Whenever anyone wants to understand why I criticize the GOP’s recent discovery of fiscal restraint, it is because of this falsehood and the repetition of this falsehood as the central political lesson of the last few years. One cannot separate this embarrassing revisionism about the causes of Republican political woes from the general culture of mendacity that typified the years of unified Republican rule, and this is something that conservatives cannot afford to indulge even when it yields modest improvements in rhetoric and Congressional votes.
It seems to me that only a very stupid, very ill-informed or very partisan person could possibly believe that cutting back on spending would have saved the Republicans from ignominious defeat in 2006 and 2008. For one thing, it was the center-left party that won both times, and they won not just by consolidating their base regions (though the Democrats did that both times) but also by aggressively carving up Republican territory in the Midwest, the Confederate border states, and the Southwest. President Obama even managed to win an electoral vote in Nebraska. I suppose it is possible for all of this to be consistent with the Repubs' center-right nation meme, but in order for that to be correct, one would expect to find Democrats in very conservative areas getting elected solely because of vote-splitting between Republicans and parties even more to the right of the GOP, like the Libertarians or the Constitution Party. The GOP being too liberal would necessarily open a political space for even more rightism, and one would figure that parties like those would flourish.
In fact, those parties are just about as marginalized as they've ever been, because there really isn't much political space to the right of the GOP. It seems curious for these ostensible right-wingers to not only vote for substantially more liberal politicians in 2006, but then to re-elect them at staggering rates in 2008, if the point was merely to punish an insufficiently conservative GOP. So, for anyone with even a moderate understanding of current events and political realities, and a bit of logic, this theory doesn't really make sense, but I understand the purpose of it. I'm sure there are lots of Republicans who realize that the party needs to moderate--I suspect that they know this and are waiting for now because that message won't fly until after the Palin-DeMint ticket loses 47 states in 2012.
And then there's some nuttiness here, courtesy of Laura Ingraham:
"Democrats gained power by going to the most liberal senator in the U.S. Senate and they ran him for the presidency and they won," Laura Ingraham, a conservative talk-radio host said on Fox News Sunday. "They were relentlessly attacking George Bush for several years from the left. They didn't move to the middle and the idea that Republicans now have to move to the middle – what, beyond John McCain's middle?"
The "most liberal senator" remark is moronic. Obama's not more liberal than Bernie Sanders, an actual self-proclaimed Socialist. But the notion that just because the Democrats won by moving to the left makes becoming more extreme the right strategy anytime is simply silly. But what Republicans are missing is that they seem to think that Democrats won by taking their existing issue set, circa 2004, and just made it more left-wing. This was certainly not the case. The Democrats moved to the left on the economy and the war, but more to the right on guns, and in general they deemphasized social issues altogether. Running Bob Casey in Pennsylvania is a good example of this--he's socially conservative but in most other respects he's a conventional liberal.
Republicans probably could make some gains by following Pelosi's model. Indeed, let's say that the GOP decides to pick three major themes for 2010: immigration (Protect our borders!), spending (Taxing our grandchildren!) and let's say corruption. Go after Murtha hard, make him the poster boy. What the Pelosi strategy would entail would mean the GOP giving up indefensible positions--for example, they could allow candidates to criticize Bush for something other than spending. Then, via the Pelosi strategy, they'd recruit candidates who have heterodox views on issues other than these three that could win in their areas. So, for example, running a libertarianish Republican in New England who is unabashedly pro-choice and pro-gay, opposed Iraq from the beginning, but believes in cutting spending, government reform and restricting immigration. That might or might not work, but it would require prioritizing certain issues over others--something called creating a strategy--instead of blanketing the known universe with generically anti-Obama bile.
You see, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid weren't under the illusion that they'd somehow get a liberal elected out of Indiana in 2006, but they correctly figured they could get some socially conservative, economically populist candidates elected, which furthered their strategy. And that built up Democratic momentum to get an actual liberal to carry the state in 2008. I do question whether such a strategy would yield gains for Republicans if Obama remains popular, though I don't doubt it would work better than the going more conservative across the board approach.
