Takeover (24 page)

As the 2006 election approached, conservatives were as angry as I had seen them in my five decades in politics. At that time, I guessed that 40 percent of conservatives were ambivalent about the November election or wanted the Republicans to lose. But a Republican loss of one or both Houses of Congress would turn power over to the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Did we dare risk such an outcome?

The answer was, we had to take the chance.

As I saw it, the conservative movement, and the cause of conservative governance, can and often did end up in a better position after Republicans lost a given election than it did by backing the Republican establishment—and 2006 was going to be one of those elections.

What’s more, the American people were clearly fed up with
George W. Bush and the establishment Republican congressional leadership.

Public-opinion polls in mid-2005 gave Bush his lowest approval rating in office. After averaging a 62 percent approval rating during his first term, just 44 percent of respondents approved of his performance, a national Gallup poll found.

According to Gallup, Bush ranked behind Presidents Eisenhower, Reagan, Clinton, and Truman and was on par with Richard Nixon (44 percent amid the Watergate crisis) and Lyndon Johnson (42 percent during the Vietnam War) at comparable times in their presidencies.
⁵

One of Washington’s top political analysts, Charlie Cook, publisher of the
Cook Political Report
, surveyed the situation just six months after George W. Bush’s 2005 inauguration and reported that “Democratic [congressional] candidates from coast to coast have already taken up the mantra ‘arrogant, abusive, and out of touch’—stolen straight from the Republicans’ own 1994 playbook. That chant is starting to get under the skin of Republicans, particularly those who were around in 1994.”

Charlie Cook also noted that history wasn’t on the Republicans’ side either.

“In four of the five midterm elections since World War II that were held during a president’s second term, the party in the White House got shellacked,” said Cook in June 2005. “Today’s House Republicans are watching many, if not all, of the factors that led to those losses being replicated before their very eyes.”

While it is hard to identify exactly when during the 109th Congress Republicans sealed their fate and the loss of their majority, a good case could be made that it was with the House passage of the 2005 Transportation bill that included the infamous “bridge to nowhere.”

At $286 billion it was at that point, the most expensive public works bill ever—passed by the “fiscal conservatives” of the Republican Party and touted as such in news conferences across the country.
As the
Chicago Tribune
observed at the time, “If that’s responsible, what would irresponsibility look like?”
⁶

The
Trib
took a look back and noted that since Bill Clinton left office, federal outlays under President Bush and a GOP-controlled Congress had risen from 18.5 percent of gross domestic output to 20.3 percent.

In January 2006, as the crucial midterm election year opened, the Cato Institute looked at the George W. Bush fiscal record and labeled Bush “the biggest-spending president since Lyndon Johnson.”
⁷
Nor could that spending all be blamed on the Iraq war and homeland security. When Cato’s study excluded defense and homeland security spending from the calculations for both presidents, it found that, even then, “Bush was worse than LBJ.”

A few Republicans in Congress had the courage to buck the establishment leadership and admit that their party had gone wrong. “If you look at fiscal conservatism today, it’s in a sorry state,” principled fiscal conservative representative (now senator) Jeff Flake of Arizona told the
Washington Post.
“Republicans don’t even pretend anymore.”

While the same could be said of Jeff Flake now that he has moved to the Senate, he had nailed the problem—Republicans didn’t even pretend to follow conservative principles anymore.

If Big Government Republicans behaved so irresponsibly and betrayed the people who elected them, and conservatives blindly, slavishly continue backing them, we establish that there is no price to pay for violating conservative principles.

If we gave in, we were forgetting the lesson that mothers teach their daughters:
Why buy a cow when milk is free?

As I saw it, it would take a Republican defeat to bring about a complete change in the GOP leadership in Washington. Without such a change, real conservatives will never come to power. We were (and still are) like the Jews who wandered the desert for forty years until their flawed leaders passed away; we will never reach the Political Promised Land with these guys in charge.

Many conservatives and right-of-center independents apparently
agreed with my analysis, because one by one conservatives decided it was time to stop slavishly giving free milk to Big Government establishment Republicans who did no better than pay lip service to our issues.

The Republican House leaders never seem to learn that going along with Big Government policies is exactly what gets Republicans thrown out of office and relegated to the status of the powerless minority they were from the beginning of the New Deal until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

And without committed conservative support, Republicans were not just beaten; they were wiped out in the 2006 midterm election.

Why did Republicans get wiped out in 2006?

There is no doubt that religious conservatives, an important part of the Republican coalition, were turned off by Congressman Mark Foley’s homosexual sex scandal.

But there were other issues at hand.

The media, and more importantly, the candidates, seem curiously unconcerned with another discontented part of the Reagan coalition: economic, small-government conservatives.

It was the Republicans’ big-spending, Big Government ways that helped ensure their defeat in the 2006 midterm elections. It wasn’t Evangelical Christians or so-called values voters who deserted Republicans. Roughly 70 percent of white evangelicals and born-again Christians voted Republican in 2006, just a fraction less than in 2004.

It was suburbanites, independents, and others who were fed up not just with the war and corruption, but also with the Republican drift toward Big Government who stayed home, or even voted Democratic, on Election Day 2006. That night, more than 65 percent of voters told a pollster they believed that “the Republicans used to be the party of economic growth, fiscal discipline, and limited government, but in recent years, too many Republicans in Washington have become just like the big spenders they used to oppose.”
⁸

There was a swing of six seats in the US Senate and thirty-one seats in the House of Representatives. Democrats gained control of
Republican-held governorships in Arkansas, Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio to give the party a twenty-eight to twenty-two advantage in governorships.

