Oui, la bataille est perdue; mais il n'est que trois heures; il reste le temps d'en gagner une autre. (Yes, the battle is lost, but it is only three o’clock. There is still time to win another.)
When a party reaches the point of trawling for reasons why the polls might be unanimously cockeyed, it is in rather desperate straits. Let us, like Napoleon’s general, state the obvious: If today were November 7th, the election results would fall somewhere between a stinging defeat and a catastrophic rout.
But it is only October 21st. “Il reste le temps d'en gagner une autre.” As my own modest contribution to the counterattack, I’d like to take a potshot at what has become the conventional wisdom of the right side of the blogosphere: that the Republican Party has a miserable record and that the only point in its favor is that the Democrats, as the party of Michael Moore and Ned Lamont and Al Sharpton and Howard Dean and John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, are palpably worse.
I disagree. This election is not like a “choice” between Hamas and al-Fatah or among the three brands of British leftism (Labour, Liberal Democrat or Cameronian Ex-Tory). The Republican Congress has a fine record that is disappointing to conservatives and libertarians only if they fail to recognize three blunt truths about our government:
There is no way that a party with a small majority in the House and too few Senate votes to stop filibusters can enact its entire program, particularly not when the opposition’s strategy is to obstruct as much as possible. Indeed, one of the purposes of the Democrats’ relentless negativism is to demoralize GOP supporters, to induce them to grumble, “A Republican majority hasn’t repealed the death tax and reformed Social Security and opened more land to oil exploration and miraculously fixed 50 years of immigration policy problems, so what good is it?”
The Republican Party is a center-right party, not a full-blooded conservative one. The less conservative elements are bound to get their way sometimes, watering down or derailing worthy initiatives. That is the price of real world politics. What we shouldn’t overlook is that Republicans in Congress today are considerably more conservative, on average, than they were 30 years ago. We are making progress; patience is in order.
Because power has not, and never will, lose its tendency to corrupt, the Republican ascendancy was bound to throw up its quota of rogues and scoundrels. Anyone who is under the amnesiac impression that the Democratic ascendancy was cleaner (or as clean) needs to read up on figures like Dan Rostenkowski, Jim Wright, Tony Coelho and the Abscam bribe gobblers. Instead of punishing the GOP for its inability to repeal the Fall of Man, we should credit it with taking a tougher line against wrongdoers than the Democrats ever did. It was the Republican caucus that made indictment a disqualification for leadership positions, a rule that the other party declines to adopt, and that swiftly jettisoned Duke Cunningam, Bob Ney, Mark Foley et al.. By contrast, the Democrats never could bring themselves to act against most of their malefactors until they were either in prison or defeated for reelection. All in all, Republican government has been less honest than the brightest hopes of 1994 but quite a bit better than what preceded it. As signs of what a change of parties will bring, consider that, even while out of power, Democratic legislators have been able to run up an impressive array of scandals, from William Jefferson’s “cold cash” to Alan Mollohan’s family earmarks to Harry Reid’s carefully concealed business deals with dubious characters in Las Vegas. The infamous Jack Abramoff has been pigeonholed as a Republican embarrassment, yet he directed a third of his campaign contributions (nearly half in the period just before his fall) to Democrats, and, to recycle an observation that I’ve quoted before,
“Jack as a Republican would often direct contributions to Republicans because he liked them, they were friends or he agreed with their positions that had nothing to do with his clients,” says one Abramoff friend. “But if Jack steered campaign cash to a Democrat you can bet that he wanted something in return for it.”
I don’t want to excuse failure, just emphasize that success in the face of virulent and frequently hysterical opposition is not easy. In the face of daunting obstacles, the Republican Congress has done quite a bit and would be able to do more if its majority were a little larger. To recap:
Tax cuts used to mean a lot to the Right, yet hardly anybody in the ranks of the discontented seems to remember that the miserable, undeserving-of-victory Republicans have reduced tax rates on ordinary income, dividends and capital gains, ameliorated the tax penalties for marriage, expanded tax incentives for retirement saving (made permanent, over Democratic foot dragging, in the recent Pension Protection Act), and made progress (hindered at every step by the Dems) toward repealing the death tax. The result has been an economy at least as buoyant as during the Clinton Administration, but resting on a solider foundation than the Internet exuberance of the Nineties.
Repetition seems to have dulled awareness, but a Republican Senate has made it possible to confirm a string of topnotch judges, culminating in Justices Roberts and Alito, despite Democratic filibusters. If the Democrats make big gains this year, they will read them as proof that there is no political price for their judicial antics, and it will be impossible to elevate highly qualified conservatives to the bench for the next two years. The lost opportunities are likely to include one or two Supreme Court appointments. Someone like Harriet Miers may be the best confirmable nominee for the next vacancy.
