Columnist Robert Novak has written a blistering column lambasting Congressional Republicans for wanting to in effect leave the Congressional leadership intact.
If you look at the context it is not surprising.
After an initial soul-searching that seemed to last some 24 hours, some Republicans have already resumed attack mode against Democrats (suggesting that because Al Qaeda issued a statement welcoming Bush’s electoral defeat that means they WANT Democrats in power, insinuating that Democrats are enablers of terrorism), others have said it really wasn’t the war but really about corruption (Karl Rove), and others said the election results weren’t a real setback for conservatism or the GOP but a fluke (listen to talk radio show host who are quickly picking up this line).
Novak does not mince words:
The depleted House Republican caucus, a minority in the next Congress, convenes at 8 a.m. in the Capitol Friday on the brink of committing an act of supreme irrationality. The House members blame their leadership for tasting the bitter dregs of defeat. Yet, the consensus so far is that, in secret ballot, they will re-elect some or all of those leaders.
In private conversation, Republican members of Congress blame Majority Leader John Boehner and Majority Whip Roy Blunt in no small part for their midterm election debacle. Yet, either Boehner, Blunt or both are expected to be returned to their leadership posts Friday. For good reason, the GOP often is called “the stupid party.”
Yes, it’s hard to present a new face when you’re wearing an old face. Ask some famous movie stars or stop and ask any middle-aged-looking woman in Beverly Hills. MORE:
While an unpopular Iraq war and an unpopular George W. Bush were primary causes of last Tuesday’s Republican rout, massive public disapproval of the Republican-controlled Congress significantly contributed. While abandoning conservative principles, the spendthrift House had become chained to special corporate interests represented by K Street lobbyists.
This malaise is embodied in the avuncular Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, whose consistent response to accusations of failed leadership has been 20-minute lectures to closed-door party conferences pleading for Republican unity. As expected, Hastert is leaving the leadership now that the party is in the minority. But his departure leaves the other leaders in place, with their colleagues reluctant to turn them out.
This yet another sign that perhaps Karl Rove, the RNC and even the Bush 41 team are a bit off their games. They should be moving heaven and earth to change the players in Congressional GOP leadership.
Anyone with a thimble-full of knowledge about public relations knows that image is critical. Senator Harry Reid isn’t exactly a new face to the media and neither is Nancy Pelosi. But their party did well in the elections and they haven’t had the media time that GOP leaders have had.
In fact, the voting records of Boehner and Blunt are nearly identical to Pence’s and Shadegg’s. The difference between them was demonstrated last Thursday when Blunt went to the Heritage Foundation to campaign for his retention as whip. He delivered a defense of earmarking, echoing the House appropriators’ claim that the elimination of earmarks would do “nothing but shift funding decisions from one side of Pennsylvania Ave. to the other.”
That is the view that led Republicans to earmark a “bridge to nowhere” and hundreds of other projects in competitive districts, hoping it would save them on Election Day. The House has been a place where Rep. Don Young (a notorious Alaska porker) was setting national transportation policy, where the “Cardinals” on the Appropriations Committee established earmarking records, where the pharmaceutical industry had a pipeline to party policy and where even Speaker Hastert was making personal profits on an earmark. Maybe that’s what Republicans want to retain, even in the minority.
Novak is correct here. It sounds as if there is zero sentiment to shift policy, let alone making physical changes to party leadership personnel so the case could be made that the next Congress’s’ Republicans will be different from the ones in the last Congress now who turned off so many voters of both parties or and no party.
If fed-up independent voters, centrists and moderates turn on the tube and see some Democratic faces that haven’t been on that much and who now speak with greater authority and then see the same Republican leadership faces, which party will these voters who yearn for change listen to more? The been-there/done-that faces or the newer ones?
Which ones will garner more voter attention? And which ones have been around too long and in appearance and political position so that their political mantras and faces are the same-old same-old?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.