That the Republican party has been flailing since the 2006 midterm elections is pretty hard to deny. At this point, sorting out what is wrong with the GOP is the political equivalent of cleaning out the Augean Stables, and there’s no shortage of people willing to grab a shovel.
But of all the horse, er, puckey that’s been flung, perhaps the most baffling is the narrative that the GOP is so bereft of ideas it is not to be taken seriously. The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, who’s not known for being a partisan bomb thrower, appeared to be vying for the David Broder Award for Lazy Conventional Wisdom when he recently wrote, “My Republican friends keep asking me when I’ll take the GOP seriously again and why I’ve stopped writing about ticky-tak political gamesmanship and GOP consultant tricks. When they’re a serious party with serious ideas, then we can talk.” Snap! Well, thank goodness Ambinder will presumably keep us abreast of the latest Democratic ticky-tak political gamesmanship and consultant tricks. Surely those are still worth covering.
To support his decision to ignore Republican politics, Ambinder cited poll numbers straight from a liberal blog that supposedly demonstrate that Venezuela — not specifically the country’s socialist government, but the country as a whole — has a higher approval rating than the Republican party. Of course, the same meaningless CNN polling data also show that Americans have a higher opinion of Turkey than of the Democratic party. Maybe Ambinder can explain what that means — perhaps Armenians and Kurds are underrepresented in the polling sample?
A
tax-day editorial from the
Austin American-Statesmen seemed to echo the same talking point: “Instead of presenting ideas for lifting the economy, Republicans again are engaged in attention-getting gimmickry. This time they are backing a ‘Tax Day Tea Party’ to denounce President Barack Obama’s budget and initiatives to stimulate the economy. . . . The tea parties, scheduled today in Austin and across the country, are stunts — the kind associated more with high school or college students than serious-minded politicians confronting an economic crisis.”
First, the tea parties were a grassroots effort not associated with the GOP, even if the party is largely simpatico with the effort. Second, there are polling data that say
a majority of Americans have a favorable view of the tea-party effort — so it seems the GOP has to choose between popularity and being called “serious-minded” in the press. It can’t win.
Of course, it’s not news that political popularity isn’t always readily explainable, especially as it relates to “serious ideas.” In 2004, the Democrats had been largely out of power in Congress for a decade and had lost two presidential elections in a row. Two elections later, they are firmly ensconced in the White House and in the congressional leadership. What brilliant new policies did Democrats come up with that captivated the public?
In fact, since time immemorial, the policy rap on the Democratic party has been that their solutions amount to stuffing cannons with money and aiming them at amorphous, and occasionally invented, societal ills. Since Obama entered the White House in January, the cannonades have been nearly unending. The government has spent money at astonishing rates with little assurance that the efforts will pay off.
Asserting that there was a dire fiscal emergency, Obama and a Democratic Congress railroaded a nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill of dubious efficacy. The stimulus, combined with the Democrats’ bloated wish list of a budget, will nearly triple the Bush deficit ten years out, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Obama’s sop to fiscal responsibility is to call for a $100 million budget cut among all federal agencies — an amount equal to 0.0029 percent of the annual federal budget. Even liberal economist and Obama supporter Paul Krugman
thought this was utterly inconsequential.
This stand is in marked contrast to that of the Democratic congressional leaders who seized control in 2006 and hammered the GOP for its fiscal incontinence, as well as to that of Obama himself, who campaigned to reform earmarks and go “line by line” through the federal budget eliminating waste. Democrats seized power by promising to move beyond taxing-and-spending, then proceeded to tax-and-spend at unprecedented rates. Now, is this a serious response to America’s faltering economy?
Further, when Republicans put together
a detailed, not inconsequential $478 billion stimulus alternative, the president
attacked it thus: “[The GOP stimulus plan] is rooted in the idea that tax cuts alone can solve all our problems, that government doesn’t have a role to play, that half measures and tinkering are somehow enough, that we can afford to ignore our most fundamental economic challenges. . . . Those ideas have been tested, and they have failed.”
So Obama explictly argued that anyone who suggests that tax cuts are more efficient than government spending at stimulating the economy is peddling failed ideas. And yet for all the talk of “shovel ready” projects, two months after the $787 billion stimulus bill was rushed to passage with the justification that we were in a national emergency,
only $13 billion in funds have been allocated, according to no less an authoritative source than the administration’s own Recovery.gov. Meanwhile, California’s unemployment rate
just hit 11.2 percent. Stimulative.
In addition, Democrats have gone out of their way to kill popular and successful Republican and bipartisan policy initiatives for no apparent reason other than to appeal to key special interests. First, the Democrats placed provisions in the stimulus package that killed Clinton-era welfare reform — a successful and very popular policy originally passed with bipartisan support. Then, the Obama administration killed off the D.C. school district’s voucher program, which primarily benefited inner-city black students — and to cover the Democrats’ tracks, the Department of Education tried to bury a study showing that the program was working. Why would a serious political party roll back vital reforms and reject innovative policies like this?
Now, one may conclude that the GOP is unpopular on the merits. But that’s no excuse for the media’s refusal to measure the relative worth of Republican ideas against Democratic ones. When a respected journalist such as Ambinder makes sweeping generalizations about the GOP instead of actually reporting on Republicans, it is certainly telling. Maybe Ambinder deserves some credit for so brazenly advertising the specious indicators he uses to explain away his bizarre decision not to take the Republican party seriously. The GOP would be lucky if the rest of the press were so honest, unintentionally or not.
— Mark Hemingway is an NRO staff reporter.
