Can ‘No’ Revive the Republicans?

Can ‘No’ Revive the Republicans?
By TOBIN HARSHAW
Copyright by The New York Times
March 26, 2010, 6:46 PM
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/can-no-revive-the-republicans/?scp=1&sq=Can%20‘No’%20Revive%20the%20Republicans?%20&st=cse


Well, Karl Rove isn’t one to let a downpour dampen his parade. “Democrats are celebrating victory,” the Republican strategist wrote in The Wall Street Journal after President Obama signed the health care reform package. “The public outcry against what they’ve done doesn’t seem to bother them. They take it as validation that they are succeeding at transforming America. But we’ve seen this movie before and it won’t end happily for Democrats.”

Rove’s version of “hope and change”? “Republicans have a powerful rallying cry in ‘repeal, replace and reform.’ ” Well, I can’t say that it sings, but there may be more public support than you’d expect: “The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey, conducted on the first two nights after the president signed the bill, shows that 55% favor repealing the legislation. Forty-two percent (42%) oppose repeal. Those figures include 46% who Strongly Favor repeal and 35% who Strongly Oppose it.” Yes, I know that many liberals think Scott Rasmussen as a G.O.P. shill, but they may want to look at this CBS News survey that found “nearly two in three Americans want Republicans in Congress to continue to challenge parts of the health care reform bill.”


Some conservatives think intransigence is a political winner. One who disagreed, David Frum, got fired.
Rove’s got a bevy of supporters on the right side of the blogosphere. “Republicans aren’t going to get 67 votes needed to override an Obama veto that would greet repeal attempts, but it’s no longer inconceivable that the Senate could flip, leaving the remaining Democrats (especially those up for re-election in 2012) quaking,” writes Jennifer Rubin at Commentary. “Certainly there will be other issues — repeal of the Bush tax cuts in 2011, unemployment, and national security. But if you have a large base of active support on one key issue – which the other side obsessively emphasizes — it’s hard to resist making that issue the central focus of the campaign.”

And it looks like plenty of Republican officials like the playbook. Here’s John McCain, the man many on the right considered an insufficiently conservative presidential candidate, in a radio interview on Monday: “There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year. They have poisoned the well in what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.”

And let’s hear from his party’s leader in the chamber, Mitch McConnell: “Senate Republicans will now do everything in our power to replace the massive tax hikes, Medicare cuts and mandates with the reforms our constituents have been calling for throughout this debate.”

Strong words, but not strong enough for Erick Erickson of RedState (and now CNN)” “What word is missing?” he asks of McConnell’s statement. “How about the word ‘repeal.’ So fearful of being labeled the ‘Party of No,’ the Senate Republicans cannot bring themselves to give a full throated defense of the proposition that this monstrosity should be repealed. They will instead go with nibbling at the edges.”

All this raises a question that goes well beyond the health care debate: can the Republicans make any progress, in Congress or at the polls in November, with that ‘Party of No’ label?

Darrell Delamaide of MarketWatch is skeptical:

The excessive rhetoric of House Minority Leader John Boehner, who called the bill “Armageddon,” will leave Republicans looking silly as the law’s various provisions are quietly implemented, and affordable health care becomes as natural to people as Social Security and Medicare have become.

The midterm elections will not be a referendum on health-care reform. That was the election in 2008, when the majority voted in favor of reform and finally got what it sought through our tortured legislative process. But midterm elections will be a referendum on Obama’s performance, and the outcome depends on how skillfully the administration and the congressional majority now use the game-changing momentum of the health-care vote over the weekend.

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber thinks this debate marked an epochal change for the G.O.P.:

The Republicans have become the Party of No in another sense. Having been the party of initiative since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, they are back to their more accustomed role as the party of reaction. The change can probably be dated back to the 2004 election, when Bush failed to privatize Social Security or maybe even in 2003 when electoral pressure pushed him into introducing the Prescription Drug Subsidy (a pork laden monster as you’d expect from Bush, but still an expansion of the welfare state).

The shift is certainly evident when you compare Obama’s first year in office with Clinton’s. Clinton was introducing policies demanded by the Republicans and their response (the Contract with America) was that he wasn’t doing nearly enough. Now, the Republicans have nothing of their own to offer, except more tax cuts (and, I guess, more torture).

The most surprising critic of this approach, however, was the former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum. “It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster,” he lamented at his site FrumForum. “Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But: (1) It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November — by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs. (2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.”

In this pessimism, Frum was part of a sizeable minority of conservatives. But in the rest of the column, he crossed a Rubicon of sorts. “At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration,” Frum explains. “No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo — just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.”

The result of this blind ambition?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or — more exactly — with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother? I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters — but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead …

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

Frum’s cri de coeur got rave reviews, albeit not from the intended audience.

Here’s Bill Barol at Huffington Post: “Last night was more than a legislative moment. It was also, and the implications of this will be deeper and broader than any legislation, a political one. (God help me, this is a part of the argument David Frum made yesterday.) Had the administration been turned back on health care it would have been crippled, probably irreversibly, in its ability to do big things in the areas that still need big things done: Energy, jobs and immigration, to pick just three.”

“Frum seemed to be picking up on exactly what I, and others, have been arguing: the midterm elections in 2010 are likely above all else to be a function of the state of the economy, which, as Frum notes, may actually be looking better by November,” adds
Joshua Tucker at Salon. “They will also … be a function of President Obama’s approval ratings, which have held relatively steady at around 50 percent for months, despite all the supposed angst in the country since then over health care reform.”

