Republicans won’t find a more conservative candidate than Bob McDonnell if they draw lots from National Review’s subscription list. He didn’t abandon or “moderate” his principles to win the middle. Instead, he complemented them with an optimistic, populist vision of economic success.
Mr. McDonnell offered suburban voters, working women and independents a better way to increase jobs and expand the economy, from the bottom up. It was a stark contrast to what Americans are seeing in Washington, where elitist Democratic politicians, in bed with the Wall Street establishment, are taking Americans’ tax dollars away to invest in arrogant, top-down public-sector schemes. This helped Mr. McDonnell forge a powerful coalition involving not just independents but also young voters; he won the under-30 vote by 10 percent. Thanks for the opportunity, President Obama. On Tuesday, Nov. 4, in Virginia a New Republican Party was born. See you in 2010.
Alex Castellanos – “Finally, an Authentic G.O.P.” – NYTimes.com.
Comments 7
Castellanos also says this:
Of course, they didn’t have to “rebrand” themselves: they already are the party of mo’ economic irresponsibility. Have been since at least 1932. Some would say since 1912. Some would date it back further.
But one big, gigantic reason the GOP has had so much trouble with both its base and independents is that the Democrats have had to go on such an epic bender, in the last 10 months, to be worse than the GOP of this past decade, economic-irresponsibility-wise.
I wish McDonnell well, but I’m not at all sanguine that he will actually rein in spending in Virginia, or get the Holy Commonwealth on a better fiscal footing. Same skepticism about Christie in New Jersey.
I’m not convinced Republicans have internalized well enough the truth that we simply cannot go on the way we’ve been going, in many, many areas. Business as usual, at a slower pace, won’t “fix” our wagon.
Well, we’ll see how these guys do. We can hope they are the harbinger of a trend — but I’m not starting from the assumption that they will be able to change much that needs to be changed.
November 5th, 2009 at 10:29 am
I share your skepticism, JED, though it’s hard to know how much good some adjustments at the margins in NJ and VA might actually achieve.
If we go back to the roots of the Republican Party, and their first accession to power, few who supported Abraham Lincoln, least of all Lincoln himself, were voting for the Emancipation Proclamation or, even less, a “great civil war.” Once they were invested in the fight, however, they found themselves able and willing to go much further than they ever could have contemplated. I’m confident that you’ve observed the same phenomenon again and again in your extensive study of military history.
It’s doubtful that the mass of voters can ever be persuaded to embrace a radical re-working of the system from the ground up. Events, not arguments, and coalitions, not lockstep marches, will probably be required. Even RWR had to bring GHW on board, had to beat Carter straight-up, and had to hedge and compromise up to the day he finally left office.
But if and when and as the fit really hits the shan fiscally and economically, I feel confident you’d rather have a national-level Bob McDonnell deciding how to cope with it than a BO.
November 5th, 2009 at 10:52 am
@ CK MacLeod:
Well, you know me. If I’m not arguing that anyone who agrees to run as a Republican is as bad as Obama, I’m arguing that it constitutes an “entangling alliance” to say “France” out loud.
There is a point, however, at which business-as-usualism will kill us as surely as radical progressivism — because the compromises of business-as-usualism keep loading the people up with burdens in the form of regulatory costs. Those burdens reset — upward — the threshold at which people can survive economically, feel themselves well-off, and feel themselves able to take investment risks with what they have. The more regulation there is, the more politically discontented people tend to be, because the entry price to economic viability keeps being driven up artificially.
A case in point regarding business-as-usualism is the GOP health care reform plan that has just been costed out by the CBO. I think it’s a whale of a lot better than any of the five plans the Democrats have floated so far, and the CBO says it’ll sure enough cost much, much less, and even save the federal government money over time.
But it will also exert upward pressure on people’s insurance premiums, because it prohibits limits on payouts to the insured. There’s a possibility that, in the beginning, the ability to buy insurance across state lines would exert enough downward pressure on premiums to make it all a wash. But any regulation that requires insurance companies to function as bottomless ATMs for their clients will inevitably mean higher premiums for everyone. They will assuredly also mean, in the future, more and more government intervention and tinkering with the insurance industry.
It’s the sort of thing that seems like such a good compromise at the time, but the fact that it’s not nearly as bad as what the Democrats want to do doesn’t mean it’s not shortsighted and irresponsible.
All that said, am I going to march off with a crazy look in my eyes repeating a Ron Paul mantra? Of course not. You work with what you’ve got. But we need to keep in mind that what Reagan wanted to do, and actually did, was thought by people to be as wildly uncompromising as suggesting that the GOP’s health care proposal lays a much smaller egg than the Democrats’ proposals, but it’s still an egg.
November 5th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Well, you know I agree with you a lot more than I disagree, JED. I haven’t taken any kind of a look at the latest GOP proposal, but it doesn’t surprise me that it may fail on several scores.
