Republicans in Denial
Back in the days when the
Democrats were the perpetual losers of presidential elections, they developed a
formidable ability to psyche themselves into believing that the fault lay
elsewhere. When Jimmy Carter went down in 1980, it was economic forces beyond
his control and rotten luck in Iran. In 1984 and 1988, it was a serendipitously
healthy economy that favored Republicans. Democrats always complained of a
charismatically challenged nominee, or Reagan's magic dust, or Lee Atwater's
slime-ball tactics. As manifested by voters' continuing refusal to give
Republicans control of Congress, they reasoned, the people obviously liked what
Democrats stood for. The people just had a funny way of expressing it. For some
dogmatic Democrats, it seemed, any explanation would do except the obvious
one--that the party wasn't speaking for a majority of voters at the national
level.
As with so much else in
politics, the traditional roles are now reversed. Today, it is the Republicans
who are on a quest to rationalize political failure. A few go so far as to
argue that the GOP is winning even as it appears to be losing. Grover Norquist,
who is the president of an anti-tax organization and an adviser to Newt
Gingrich, compares the 1996 election to the Battle of the Bulge, in which
Germany inflicted losses on the Allies, but weakened itself to a point where it
could soon be defeated. The Democrat-Nazi analogy is an added bonus.
Denial
is, according to psychocliché, one of the stages of dealing with death. But
what of the stations of denial? Conservatives are now ignoring reality with the
help of four principal excuses.
1 It was all Dole's fault.
Charles
Krauthammer makes this case in the post-election issue of the Weekly
Standard . ("No Excuses, No Alibis," declares the editors'
self-congratulatory headline, as if pinning the entire blame on one scapegoat
deserves a medal for intellectual valor.) "The reason for the Republican defeat
is to be found not in the economy, not in the opponent, not in the stars, but
in the candidates," Krauthammer writes. "The most important fact about the 1996
presidential campaign for Republicans is that but for Dole (and Kemp), it was
winnable." Dole, according to Krauthammer, failed to make Clinton
administration corruption seem like a valid issue, and missed his chance to
exploit affirmative action. Tony Snow, a former speechwriter to George Bush,
also makes this argument in his column. "Bob Dole, stranded in the thickets of
his ineloquence, settled on the theme of: Whatever," Snow complains.
Certainly
Dole was a weak candidate, as was Mondale, as was Dukakis, and as was Bush,
both when he won in 1988 and when he lost in 1992 (his speechwriter, one Tony
Snow, failing to extricate him from his own verbal briar patch). But to put all
the blame on Dole presumes that there was some other Republican candidate who
might have presented a more formidable challenge to Clinton. Would that be Phil
Gramm? Steve Forbes? In the early phase of conservative lament over Dole's
hopelessness, most Republican pundits were pining for ... Jack Kemp. But even
the great white hope Lamar Alexander would have faced the same situation Dole
had to deal with: a damaging but untouchable GOP abortion plank and guilt by
association with the Gingrich Congress.
2 It was due to circumstances beyond our
control.
Republicans
suddenly sound like a bunch of Marxist economic determinists. "Tuesday's
presidential election was won back in January, when the economy, which seemed
headed for zero or even negative growth, suddenly turned around," writes James
K. Glassman, the conservative Washington Post columnist. "Economy is
destiny." Others make an even broader structural argument. "It was Clinton's
good fortune to run for re-election in a generally satisfied country," write
Ramesh Ponnuru, Rich Lowry, and Kate O'Beirne in the National Review . In
the words of Fred Barnes, offering an alternative explanation to Krauthammer's
in the Standard : "In a period of peace and prosperity--such as now--an
incumbent president is all but certain to be reelected. It's that simple."
That
simple? Peace and prosperity? As recently as four years ago, pundits were
explaining George Bush's defeat after winning the Gulf (and arguably the Cold)
War--delivering not just "peace" but victory--by likening it to Churchill's
defeat by British voters after World War II: Peace gave people the security to
try someone new. As for "prosperity," Republicans certainly didn't attribute
their victories of 1984 and 1988 to a fortuitously good economy. In those
ancient days, they thought the president deserved some credit for the state of
the economy. They also insisted that larger ideological tides were at work.
3 If you squint, it looks like we
won.
In one of
several exculpatory post-election editorials, the Wall Street Journal
notes that votes were much more evenly split among married women than among
divorced, widowed, or unmarried ones. "Seen in this context, what was seen as
an issue of male vs. female actually emerges as the nuclear family vs.
something else," the Journal editors write. The editorial goes on to
note that between one-third and one-half of all divorced women spend some time
on welfare: "As for the famous gender gap, it appears to be merely part of the
basic political tensions that now exist between defenders of the country's
post-War system of government guarantees and Republicans who argue for an
updating of the ways we ensure personal and financial security."
The theory
gets a bit murky here. If the "basic political tensions" in America today are
between pro-big-government and anti-big-government factions, and the
pro-big-government faction just won, how are the Journal 's editorial
sympathizers supposed to find comfort in that analysis? If women are
disproportionately pro big government, for whatever reason, how does that
disqualify the big-government philosophy, or explain away its apparent triumph?
Are the Journal editors trying to say that Dole would have won the
election if not for people who are--or might go--on welfare? Or, perhaps, that
Dole is actually the president of married America? In any case, the response
is: so what? It's true: If you don't count the people who voted for Clinton,
most people voted for Dole. Back on Planet Earth, Clinton won, by a bigger
margin than he did last time around, and with the help of a gender gap that
Republicans have no idea how to close.
4 We actually did win.
In an
interview with the electronic magazine Intellectual Capital , Grover
Norquist said, "President Clinton ran as a false conservative but he ran as a
conservative, the Republicans ran as conservative, and they both won." This
matches the argument of that publication's sponsor, Pete du Pont, who adds in
his column: "As the election smoke clears we can now see the political
landscape clearly. What stretches out behind us is twenty years of an
increasingly conservative America." In the opinion of the editors of the
Standard , Republican retention of congressional control "is a tribute to
the inexorable tidal pattern of partisan realignment."
The
premise here is that the only authentic Democrat is a McGovern Democrat. If the
Democrats win while claiming to stand for anything to the right of the 1972
platform, it counts as a victory for Republicans. This is silly. Clinton ran on
a platform that, while certainly less liberal than those of his recent
predecessors, is best characterized as reform liberal, not conservative. His
politics owe far more to Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy than they do to
Goldwater or Reagan. If his move toward the center means that the inexorable
Republican tide continues to rise, then, by the same token, it counts as a
Democratic victory that Republicans retained control of the House only by
disavowing their 1994 vintage radicalism. If Clinton has been Gingriched,
Gingrich has been Foleyated.
And even by their own theory, how do these Republicans
explain the voters' preference for an ersatz Republican over the genuine
article? Wherever you place Bill Clinton on the ideological spectrum, his
defeat of Bob Dole cannot rationally be interpreted as a victory for
conservatism.
Of course, the above reasons
all contributed to Clinton's victory. Dole was a lousy candidate, Clinton a
brilliant one. Peace and prosperity, which were only partly the president's
doing, handed him an enormous advantage. Clinton shifted to the center for
tactical as well as philosophical reasons. But Dole also lost because of deep
Republican problems. Voters rejected, and will probably continue to reject,
giving total power to a party that remains a hostage to the Christian right on
abortion and that threatens to scale back government in a radical way.
Conservatives can start
facing up to these problems. Or, they can keep blaming it all on bum luck, and
keep on losing.
