Replace The Republican Leadership
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Michael Barone argues that Republicans should pursue opposition to centralization, particularly as it relates to the actions of the Treasury and Fed in recent months and years, and on the whole I agree. This is what I have been calling for since last autumn. It helps Republican credibility somewhat that even in the waning days of the Bush administration more House Republicans rejected the TARP than accepted it, but Republican leaders and the Bush administration were necessarily identified so closely in public with the measure that it is virtually impossible for the same House and Senate leadership to rail against it now. As an early and frequent critic of the bailout, I welcome Barone’s recognition that populist opposition to the bailout is the right thing to do as a matter of politics and policy. There are several serious obstacles that make it difficult to take this route, not least of which is the genuine obliviousness of most Republicans to the dangers of the housing bubble when it was expanding, their long record of treating Alan Greenspan as an all-seeing oracle, and the unwillingness to accept that the bubble and the enormous risk-taking that went along with it were in no small part consequences of decisions taken by Bush and Greenspan.
One the reasons why the GOP has so little credibility left is that its members and its spokesmen spent the better part of the fall concocting exaggerated, if not absolutely ridiculous, narratives that put all of the blame for the crash solely on the other party, which had not been in power during most of the period in question. One might be able to understand, if not condone, this on account of the timing right before a general election, but the infuriating thing is that they actually came to believe that these tall tales were correct and they have continued to repeat them as if they were true. Unanimous House GOP opposition to the stimulus bill seemed unwise to me at the time because it suggested that the party had learned nothing from its electoral repudiations, and more than this it suggested that the party was unwilling to take responsibility for decisions that its leaders had endorsed over many years. The attitude seemed to be that opposing “wasteful spending” would have some sort of rejuvenating political effect. The party leadership, compromised for the most part by its past support, had no interest in fighting Obama on the financial sector bailout. Having missed the opportunity to own up to their mistakes, the party leadership wanted to pretend that its compromises in the fall would be forgotten and that it would receive credit for resisting Obama’s spending. Failing to take the right stand when it would have stopped the creation of the TARP and done them some good politically, the GOP leadership in Congress capitulated to one of the most unpopular Presidents of all time in support of a bad policy. The leadership then turned around four months later and pledged a fight to the death against a new, fairly popular President on a spending bill that, for all its real flaws, was far less objectionable than the bill they had helped to pass the year before. In short, the leadership took the wrong side on the obviously winning issue of resistance to the bailout and then took the right, but politically toxic side in the stimulus debate, all the while believing that it had behaved both responsibly and cleverly. If there is to be any credible Republican opposition to centralization, it is not going to come from the current House and Senate leadership. The leadership must be replaced. It will be as clear a break with the Bush-accommodating ways of the past as the GOP can manage at the moment, and it could bring to the fore a new set of leaders in the minority to craft an agenda, or for that matter simply an alternative budget proposal, that will not be immediately laughed out of the room.
Filed under: economics, politics, populism
9 Responses to “Replace The Republican Leadership”
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Dead on target Daniel! If the GOP is to have a future, it must utterly renounce the debacle of the post 1994 phony conservative revolution. “We talked the talk but didn’t walk the walk.” Heads must role and new, believable leaders must be advanced. The GOP must publicly own up to its failure to live up to its ideals and sound principles. They must also repudiate the Iraq fiasco and announce a non-interventionist policy. And dare I say, an America first orientation.
I suspect that these leaders will come mostly from the states in the form of governors. Still, we may have some luck if we can encourage serious, successful people to enter congressional races. The caution is that they cannot be from the political class of party activists. Such people are already so infected with careerist opportunism that they will just create a 1994 redux.
Finally, I think we need to put our principles to work where we can on the local/state level as test beds so we have something to show the nation at large of conservative principles and policies working well.
The leadership then turned around four months later and pledged a fight to the death against a new, fairly popular President on a spending bill that, for all its real flaws, was far less objectionable than the bill they had helped to pass the year before.