Leaving aside any discussion of what Reagan did and didn’t achieve, he arguably represented an ideological challenge to the status quo of American politics in a way that no president had since Roosevelt. We have a movement of people desperate to revive and extend that challenge, but there is as yet not enough overlap and exchange between them and the Republicans currently in office.
The reason I brought up slavery and Lincoln (aside from the fact that it’s appropriate in any discussion of what Republicanism means) was that Lincoln’s minimal position, that slavery not be extended, couldn’t be realized politically, economically, and legally without eventually uprooting the institution. In a familiar pattern, his opponents and the Black Republicans were more right than he was, or than he admitted to, regarding the necessary implications of his program.
It may be that a commitment to addressing the fiscal-monetary-regulatory-economic statist mess, including health care, on the basis of conservative principles or any principles at all, will require a much more radical approach than any practical politician and any popular constituency will be likely to address ahead of time. If we’re as lucky as we’ve been in the past, we’ll “do the right thing, after exhausting all of the alternatives.” If we’re a little less lucky or the problems are deeper than they’ve been before, the crisis may have to mature further.
Many Obamaists – including the chief Obamaist, of course – appear to have adopted the left-liberal, arguably the socialist, version of this same view. They hope to put us ineluctably on the road to the “stationary state” pseudo-solution to health care and all other economic uncertainties. It’s hard to blame them when the only alternative over the long term, possibly the middle term, conceivably the relatively short term looks like the dismantlement of their multi-generational collective project.
November 5th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
CKM, a very interesting comparison. It seems true that Lincoln did not expect to dismantle slavery within five years. Of course, he did not expect that the south would put up such sustained opposition. Without that, with just a regime of limiting slavery in all new territories, it might have died out more gradually.
It’s fun to note that Anthony Trollope, a very informed observer, predicted in 1862 that the U.S. would never be united again, but would split into three separate countries–south, north and west–that would always be at each other’s throats. Lincoln of course prevented that probably bloodier outcome.
What I think was huge for Lincoln was that his program was pointed in the direction of a stable society ultimately, and that he was willing to stick with it as the enormous repercussions became evident.
As JED points out, the move to require insurance companies to do more things that aren’t really insurance pushes things in an unstable direction. Always the lowest rung of the ladder becomes steeper and more people are unable to get onto it. Then the demand becomes to do things to relieve those people, taking a purely expedient view rather than a principled one. As a nation, we are getting to have a more an more expediential view of how to do things–so much so that the constitutionality of these enormous government moves is barely questioned. Taking the principled route at all times requires great discipline because it appears callous.
November 6th, 2009 at 2:43 am
CKM — I want to clarify that I think your point about Lincoln is a good one, although I’m not sure how much of a guide to political platform-building (or party branding) it is. The reason I say that is that Lincoln didn’t set in motion the events that launched the Civil War or brought Lincoln to the abolition of slavery: the South did.
If we temper our political message and agenda proposals, do we then pray that someone secedes and fires on Ft Sumter, so we’ll have the free hand given us by internal chaos to rearrange things?
That may sound flip, and it’s not meant to. But I think it conveys the proposition more handily than a 6-sentence paragraph.
It’s not that I don’t roger your point, because I do. I don’t see much of a history of small-government-ism sneaking up on any polity, though: compromise-friendly center-rightists being elected, and then moving to the right in terms of reducing the size of government.
That’s a phenomenon much more common on the left. Both FDR and Obama got elected on much more centrist, happy-happy-feel-good platforms than they turned out to actually embrace once in office. FDR got reelected, but that wasn’t because the nation was actually thrilled with the wildly socialistic nature of much of the NRA. There were big cheers in most political quarters when its hundreds of elements governing commerce, profit, and union operation were overturned by the Supreme Court. The enduring legacy — what the people couldn’t be bothered to abort before they metastasized — was the entitlement programs.
I don’t think there really is an example of a center-rightist candidate becoming more of a small-government champion in office. It’s hard to think of an emergency such a new president could be presented with — like Lincoln being handed a bunch of secessions, and the shelling of Sumter — that would drive him to reduce the size of government.
My conclusion over the years has been kind of a corollary of O’Sullivan’s Law: that unless you have a prior commitment to reducing the size of government, you will end up increasing it.
November 7th, 2009 at 10:34 am
@ J.E. Dyer:
I think we may have to go beyond US history to find a corollary for the kind of crisis that might impel a President Bob McDonnell to do more than take in the hem a bit on the statist skirt. The history of the US has been the conquest, development, and exploitation of open spaces and dramatically expanding possibilities. Our tremendous and burgeoning wealth enabled us to finance, grow, and sustain the public sector while simultaneously financing, growing, and sustaining our prosperity. The math seems to suggests that something has got to give, either our expansiveness and dynamism or the stationary state.
So, we might have to look to other eras and polities to find examples of successful renovators, while remaining wary of facile one-to-one comparisons – since one might hope we could still be spared the literal proscriptions, mutilations, and executions that often accompanied “new beginnings” in other times and places.
November 7th, 2009 at 11:00 am