’ve accepted the beliefs of the liberal Democrats. The Bush Administration and the Republican majority in Congress both increased the size of government and government spending while they were in power. This infuriated their conservative base to the point that it split from the party beginning in 2006 and continuing through the 2008 election. Today much of that base sympathizes with the Tea Party movement more than the Republican party. The Tea Partiers have the ideals of small government, a strong military and decreased spending.
Of those three ideals, the Republicans have only supported a strong military; otherwise they have acted like Democrats. They have spent like Democrats. They have expanded government like Democrats. So how are they not Democrats again?
While much has been made by both Left and Right over the November 2009 off-year election, the Republican Party should take notice of New York’s Congressional election in the 23rd District. In this election, the Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava, was a polarizing figure between the Party leadership and the party electorate. Scozzafava held many liberal positions that weren’t held by the conservatives in her district, but she was a Republican, and therefore received the backing of the RNC and other notables with “R”’s after their names including Newt Gingrich. As much as she was supported by these party insider, she was avoided by the voters who backed Doug Hoffman, a former Republican who ran as a 3rd Party candidate. Scozzafava eventually threw a snit, and her votes, to the Democrats, who won the seat in a squeaker.
What lessons did the Republican Party leadership take from this election? That they needed to keep liberals like Scozzafava from bolting. What lesson should they have taken? They should have jettisoned Scozzafava early and brought Hoffman in to run as a Republican because from the conservative voter’s perspective, the choice between Scozzafava and the Democrat was really a choice between two Democrats, neither of whom represented them.
And that’s the way many conservatives feel today about the Republican Party. We have a choice between the Liberal Democrats – who want to “Mirandize” our enemies and turn America into a Swedish-style nanny state, and Moderate Democrats – who want to kill our enemies and turn America into a British-style nanny state. There are no Reagan Republicans, no small government-strong military politicians left in the party. The Republican Party has been co-opted and neutered by the Washington elite – the same elite that runs the Democrat party – and doesn’t deserve the support of the electorate outside of the Beltway.
So while the Democrats are looking up at the camera with big sad eyes as they fall to their doom off the cliff, the Republicans are not ready to benefit from their demise.
Addendum:
Even Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid’s comments about Obama show the divide between the Republican Party leadership and the rank and file. The Republicans inside the Beltway are using Reid’s comments to attack the Democratic Party. By doing so they are sounding just like the Democrats who attacked Trent Lott for his comments at Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party eight years ago and Rush Limbaugh for his comments about Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb.
The problem is that Lott and Limbaugh’s comments didn’t deserve the attacks they sparked and neither do Harry Reid’s. Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) said “Democrats were really wrong in what they did to Trent Lott, and we shouldn’t do the same thing to Senator Reid.” Republicans should be fighting against political correctness and encourage freedom of speech – unlike the Left which has implemented speech codes. They should not be encouraging self-styled “African-American leaders” like Al Sharpton to get his boxers in a twist over Reid’s poor word choice. That’s what Democrats do.
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