“Far less objectionable?” How so, please?
Daniel, I have learned to admire your sharp mind, authentic conservatism and great spirit, but I cannot fathom the source of your seemingly all-souring cynicism, which is not actual despair on your part but which seems to counsel despair in others. This is why I have disagreed with you and continue to disagree with you, 180 degrees, regarding Mitt Romney and certain other topics, usually not according to my own arguments and principles but according to yours. The weird thing about this is that it is abundantly clear to me that you and I see the world fundamentally in almost exactly the same way.
Fortitude is a virtue of which you possess such a philosophical abundance that it is hard to believe (even if impossible through a written medium to judge) that you would not make a reluctantly fearsome opponent on the battlefield, as the abundance of fortitude leaked even a little from the philosophical realm to the physical. Indeed, if the virtue leaked more than a little, brave Horatius should not have been ashamed to have you at his shoulder to hold the bridge. No one could credibly accuse Larison of lack of constancy!
However, is tolerance not a virtue, too?
These Republican officeholders, excepting Ron Paul, that pure chevalier, cannot all be as wicked and debased as you seem so persistently to suggest. Why is it so hard for you to believe that they are mostly good people in hard times, doing about the best they can?
I would heartily disagree with you that any Republican members of the House of Representatives should have supported Mr. Obama’s monstrous spending bill. Moreover, I suspect that you are familiar with the formidable Zippy Catholic’s ferocious promotion of the original bailout. Now, do I agree with Zippy? Answer: no; in my estimation Zippy went too far. Had you and I served in the 110th Congress together, that would have made two more solid votes against the Paulson bill, and then good Zippy would have trashed the two of us together; but I cannot believe that you would have turned around then and voted for the far worse, far less excusable Obama bill.
The Pauson bill at least had an arguably credible economic theory behind it. The Obama bill? What has it, except an extremely vague Keynsianism veiling the mad scramble of Democratic hogs to the public trough.
And, if you were tempted to object that there are Republican hogs, too, then I would ask what you would hoped to achieve by this observation, other than to bank further the smoldering fire of your seemingly all-consuming cynicism. There are litterers and murderers both in this fallen world, the two of which sinners resemble one another neither in degree nor in kind, nor in effect.
There is not only corruption in this Creation, but also the glorious work of God. It might not hurt you, now and then, to admit to perceiving the light, even when it shines out through some unexpected chink in the white palace of the U.S. Capitol, which is not only, nor even principally, a den of theives.
Keep up the good work.
(And, well, keep up the more skillful use of the spell-checker than mine. Sic.)
““Far less objectionable?†How so, please?”
Yeah, I’d like to know that one too. I’ve asked Daniel several times to justify his contention that the September credit crisis didn’t amount to much (that’s the premise for the idea that the Republican votes for TARP were indefensible).
Now that I’ve looked at the links in this post, I don’t think that Daniel has internalized the various aspects of our economic troubles, and the differences in time frame that are implied.
The economic collapse scenario in September was very real. It could be that we could have avoided it in other ways besides TARP. However, whatever we talk(ed) about in that context has to bear that possibility in mind.
The situation was different in January and February. The problems were (and are) no less severe, but our orientation is different. The imperative is to get it done right, which is a big difference from getting it done fast.
The stimulus package was horrible in a hundred different ways. But for all the complaints about socialism or social democracy and all the rest of it, there was also the demonstrable reality that there’s no reason to believe that the stimulus package would in fact stimulate anything.
The fact is that for people who are paying attention to today’s economic crises the GOP has more credibility than they need. The problem is that they don’t have enough bandwidth to force people, both opinionmakers and voters, to consider choosing the GOP as an alternative to the Obama Administration. But I don’t see how changing the GOP leadership is going to help. There is going to be _some_ GOP leadership to implement GOP policy if it comes to that.
