Republicans and the politics of No

Republicans and the politics of No
By Clive Crook
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: February 7 2010 17:38 | Last updated: February 7 2010 17:38
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3d90c0f8-140b-11df-8847-00144feab49a.html


The change in the Republican party’s prospects has been astonishing. A year ago, analysts were talking of a new Democratic hegemony. Republicans, shut out of the White House and consigned to a minority in Congress, were in disarray. They looked helpless and on the edge of civil war.

In the blink of an eye, the Obama magic is gone, the Democrats are reeling, and the Grand Old Party is back – winning elections in states like Massachusetts, for heaven’s sake, and poised to humiliate the Democrats in November’s midterms.

If swings in recent elections are replicated, the Republicans will regain control of the House. In the Senate, with relatively few Democratic seats in play, the loss of four or five would be a heavy blow. This now looks likely. Losing a few more, and with it the Democratic majority, was scarcely conceivable even a few weeks ago. Analysts have started hedging, calling it a mathematical possibility.

This shift is remarkable not just for its speed but also for how little the party has done to deserve it. In the longer run, this surge may even hurt the Republicans, because it is rewarding them for having almost nothing to say.

The Democrats’ injuries are nearly all self-inflicted. The economy has hurt them even though voters understand that they inherited a mess. But Democrats still deserve most of the credit for the Republican revival. The public is clearly unhappy with Democratic priorities. Democrats’ congressional leaders are flamboyantly uninterested and so is President Barack Obama: his message to the party is, “Don’t be deflected. Keep up the good work.”

The most vocal section of the party – its progressive pundits and activists – vents an anti-capitalist rage that, bank bail-outs notwithstanding, repulses the middle of the electorate. Much of this anger is directed at the party’s own centrists, many of them from closely contested districts. With their eye on voters, these conservative Democrats are in rebellion against the leadership. The civil war, in other words, is in the governing party.

The Republicans’ main achievement has been to contain their own internal conflicts. The trouble is, they have done this entirely by uniting against their self-wounding opponents rather than by forging an alternative programme.

The problems that the Democrats are trying to address – the struggling economy, the approaching fiscal breakdown, the broken healthcare system, the transition to clean energy – are not imaginary. They require solutions. The Republicans have none, and as soon as they try to get some their unity will collapse.

In the short term, there is a place for unity in mere opposition. To be viable, a political party has to care more about winning votes than staying ideologically pure. Since parties are coalitions, differences have to be set aside, or at least kept in check. The Republicans, so far, have managed to do this, which is both surprising and impressive.

The conservative tea-party activists, who held their first national convention over the weekend, could have harmed the Republicans’ prospects. They represent an authentic and indispensable strand of American values: liberty, self-reliance, the family, suspicion of government. But they are a leaderless and unruly bunch . They stand outside the Republican mainstream and are highly resistant, or so one supposed, to direction from the party.

They could push the party further to the populist right, just as the Democrats are vacating the critical electoral space in the centre. But so far, this has not happened. Tea-party activists came out in force for Scott Brown – a supporter of abortion rights – in Massachusetts. The movement is apparently capable of pragmatism. First and foremost, they want to defeat Democrats, and for now that will do.

But the question remains, what will Republicans do with their political power if they get it back? The answer is mostly silence.

I say mostly, because the party is not entirely without thinkers or ideas. But in some ways the exceptions only underline the point. One of the most interesting politicians in the House is Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican on the budget committee. He recently published a budget proposal, and had it scored (insofar as it could be), by the independent Congressional Budget Office. It was a much better budget than the one produced by the administration because, unlike the official version, it proposed a way to bring public debt under control.

It was full of interesting ideas, such as a bold simplification of the tax system. On spending, it proposed radical reform of entitlements, including a plan for Medicare that would eventually replace the present entitlement with vouchers, whose value would be capped.

There are good and bad things in Mr Ryan’s plan. To put it mildly, implementing it would face political difficulties. But whatever one thinks of it, his budget is a coherent, conservative approach to the issue. John Boehner, House Republican leader, promptly disowned it. Mr Ryan had done a lot of work on the plan, he said, and good for him, “but it’s his”. Other Republicans thought Mr Ryan was being too forward. They wanted the party to unify around a plan arrived at collaboratively. Good luck with that.

It will not happen, so long as the Democrats keep doing the Republicans’ job for them. The politics of “just say no” is working too well.

clive.crook@gmail.com
More columns at www.ft.com/clivecrook