Welfare reform, a Republican initiative enacted during the Clinton years over strenuous Democratic opposition, was reauthorized last February without the gutting that its opponents had hoped to inflict. Shouldn’t the party get credit for continuing a program that has been one of the most unequivocally successful in U.S. history?
Since 1996, welfare rolls have been cut by almost 60 percent; 1.6 million fewer children live in poverty; the formerly persistent and rapid growth in illegitimacy rates has ended; and more single mothers are employed than ever before. States with the strictest work programs have experienced reductions of up to 80 percent in their welfare caseloads. The largest decrease in poverty has been among black children: By 2001, black child poverty was at its lowest level in history. Beginning in 1965, the rate of out-of-wedlock births — then 7.7 percent — grew by about 1 percent a year, rising to 32.2 percent in 1995. By contrast, the rate of increase in recent years has been a fraction of the former growth, and consequently about 1.5 million fewer children have been born out of wedlock than otherwise would have been. And the largest decline in dependency has been among the most disadvantaged single mothers: Employment of never-married mothers has increased by nearly 50 percent, and among the youngest of them (ages 18 to 24) it has almost doubled.
Free trade is vital to continued prosperity and is, or at least used to be, an important libertarian cause. Republican majorities in Congress ratified and implemented the Central American Free Trade Agreement over solid Democratic opposition, and it is a near certainty that a Democrat-controlled Congress won’t extend the President’s “fast track” authority to negotiate trade agreements, thus effectively dooming trade liberalization for years to come.
The Republican Congress has not been frugal. That no one can deny, and we all laughed when Tom DeLay tried to insist that “all the fat” had been cut from the federal porker. But there is spending and spending. With the lone exception of the Medicare prescription drug program, a policy blunder inspired by political miscalculation, Republicans have refrained from creating new entitlement programs that further preempt future revenues. Even Medicare Part D had its silver lining, for it became the vehicle for introducing health savings accounts, the first step toward rolling back the tide of dirigisme and bureaucracy in health care. Needless to say, HSA’s, because they reintroduce a modicum of market discipline into medical decisions, are anathema to the Dems. We can be sure that pending legislation to enhance them will go nowhere under Speaker Pelosi.
The biggest example of the “So what have you done for me lately mentality?” that I’ve seen in years comes from a Cato libertarian, obviously a Second Amendment advocate, who lambastes the GOP for not having abolished the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. That step is, of course, well beyond the Art of the Possible. On the other hand, Republicans did succeed in passing laws to prevent lawsuits punishing gun manufacturers for the acts of criminals and barring gun seizures under the pretext of natural disasters. More broadly, the party’s firm defense of gun owners’ legitimate rights has been a big factor in turning this issue from a political minus to one where Dems do all they can to hide their desire to ban private ownership of firearms.
Vote fraud is a growing threat to our democratic institutions, as John Fund details in Stealing Elections, one of the two or three books that every voter ought to read this year. (Two others are Mark Steyn’s America Alone and Jim Geraghty’s Voting to Kill.) In an effort to make chicanery more difficult, the House has passed legislation requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls. Almost every Democrat voted “no”, and the chances of final enactment by a Democrat-controlled Congress are nil.
I’ve left the War on Terror till last on this list, though it is, of course, first in importance. A Republican Congress renewed the key provisions of the Patriot Act, such as the authorization of information sharing between law enforcement and intelligence agencies, to lapse. By contrast, Harry Reid boasted that his party’s opposition had “killed the Patriot Act”. Happily, he was wrong. The GOP also responded promptly to judicial interference with the war by passing the Military Commissions Act. The Democrats would have either done nothing or enacted a bill of rights for terrorists.
The war is an area where the choice between the parties is unusually stark. Under a Democratic Congress, funding might continue, but it would depend upon a fragile coalition between Republicans and dissident Democrats. The Soros-MoveOn wing of the party, invigorated by election victories, would surely demand that the Democratic caucus majority punish members who deviated from the “bug out now” policy. Meanwhile, Congressional committees would harass the Administration with hearings and investigations pushing all the paranoid theories that have taken root in Democratic soil. Along the way, intelligence secrets would be revealed, foreign allies undermined, anti-American propaganda prepackaged for worldwide dissemination, and our soldiers in the field demoralized. Vietnam demonstrated that it is impossible to win a war that Congress is determined to lose. We don’t need to repeat that lesson.
Discontent with the Republican record isn’t groundless. The party has done far less than Newt Gingrich promised in the Contract With America. On the other hand, it has done quite a bit more than seemed “realistic” in 1992. Had anyone told me then that, by 2006, the United States would have lower tax rates, successful welfare reform, a Social Security debate in which individual accounts were a mentionable option, a trend away from protectionism, and no national health system, I would have scoffed. Now that the future I didn’t predict has arrived, I’m not ready to scuttle the guys who brought it about.
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