Even if you accept Barone’s assumptions about the wisdom of the steps the government has taken, exactly what does running against the government mean? TARP has passed. The stimulus package passed. The restructuring of GM and Chrysler is now taking place. Isn’t this like closing the barn door after the cow has left? It’s done, it’s over, and by fall 2010, nobody will care about the stimulus package. What people will care about is how the economy is doing. That’s something the Republicans no longer have any control over.
I feel like I am reading posts from an alternate universe here. The GOP has NO credibility on ANYTHING. It’t shot, gone, history, and bad history at that.
I can only speak for me, but if the GOP is against it, and there is NO hard evidence they are against it for anything other than political gain, then I am for it. And so far, hard evidence has been hard to come by.
You, Howard and Koz, put the facts out there. The stimulus is horrible in a hundred different ways? What hundred ways? Who says, some English major working the CFR? McConnell and Boehner not wicked and debased? Their hypocrisy alone qualifies them.
Quit talking in GOP dog whistle and pony up some evidence, some proof, that what you are selling here has even a passing acquaintance with reality. Otherwise, you find yourself exactly where the current GOP leadership finds itself – ignored and inconsequential.
Jake
The GOP, for the most part, is only a fundraising machine and popular political vehicle. It should not, but unfortunately does, enforce or impart strict policy positions onto its members. It should, simply, have a broad but nebulously defined set of goals, and payout dollars to candidates that share some portion of those goals.
The Democrats have an advantage because their machine/vehicle paradigm doesn’t depend on strict adherence to anything. As we saw with the Obama campaign, this is ideal in that Democrats can mean everything to anyone, even contradictory things! This isn’t to say, however, that there isn’t any party coherence. Dem leadership can cajole Blue Dogs into line for important votes, but nontheless allow them a great degree of freedom within the party. Additionally, if a bill comes up for a vote and a Dem congressmember hasn’t read it, they can simply vote the party line and know that they are probably not doing any damage to themselves.
For example, the GOP has planks that describe how its members should vote and act on abortion and gay marriage. Speaking against these planks is bad enough (unless you’re a washed-up ex-VP), but voting against the planks is suicide. In contrast, the Democrats have planks on the same issues, but the party tolerates not only heterodoxy in speech but also on the voting floor!
Is a sense, the GOP itself is too centralized.
I don’t know why Daniel thinks the TARP bill was worse than the stimulus bill but I can tell why I think it was:
The TARP bill was giving money to the highly paid crowd that caused the meltdown. There was very little deliberation by the congress and very few strings attached to the money. The banks then used the money to pay dividends and bonuses. Some of the AIG money even went to European banks.
Half of the stimulus money were tax cuts to ordinary Americans. Some of the rest was for unemployment insurance.
I would prefer congress give money to average Americans then to incompetent investment bankers.
Great post, Daniel.
TARP was way worse than the stimulus because TARP rewarded failure. Did we forget why we prefer capitalism to socialism? All that stuff about the discipline of the market? Creative destruction? Accountability?
The stimulus at least has some coherence. The basic Keynesian idea is that when consumer and business demand fall far enough recovery is aided by increased government demand may or may not be correct, (I am not qualified to judge) but it does not turn the basic principles of capitalism on its head, because the increased government demand is supposed to be a temporary corrective. It is not a financial get out of jail free card awarded to the most culpable.
What was it with Bush? Why did the Republican Party follow him over a cliff (out of control spending, TARP) only to turn against a far more popular plan that is defensible if you squint a little?
Enabling GWB has done to the word ‘conservative’ what LBJ did to ‘liberal’ . Sooner than you think Democrats will call their opponents conservative and the Republican will shop for some equal and opposite to ‘progressive’.
Is power always corrupting? Was the Republican fall inevitable? Is American politics always going to be a pendulum? Or was the Republican advantage squandered because the party of order will always be too obedient? I suppose the Democratic Party has an equal and opposite tendency to be to disobedient (witness Vietnam anti-war protests and the rejection of LBJ in 1968).