It would be easy, after all that’s happened with Mark Foley, to say that’s what going to cause Republicans to lose next month, but that’s not the whole story. When I step back (and I’m better at the big picture stuff, usually), I think there’s more going on here.
If the Republicans lose (and as John Podhoretz notes today, if Nancy Pelosi isn’t measuring for drapes, she’s just being polite), it will be about more than just Foley. It’s what the Foley affair represents – the ten years of “Republican Revolution” that have brought us to where we are.
This was supposed to be the party of big ideas, who gloated often and endlessly about their big ideas and big plans. They had theorists. They had policy papers and in-depth discussions. And well, here we are. What do Republicans stand for in this election? They stand, principally, for the proposition that should remain in power because, well, they are in power. That’s it.
The Foley Affair simply pulls together a group of threads already in play and crystallizes them around a clear idea – whatever it is Republicans are supposed to have stood for, those claims of credibility are gone. Power has bred corruption and the results are there for all to see:
- Fiscal responsibility? The largest deficits in years; no efforts to reign in spending. Bills loaded with pork projects designed to maintain and protect personal power and prerogatives.
- Ethical Standards? The destruction of the House Ethics Committee (no one credibly expects the committee to evaluate the Foley affair), the “K Street Project” linking Jack Abramoff’s scandals, Grover Norquist’s hazy puppet string pulling, Ralph Reed's religious politics, and Tom DeLay’s role as House enforcer.
- Moral Standards? Years of demonizing gays and the best they can come up with to excuse Foley is “we were afraid of being labeled antigay bigots?” Fanning flames of hysteria around child sex predators (distorting a clear issue on which everyone agrees), yet failing to protect the children most immediately in their care. Seeking a definition of “cruel punishment” that will allow for some forms of torture… because a clear standard that any excessive treatment is just too, you know, vague.
- Legal Standards? So distrustful of the Rule of our own Law that an extra-legal procedure has to be developed so that the guilty in Guantanamo can be, somehow, guiltier; never mind the innocent.
- Immigration Policy? No coherent attempt to address the complex issues of immigrants stuck in limbo due to INS beaurocracy; a mean-spirited, ham-fisted effort to play to the worst of our xenophobia and nativist tendencies.
- Prosecuting a War? Lax oversight of the Iraq War, no clear plan for managing the deterioration of conditions on the ground, no plan for reducing (or increasing, should it be necessary) troop levels, more wasteful spending and missed priorities.
At the Cato Institute this week, David Brooks made the point that the Conservative Agenda is simply nonexistent - he does it well into this long, windy exercise (I love Andrew Sullivan, I do, but he needs to cut to the chase… go to 1:15 or so in the Cato broadcast to see Brooks), and Sullivan rightly points out that Intolerance is an agenda, but Brooks is right. The right long ago gave away it’s deep philosophy, such as it was, for filthy lucre and the insatiable rush of power. They did it because their agenda turned out, ultimately, to be unpopular. And better to be liked than to be good.
Ezra Klein says, fairly, that Democrats don’t have a core philosophy to point to as an alternative, just a set of political tactics. I don’t entirely disagree – we’ve never been entirely coherent in our message. But the alternative is there – in managing the complexities better, taking in different viepoints on complicated issues, working to find compromises and solutions. We are not Republicans, and one reason their rigid, overly targeted agenda failed was in its very refusal to see gray rather than black and white. Our canvas is bigger, our sense of how to do this broader. We can do this. We’ve done it before.
As Americans, we’ve been so starved for any sense of what government can do, I suspect it will be a revelation just to see the small things work. And they will. When Democrats win.
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