Why do we have to use storm metaphors for the Republican election victory? Storms are destructive. I prefer to think of the outcome as a construction project that came in ahead of time and under budget, like the highway rebuilding after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 (California’s last First World accomplishment). Of course, much still must be done. A government is a road that is never finished.
It’s not likely that I have any insights that improve on what’s readily available on the Internet, so the goal of this post is merely to put my own thoughts into order.
Around the dexterosphere, there seems to be universal agreement that the voters wanted to punish Democratic failures more than they wanted to reward the Republican Party. That is the biggest difference between 2010 and 1994. Newt Gingrich’s victory was the triumph of a positive vision. President Clinton had certainly blundered a number of times (Hillarycare, the proposed BTU tax, the income and Medicare tax increases, the “don’t ask, don’t tell” fiasco), but he was intensely unpopular among only a small slice of the public, the economy was in decent, if not superlative, shape, and all foreign policy annoyances seemed to have vanished with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In 2010, close to a majority of voters “strongly disapprove” of the Democratic President’s policies, the economy is making its slowest post-recession recovery ever, America’s position in the world is falling apart, and the Democrats’ signature achievement, health care reform, is widely unpopular. What opposition party couldn’t win under those circumstances?
The trouble with “had enough?” victories is that they don’t last. The most famous was in 1946, when the GOP picked up both the House and the Senate. Two years later, the Democrats won back both houses and kept the Presidency. Repealing wage-price controls, passing the Taft-Hartley Act and ignoring the “Fair Deal” were good for the country but not sufficient to ward off the fatal “Do Nothing Congress” label.
It’s a good thing that very few conservatives seem to harbor illusions about realignment, inevitable future victories and the like, and realize that it isn’t possible to row a boat forward with only one oar. Unfortunately, recognizing a problem isn’t the same as solving it.
The great post-election imponderable is how President Obama will react. Actually, there are two imponderables: What will he try to do, and how competently will he do it? I have no idea of the answer to either question, though I wonder whether a figure with such high self-esteem can be chastened by other people’s defeats. Don’t his party’s losses merely demonstrate how much inferior the rest of them are to The One?
One reason why the Right’s irrational exuberance is restrained is the Republicans’ relatively tepid Senate pickup: probably five seats when the consensus forecast was seven or more. True, the consensus a year ago was that the Democrats were likely to gain seats, having fewer to defend and generally more favorable terrain. Back then, it was realistic to foresee Republican losses in New Hampshire, North Carolina, Florida (all carried by Obama, two of them open seats, one with a not very popular incumbent) and Louisiana (incumbent hit by scandal), with no offsets except North Dakota and, more doubtfully, Arkansas. But that was then. The expectations game has turned yesterday’s stunning string of victories into today’s disappointment.
Some of the narrow defeats confirm some of my “don’t get cocky” concerns: In Colorado, the Democrats were unenthusiastic, but they dutifully came to the polls, spurred by one of the country’s best GOTV machines. Nevada and Washington are places where fraud is easy. (Nevada has plenty of corruption; Washington doesn’t have a secret ballot.) It’s noteworthy that, outside the epicenters of ballot finagling (Clark and King Counties), Republicans did well, gaining a House seat in each state (possibly two in Washington if Joe Koster’s 400 vote margin holds up in the 2nd District).
The major lesson of the Senate races, though, is a familiar one: the importance of recruiting top-flight candidates. This election cycle was challenging for Republican Senate recruiters, because prospects were so gloomy at the start. Only a few formidable candidates were willing to take the risk. Thus the GOP wound up playing its second string. Ken Buck is a great guy (and a better candidate than Jane Norton would have been), but state’s attorney in Greeley isn’t exactly a high profile position, nor are campaigns in the “good old boy” corner of Colorado the ideal preparation for a statewide race. In Nevada, Brian Sandoval could have demolished Harry Reid, but that wasn’t obvious when he decided to run for governor instead, leaving the Senate primary field to three fairly weak choices. In New York, Republicans couldn’t even find a serious candidate against blue-dog-turned-lapdog Kirsten Gillibrand.
Good candidates aren’t everything, even in what turned out to be a generally good year. That brings us to the cycle’s most seriously awful result: California – yesteryear the engine of American economic growth and a cornerstone of Republican election strategy; today a Democratic bastion with, not coincidentally, a verging-on-Third-World economy. Political historians will get many a book out of accounting for this trajectory. My own tentative opinion is that the principal agents were Pete Wilson’s elevation of immigration to the status of a defining issue, a gambit that saved his RINO-ish administration at the cost of disaffecting the state’s fastest growing group of voters, and the legislative reapportionment after the 2000 census, which gerrymandered into office an unbreakable Democratic majority whose members had nothing to fear but primary opposition from left-wingers and creatures of the public employees’ unions. The latter condition may not continue, since the next redistricting will be in the hands of a (supposedly) nonpartisan panel. That’s a ray of hope. The trouble is, the state may go the way of Greece before a more competitive legislature can come into being, and Voice of Liberalism Past Jerry Brown will stand athwart reform shouting “Stop!”.
Let me end, though, by highlighting an unexpected bright spot: In Iowa, where the Republican “wave” was a mild sloshing, three Supreme Court justices who had discovered a “right” to same-sex marriage in the state constitution lost their retention elections by 55-to-45 margins. Whatever one thinks of homosexual unions as a policy matter, it’s heartening to see the voters reject judicial irresponsibility.