Jonathan Chait at the New Republic thinks Frum is spot on: “The Republican strategy of total opposition instead forced the Democrats into an all-or-nothing choice of passing a comprehensive bill or collapsing into catastrophic defeat. (Republicans tried desperately to convince them that letting the bill die was their best political strategy, but Democrats wisely rejected this awful advice.) Let me be clear: I’m glad they did it. I’m willing to accept higher Democratic losses in exchange for a health care bill that really solves the pathologies of the health care market. The Republican strategy was an audacious gamble, and it could have worked, but it came up empty. Thank goodness.”

Joe Gandelman at the Moderate Voice thinks Frum shows a good grasp of Republican history: “Political parties have kept power by only appealing to true believers, but coalition building which requires some consensus and compromise has proven to be the enduring and politically endearing course, (go back and read how Ronald Reagan upset many conservatives: Reagan is categorized as a ‘moderate’ by one historian due to his willingness to work with the opposition and compromise to achieve his broader goals).”

“Folks, if you want to know why bipartisanship failed, don’t look to Democrats,” writes Justin Gardner at Donklephant, naming the names that Frum left out. “Look to Boehner. Look to Palin. Look to Rush. Look to Hannity. Look to McConnell. Look to Beck. Look to Fox News. Look to the Tea Party.” He continues:

Democrats came to the table ready to deal. What they weren’t ready to do is develop a health care bill that was based almost solely on Republican economic philosophies. Still, they askewd a public option, even when their base was crying foul and demanding it. But Republicans made the political calculation that defeating the legislation was more important.

Fair enough, but Frum thinks that this bill represents the biggest legislative defeat for Republicans since the 60s. Because, even with all of this talk of repeal, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to sell the idea of jacking prices back up on prescription drugs, reinstituting the pre-existing conditions clause and a whole host of other things that this current legislation addresses.

As for the response from conservatives, well, let’s let Frum’s wife, the writer Danielle Crittenden, give us a window into their lives (via Huffington Post):

For days I’ve been sitting here in the bunker beside him (and our three dogs), watching the whizzbangs land all around. What is distressing is not the predictable hate mail he has been receiving — and thanks to the internet, he’s been receiving it in hundredfold; we’ve both seen that before. What is distressing (to me, anyway) are the dishonest slurs on his character and integrity by people who know him, and in some cases have known him for many years — truly ugly suggestions that David is motivated by cynicism or sycophancy, or both …

We have both been part of the conservative movement for, as mentioned, the better part of half of our lives. And I can categorically state I’ve never seen such a hostile environment towards free thought and debate — once the hallmarks of Reaganism, the politics with which we grew up — prevail in our movement as it does today. The thuggish demagoguery of the Limbaughs and Becks is a trait we once derided in the old socialist Left. Well boys, take a look in the mirror. It is us now.

Frum’s own update was rather more terse: “I have been a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute since 2003. At lunch today, AEI President Arthur Brooks and I came to a termination of that relationship.”

Politico’s Mike Allen was able to get Frum’s fuller account:

David Frum told us last night that he believes his axing from his $100,000-a-year “resident scholar” gig at the conservative American Enterprise Institute was related to DONOR PRESSURE following his viral blog post arguing Republicans had suffered a devastating, generational “Waterloo” in their loss to President Obama on health reform. “There’s a lot about the story I don’t really understand,” Frum said from his iPhone. “But the core of the story is the kind of economic pressure that intellectual conservatives are under. AEI represents the best of the conservative world. [AEI President] Arthur Brooks is a brilliant man, and his books are fantastic. But the elite isn’t leading anymore. It’s trapped. Partly because of the desperate economic situation in the country, what were once the leading institutions of conservatism are constrained. I think Arthur took no pleasure in this. I think he was embarrassed. I think he would have avoided it if he possibly could, but he couldn’t.

“The idea that AEI donors sit down to talk with AEI’s president about who should and shouldn’t be on the staff, or what the staff should write, is fantasy,” insists Charles Murray, a scholar at the institution, writing at the Corner. “David has never seen the slightest sign of anything like that at AEI. He can’t have. He made it up. AEI has a culture, the scholars are fiercely proud of that culture, and at its heart is total intellectual freedom. As for the reality of that intellectual freedom, I think it’s fair to say I know what I’m talking about. I’ve pushed it to the limit.”

Others, however, feel that Frum’s comments have the ring of truth to them. “I was fired by a right wing think tank called the National Center for Policy Analysis in 2005 for writing a book critical of George W. Bush’s policies, especially his support for Medicare Part D,” writes the former Reagan White House adviser Bruce Bartlett, at Capital Gains and Games. “In the years since, I have lost a great many friends and been shunned by conservative society in Washington, DC. Now the same thing has happened to David Frum, who has been fired by the American Enterprise Institute … Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI ’scholars’ on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.”

Bartlett thinks this story is much bigger than the careers of two Republican free-thinkers:

I have always hoped that my experience was unique. But now I see that I was just the first to suffer from a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn’t already.

Sadly, there is no place for David and me to go. The donor community is only interested in financing organizations that parrot the party line, such as the one recently established by McCain economic adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin … this is a black day for what passes for a conservative movement, scholarship, and the once-respected AEI.

If Bartlett is right, it gives a whole new meaning to Frum’s admonition that “a win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.”

(Note: Frum had more comments on Bartlett’s and Murray’s posts Friday evening.)