RSS Feed MenuOne of the questions here at Frum Forum is whether the conservative movement can become a majority and also, whether it can command in the future given the views of youth and various demographic changes. Various criticisms of the Mount Vernon Statement, Sarah Palin and CPAC all contain this theme. But what made conservatives successful from 1980 to 2006? For a quarter of a century, the Republican Party retained the presidency except when Bill Clinton ran. It held the Senate for most of that period, and for the first time in half a century also held the House for more than a decade. In my view the Republican response to the endgame of the Cold War, the excesses of the regulatory state (including its destruction of the underclass family) and taxation drove this dominance.
But politically that is not the key. Ronald Reagan, and in his way, Newt Gingrich, were extraordinary political talents, as was Bill Clinton. The gains and triumphs of the liberal and conservative leaning parties were achieved in part and magnified by those personalities when they occurred. But with tepid politicians like the first George Bush and a speaker like Denny Hastert, Republicans still won. I think the key is the Presidency of Jimmy Carter which capped the 1970’s. Jimmy Carter gave a host of people who had never voted Republican (or just for Nixon over McGovern) permission to vote Republican. The extent of Jimmy Carter and the Democratic majorities’ failure drove conservative success. Catholic white ethnics (as they used to be called) of the eastern states, and Southerners all started pulling the lever for Republicans and actually fearing the return of Democratic politicians.
The reasons may be attributed to this or that policy but overall it was the memory of not only failure, but incompetence. The stagflation and weakness abroad that Jimmy Carter and his vast Democratic majorities in the legislature could not reverse, branded a generation. The most liberal portion of the Democratic base always blamed it on Carter and his failure to be more liberal (hence the Kennedy challenge in 1980). Americans under thirty do not remember that time. I do not think their overwhelming fealty to Barack Obama and the Democrats is unrelated to this.
There is now great ferment on the Right. Its various factions have fractured and often view each other with enmity and contempt. But a generational gift may be forming for conservatives in the form of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party he leads. The most liberal member of the U.S. Senate, with the most fawning press coverage of any presidential candidate achieved the presidency. He is a man of sterling personal character, with an attractive family, and holds the credentialist baubles of degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law. With him came enormous Democratic majorities. He also had a perceived crisis and the leeway to address it in the manner he chose. And it is not working. Everywhere President Obama’s policies face someone who opposes them, they lose. Enormous and growing deficits projected to run forever, combined with high unemployment is not a winning formula.
By themselves President Obama and the Democrats may be discrediting liberal governance. Conservatives, it strikes me, are correct to reaffirm their principles and oppose him. The failure of President Obama and the Democrats’ polices may discredit them for a generation. But the GOP will need to have a plan to do something different that works if they are to cement the sea change that is in the offing. As Michael Barone notes you do not want to be the dog that catches the car and has no plans on what to do with it.
rbottoms // Feb 22, 2010 at 4:19 am
Everywhere President Obama’s policies face someone who opposes them, they lose. Enormous and growing deficits projected to run forever, combined with high unemployment is not a winning formula.
Obama may have stumbled, due in part to not appreciating he was being suckered the GOP’s vote NO on everything and slow down the rest approach.
From here out Obama will be hitting the Republicans square in the mouth. Couple that with a stabilized economy and most importantly not letting GOP members berate his initiatives in public while begging for funds in private.
The teabaggers and militia nuts like the IRS airplane attacker ill do the rest to show the swing voters who the extremists really are.
oldgal // Feb 22, 2010 at 9:46 am
Speaking of policy failures, folks are unlikely to forget who got us into these “perceived crises”.
Carney // Feb 22, 2010 at 10:26 am
Good point, oldgal.
For instance, Bush and the Democrats trying to outbid each other for “minority” support by pressuring and/or forcing lenders to hand out loans to specified groups at rates too low to make up for the predictably high default rates, or be hounded as “redliners” or even prosecuted. In effect, lenders were required to take on toxic bad debt as a cost of doing business, then excoriated for “irresponsibility” when the inevitable collapse came.
sinz54 // Feb 22, 2010 at 10:29 am
rbottoms:
The Dems had 60 votes in the Senate. The GOP couldn’t stop or slow down anything–if the Dems in the Senate were committed to Obama’s agenda.