More to the point, many moderate and Big Government Republican House members, such as Nancy Johnson, Jim Leach, Anne Northup, Jeb Bradley, Charles Bass, and Sue Kelly, were defeated, demonstrating that being “Democrats-lite” was no protection from the wrath of voters fed up with George W. Bush and his principle-free party on Capitol Hill.

A
fter the 2006 wipeout of Republicans, especially the party’s congressional candidates, establishment Republicans tried to explain the debacle, and their first instinct was to blame conservatives—but not for staying home. They tried to blame the few examples of Republican adherence to conservative principles they could find—for example, supporting the right to life—rather than Republican betrayal of those principles.

Sound familiar?

After the election, top Republican strategist Karl Rove specifically named the Foley scandal as the cause of the Republicans’ loss of Congress.

The big-spending Congress, the Bush failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the culture of cronyism and corruption that set the checks and balances the Founders built into the Constitution on their heads were not important factors in Rove’s eyes.

Even some establishment Republicans were honest enough to argue that the party lost its majority by straying from conservative principles, especially limited government spending.

John Boehner, who became minority leader after the 2006
debacle, accepted that argument when his leadership was challenged by conservatives, but later changed his tune to blame the Iraq war.

Boehner changed his tune because he probably recognized that by such an analysis he was implicitly holding responsible for the defeat those old bulls of the Republican establishment who had put him in power.

Most of the Republican establishment was similarly in denial. Oklahoma congressman Tom Cole, who had just been elected to lead the Republican National Congressional Committee, demonstrated such denial when he claimed, “Oh, I don’t think the problem was spending. … People who argue that we lost because we weren’t true to our base, that’s just wrong.”
¹

Of course, as a member of the Appropriations Committee, and a prolific pork-barreler, Cole would be indicting himself if he had placed the blame differently, and, as events would prove, continuing the old ways was not a successful strategy for the Republican National Congressional Committee under Cole’s leadership.

The way I saw it was that, yes, defeat stings, but in this case it was necessary and could lead to some good results in the future.

The election of Bill Clinton in 1992 led directly to the successful “Contract with America” two years later.

As I’ve said before, and it bears being repeated regularly, sometimes a loss for the Republican Party is a gain for conservatives.

A little taste of liberal Democrats in power is often enough to remind the voters what they don’t like about them, and more important, to focus the minds of Republicans on the principles that really matter. The conservative movement has grown fastest during those periods when things seemed darkest, such as during the Carter administration and the first two years of the Clinton White House; and the first two years of the Obama presidency led to the Tea Party wave election and the biggest GOP victory in seventy-five years.

Conservatives are, by nature, insurgents, and as the eight years George W. Bush was in the White House proved, it’s hard to maintain an insurgency when your friends, or people you perceived to
be your friends, are in power.

A Republican loss in 2006 did eventually lead to a rebirth of the conservative movement as a third force independent of any political party. Almost all of the gains made by Democrats in 2006 came from large gains among independents, not Republicans.

Democrats, Republicans, and independents all accounted for proportions of the electorate similar to what they did in 2004. Democrats and Republicans voted nearly as loyally for their parties in 2006 as they did in 2004, but independents exhibited a large swing toward Democrats.

In 2004, independents split forty-nine to forty-six, slightly in favor of Democrats, but in 2006 they voted fifty-seven to thirty-nine for Democrats, a fifteen-point swing and the largest margin among independents for Democrats since the US 1986 midterm elections.
²

Bringing those independents back to the Republican column by offering a clear contrast with the Big Government liberalism of the Democrats should have been the top priority of President Bush and the Capitol Hill GOP leadership.

Far from standing like Horatius at the bridge, holding off the Democrats until reinforcements could arrive or the bridge could be destroyed and Rome saved, Bush did little to check the spending of the new Democratic majority as long as he got the go-ahead to continue the war in Iraq on his terms. This was, in essence, another corrupt bargain with Congress.

In the short time that George W. Bush was president and the Democrats held the majority in Congress (2007–2008), spending jumped by $700 billion—$4.7 trillion in FY 2006 to $5.4 trillion in FY 2008.
³

Despite the fact President Bush finally vetoed a few spending bills—four of his vetoes were overridden with establishment Republican votes for such things as a massive water project bill, a massive farm bill, and more Medicare spending.

It bears repeating that Republicans never ever win big elections unless the election is nationalized and a bold contrast is drawn
between a conservative Republican agenda and the liberal Democratic agenda.

In Reagan’s 1980 and 1984 campaigns, he ran against the Big Government embraced by the Washington establishment of both parties, and he made it clear that his opponent and the Democrats were soft on communism by running against the détente with the Soviets embraced by the establishment of both parties.

In 1994 we achieved a historic turnover in the House by running against Hillarycare, and for term limits and a balanced budget.

In 2000 Republicans won the presidency, the House, and the Senate running against “Clinton fatigue,” and for fiscal responsibility and the conservative social agenda.

In 2010 Republicans won another historic turnover in the House by running against Obamacare and for an end to earmarks, out-of-control spending, and cronyism on Capitol Hill.

Establishment Republicans have still not learned the lesson that no one was going to work to get out the vote, raise money, and support a party that was merely “Democrats-lite” on spending, and stood for nothing more than keeping insiders in power.

There is no doubt the Republican Party developed a near-fatal case of split personality disease during the George W. Bush presidency, and in 2006 and 2008 it came close to death by irrelevance.

As the Bush presidency came to a close, there was a real question in the minds of many about whether or not the Republican Party could be revived—and if it was even worth reviving.