Losing Our Way

The GOP has had a comforting theory that they employ after a losing election.  The story goes like this: the Republican Party has lost its way.  It went to Washington to change things and ended up being changed by Washington. We need to get back on the right track (which usually means adhering more firmly to conservative orthodoxy).

As Ramesh Ponnuru notes, the myth might be comforting, but it isn’t true:

“We lost our way” was the cliche that expressed the Republican theory. “I believe we did not just lose our majority, we lost our way,” said Congressman Mike Pence, of Indiana, as he ran to replace the House Republican leadership after the 2006 elections. “In recent years, our majority voted to expand the federal government’s role in education by nearly 100 percent, created the largest new entitlement in 40 years, and pursued spending policies that created record deficits, national debt and rampant earmark spending.”

So widespread did this view become that the Republican leadership itself embraced it. Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy — high-ranking House Republicans all — wrote in a 2009 op-ed, “By the fall of 2006, it had become abundantly clear that Republicans had severely lost our way.” Among other mistakes, “we had significantly increased federal spending.” Speaker John Boehner has said the same thing: “Republicans lost our way on fiscal responsibility.”

For decades, conservatives have been trying to pull the Republican Party rightward and root out first liberals and then moderates. But that impulse grew stronger in the aftermath of the political defeats in the late years of George W. Bush’s administration, because conservatives believed that ideological impurity, especially on spending, had caused those losses.

But there’s little evidence that big government was the reason, or even an important reason, for Republican defeats at the end of the Bush years. Take the top item on the list of conservative charges against Bush, his expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs. That idea was overwhelmingly popular, including among self-described conservatives whom pollsters contacted. It’s hard to believe that Bush would have won Florida in 2000 without promising to match the Democrats on the issue, or that he would have won Ohio in 2004 without having made good on the promise. He won both states by small margins, and through them the Electoral College.

Republicans were more popular in Bush’s first term, when they were expanding entitlements, than in his second term, when they were trying to reform one (Social Security). For most of the second term, they exercised more spending restraint than they had done in the first term — and again, there was no evidence it helped them politically.

 

Ponnuru notes that if the party truly “lost its way” then there would have been a drop in conservatives voting Republican.  That hasn’t happened, but the GOP has lost among independents.  What has caused the Republicans to lost votes is not being fiscally irresponsible, but not dealing with things such as wage stagnation.

The talk of wage stagnation is real and conservatives like Ponnuru and David Frum have been good in talking about this.  There are a few things that come to mind though.  First, conservatives have generally not been good about talking about something like wage stagnation.  It’s not because conservatives are heartless thugs; it’s that generally, this has been considered an issue that leads to more, not less, government.  In short, it seems like a “liberal issue.”  Conservatives are more comfortable talking about the budget and cutting taxes because that’s part of the conservative DNA.  The trick for conservatives is to come up with ways that might raise wages without creating yet another permanent government constituency.  I think it can be done, but it needs Republicans, especially Republican candidates, that can think outside the box.

The second thing is that the “we lost our way” myth tends to bring forth crappy candidates for office.  As Ponnuru notes, last year the GOP has a few chances to pick up some easy seats in the Senate that could have led to a majority.  Instead, Republican primary voters passed up those shoe-ins for candidates that definitely not ready for prime-time.  We are seeing the same thing now in the GOP primary.  From Michelle Bachmann to Rick Perry to Herman Cain, we see candidates that might adhere to conservative orthodoxy, but crumble shortly after their coming out parties.

The “we lost our way” myth is a comforting one, but it won’t help the party build a long-lasting majority.  As long as they take the easy path of trying to please the base instead of creating a GOP that can include independents, they won’t get the majority.  That’s a harder road, but the payoff is so much better.