They weren’t.
It wasn’t the GOP that shredded Obama’s agenda.
It was Baucus and the other Blue Dog Dems–combined with the utter incompetence of Harry Reid.
Twice GOP moderates tried to work with Harry Reid: Olympia Snowe on health care, and Grassley on the jobs bill. Twice, Reid shot them down and did his own thing. One week after that, Bayh announced his retirement from the Senate.
You liberals made a BIG mistake: To win a majority in Congress, you ran moderate and even center-right Dems in Red States. And it worked. You got your majority.
But it’s not a LIBERAL majority, like the one LBJ had in 1965.
Too bad for you.
sinz54 // Feb 22, 2010 at 10:36 am
I would like to get back to the original question raised by Mr. Vecchione.
For starters, let’s talk about SEX. (All right, now that I’ve got your attention….)
Every generation of young people experiments with sex and sexual freedom. And today’s generation of young people have parents who did the same. Many are born into single-parent families. Some have gay parents. And all young people are tolerant of each other’s sexual proclivities.
Another reason for tolerance is that today’s generation of young people grew up on the Internet. They’re accustomed to discussing all kinds of things with their counterparts all over the world. On the Internet, national boundaries don’t exist.
The GOP will never reach such people as long as it acts like a bunch of moral scolds. Kathryn Jean Lopez of the National Review keeps railing against birth control, which she regards as having contributed to America’s moral decay. To young people today, that’s sounds totally Neanderthal.
It also won’t reach such people if it acts insular, fearing immigrants and so forth.
Young people are concerned about their economic future. They’re increasingly aware that they will have to pay for the health care of the baby-boomer generation.
So there is an opportunity there, if the GOP concentrates on a bright, optimistic, economic message. But it has to drop the messages of scolding and exclusion.
balconesfault // Feb 22, 2010 at 10:58 am
For instance, Bush and the Democrats trying to outbid each other for “minority” support by pressuring and/or forcing lenders to hand out loans to specified groups at rates too low to make up for the predictably high default rates, or be hounded as “redliners” or even prosecuted.
And remarkably, despite being brilliant businessmen, Wall Street traders took those “predictably high default rate” loans, bought and rebought them many times over in the guise of various financial instruments, until we had a 47 trillion dollar credit default swap market that was poised to bring down all their institutions.
Are you going to explain the pressure that Bush and the Democrats must have put on the rating companies to get them to place high ratings on this pile of crap … or on AIG to get them to insure much of it?
All because of some dubious “pressure” that the government somehow put on lenders … that wasn’t even encoded in law. Government also pressured the financial industry to heavily market adjustable rate loans, right?
And it certainly had nothing to do with loan agents who made massive piles of money in commissions promising poor and middle class Americans that an ever increasing real estate market that would allow them to refinance before their rates exploded.
Naah – unfettered greed had no part in the financial collapse. It was poor people and the pressure they put on Bush and the Dems. That’s the kind of forward thinking that will bring the GOP back to relevance.
dragonlady // Feb 22, 2010 at 1:01 pm
sinz54: “The GOP will never reach such people as long as it acts like a bunch of moral scolds.” Actually, successful GOP leaders (Brown, McDonnell, etc.) and tea party movement has been emphasizing fiscal conservatism as their main theme. Not much discussion lately on sex–even on the DADT issue. Yeah, there’s always a group of moral scolds in every political tent but I don’t think that is plaguing the GOP right now. There are lot of good economic ideas coming out…see Paul Ryan’s plan, the Tea Party talking up the fair tax, etc. We may not agree with it all, but like William Kristol said, it’s time to let the 1000 flowers bloom. Sooner or later though, we need fresh political leadership to start charting a coherent platform out of all those ideas.
garlic // Feb 23, 2010 at 11:06 am
“The most liberal member of the U.S. Senate…” was what John Kerry was called when he ran against Bush. Both Obama and Kerry were more liberal than Ted Kennedy?
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