I’ve been trying to read Reclaiming Conservatism, by former Congressman Mickey Edwards. It has been a difficult read. It’s not because it is hard to read. What has bothered me so far is page after page of Edwards’ rants against the Bush Administration and the feckless Republican Congress that let the President get away with so much. After a while it gets a bit tedious. It’s not that I am a fan of President Bush or the GOP Congress of 2000-06, it’s just that it gets tiring hearing the same accusations over and over again with no way to get out of this mess that has been created.
There have been a series of articles and books by frustrated conservatives who are mad at how the Republican party has lost their core values. Many conservatives have decided it is time to punish the Republicans and have decided to support Barack Obama in the hopes that a hard loss to the Democrats will sweep away the bad so that a new leadership can begin.
In a way, these conservatives have a November 4 or January 20 mindset. They want to see the GOP go down in flames in the faint hope that things will change after the GOP gets its well-deserved spanking.
A lot of these frustrated conservatives or Obamacons have shown up on liberal blogs spew their anger at how the Bushies have destroyed their beloved GOP.
While I do share their anger and rage, I don’t believe that this is a sufficient strategy. being long on rage and short on how to change things doesn’t make for a winning GOP. Also, the hope that a devastating political defeat doesn’t always mean that a political party will change its evil ways. Sometimes a defeat can confirm bad behavior instead of changing it. Witness the Democrats in the 1970s and 80s. They lost in election after election, clinging on to outdated liberal ideas. It wasn’t until 1992 that they won because of Bill Clinton’s tactical move to make liberalism suited to the conservative era. I think without some effective planning, one can expect that the 2010 congressional elections and the 2012 presidential elections would also be big losers for the GOP.
An example of this November 4/ January 20 mindset is a recent post by former Congressman Mickey Edwards in the Huffington Post. Here is what he suggest Republican representatives do to save themselves from the coming Democratic onslaught:
What should congressional Republicans do if they are to have any chance of winning even a sizable minority in November? First, they should emulate at least one element of their old “Contract With America”. That is, they should all gather together one last time on the Capitol steps. And they should apologize, collectively, to the American people for their behavior both as a majority and as a minority, guilty beyond doubt of nonfeasance (not doing their duty). And then they should go home to their constituents, plead for forgiveness, and promise that if they are returned to Washington they will remember to take the oath of office seriously: to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God. If they cannot do that, they will lose and they will deserve to lose.
While this might sound pleasing to Edwards and the Obamacons, it is hardly an answer and in some ways, I don’t think he intended it to be one. Edwards, like others are so angry, he damns the House (and Senate) GOP to hell for their sins.
I agree that the Republicans are guilty in the extreme of dereliction of duty, but in the end, I don’t think most Americans care about constitutional issues. They should care, but in reality they are more concerned about economic, social and national security issues than if they broke some clause in the Constitution. The fact is, Americans want answers to issues like health care, the environment and energy, education and retirement, foreign policy and national security. That is what they are concerned about and the problems with the January 20 conservatives is that they give no answer to these concerns, only anger.
Anger is a necessary thing, but it can only go so far. We know the GOP is in a mess, the question is, how to right the ship, not how much we can complain and hope things will get better. The constitutional questions that Edwards and others talk about is a problem, but only part of the problem. The other half which is far more consequential is the lack of a governing plan by the GOP. Since the Republicans took over Congress in 1994 and since Bush entered the White House in 2001, what has been sorely lacking in the GOP is a way of governing. Almost everything has been about politics, about trying to win the next election. That can only do so much, until people see that there is nothing there.
So what is needed is a January 21 strategy, to be come an effective opposition to the Democrats and provide real programmatic alternatives to liberals. Norm Ornstein reviewed the book “Grand New Party” by Ross Douthat and Rehian Salam, where the two young conservatives offer some real solutions on how the GOP can capture the working class. I have yet to read the book, but from of the snippets and review, what I see are people willing to offer an answer to the mess made by the Bushies. We know what the Bush-Gingrich era has done. We don’t need another rehashing of that blunder, but we need to find ways to move forward.