Hot Air » Blog Archive » Notes from the collapse
John McCain and the GOP didn’t get their turnout in this race. They lost almost seven million voters from 2004, a rather stunning number. We’ll be chewing on this for a while, but that’s more than 10% of the Bush vote that got lost in this election. Did they stay home, or did significant numbers of them defect to Obama? I’m guessing the former. The GOP demoralized their base by acting like Democrats for too many years, and the winds of “change” proved too dispiriting this time around.
It wasn’t the GOP as much as the man the base perceived as the leader of the GOP, George W. Bush.
Morrissey has been a constant supporter of shit sandwiches, no matter what. Now he finally begins to see what his political dietary choices have wrought, and resolves to do better:
If the GOP wants to win 60 million votes in future national elections, it has to stand for something other than being Democrat Lite.
Frankly, though, even in this reappraisal, Morrissey continues to cover for Bush. Unless and until Republicans understand not just how, specifically, Bush was a disaster, as well as why he was, they still have a long road to walk toward eventual recovery.
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I think the party started going awry way before Bush, even, back when they ousted Gingrich. Not that Newt is the end-all of conservatism, but (global warming weirdness aside for the moment), in the late 1990s, he was one of very few clear, cogent voices to articulate conservatism and the only ruthless, effective leader to keep the party focused. The GOP really went off the reservation once he was gone, and Bush was symptomatic of that. The powers that be were always more in the Bush/McCain mold than Reagan or Gingrich, which is why they had to go.
I agree. And the party of Gingrich would have been considerably less likely to nominate a “compassionate (RINO) conservative” like Bush.
Still, it was Bush who personally did the major damage after the party put him into the White House.
I agree that the Gingrich ouster was significant, but I think the single most lamentable strategic error was Reagan’s selection of George HWB as his running mate. Perhaps I have the benefit of hindsight knowing the outcome of the 1980 race, but Reagan still would have waltzed to victory over Carter if he had chosen a near clone ideologically for VP. We elected GHWB in 88 because of the 22nd amendment, hoping that he would be a surrogate for a Reagan 3rd term. Wrong again. He was the beginning of the unsavory sandwiches we’ve been forced to eat the last 2 decades. Had Reagan chosen a successor who was more aligned with his own ideology, I think we would have avoided the regrettable situation we find ourselves in today.
You make a strong argument, Charles. I have also long thought that bringing a family of professional politicians like the Bushes into power was a dreadful mistake. I personally will never make that mistake again. It leads to a situation in which Kennedys, Bushes, Clintons, and the rest of such ilk have more in common with each other than with the nation that employs them, or the people who elect them.
This point applies not only to families of politicians but to career politicians. Someone “serving” his twelfth consecutive House term has less in common with me than a free-lance drug dealer does. I’m in favor of very tough term limits, like “you can’t hold the office twice running”. Yes, that would tilt some power toward the career bureaucrats, but elected officials who aren’t career Washington insiders might be willing to defund, limit, or do away with non-vital agencies.
Sometimes it astonishes me that the founders of this country missed the opportunity to write something into the Constitution addressing the issue of term limits. Clearly they were not enthusiastic about having a ruling class, even if it were an elected one.
On my earlier musing, I had to dust off cobwebs from (not quite) half my life ago. In 1980 who would have been the ideal running mate for Reagan? Perhaps someone like Phil Crane? Who else was “out there” in that era?
Charles - that was because most of them were business people who didn’t see themselves as having time to stay in the capital year after year.
Not only that - when you read the early history of the Republic, you’ll find a remarkable similarity in sentiment regarding the holding of public office amongst the vast majority of the Founders. Basically, while they may have understood that there were power-seeking rapscallions involved in politics in some quarters, the majority view seems to have been that public office was not to be regarded as a “profession.” Thus, they did not foresee anything approaching the extent to which “professional politicians” (at any level) would come to dominate.
Political office-holding was service to the people and to the nation, and was never to be viewed as a sinecure.
From all accounts, most (if not all) of the Founders saw public office as a periodic obligation - a duty to be paid, for a period of time, to assist the proper operation of government - never as one’s primary occupation. As a class, they regarded themselves as principled, and pursuit of public office as one’s life-aim would have been distasteful (if not actually unthinkable) to them.
That, of course, changed over time…