Everybody always says Republicans are uncool, out of step. They’re old, they’re white. Face it, they have no rhythm.
This is, of course, a wild overstatement, for many of them excel at the rhumba, not to mention the carioca.
No, what Republicans seem to lack is political rhythm. Timing. They go after their primary enemy with vigor and force — but they strike too
soon.
As Adm. James T. Kirk told the genetically superior Khan in that peerless work of hard-headed political science, “Star Trek 2,” “You’ve managed to kill everyone else, but like a poor marksman, you keep missing the target!”
Twice now, Republicans have “killed everyone else,” in the form of rallying their own troops and others to punish the incumbent; and twice now, their actions only served to strengthen their opponent’s hand when they had to face him directly.
(I understand that I am likening Republicans to Khan, which is not nice, and I apologize. But he is genetically superior to Kirk and Spock and everybody else — plus he was played by the awesome Ricardo Montalban, so that’s nice, too.)
In 1992, George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton, who is now thought of as some kind of political genius — but he sure didn’t seem like one in 1993, when he made a hash of his first six months in office, raised taxes and then released a crazily overcomplicated health-care plan his wife had cooked up.
Republicans pounced. A frenzied grass-roots campaign, led in part by the newly powerful medium of AM talk radio and particularly a guy by the name of Rush Limbaugh, stirred passions as never before. The statism they feared most had been embraced by the other side; they would not take it lying down.
A year later, when the dust had cleared, the Clinton plan was dead and Republicans had scored the most decisive midterm election triumph in history in 1994.
They won 52 seats and took control of the House of Representatives, which had been in Democratic hands for — I’m not joking — 40 consecutive years. They also took back the Senate.
In so doing, they saved Bill Clinton from himself. He gazed out at the nation and realized he’d gone too far left. He also knew he wasn’t going to get any legislation through a Congress intent on holding down the size of government. He picked fights with them on Medicare and on a shutdown of the federal government and won them. But he also declared “the era of big government is over” and signed welfare reform, which horrified many liberals.
The Republican brake on his ambitions made it possible for him to win re-election, and he did. The GOP wanted to take him out, but the grass-roots mobilization came far too soon for that. What happened afterward didn’t generate similar passion, and they missed the target.
Eerily similar to the last few years, no?
Barack Obama came into office, muscled through an $860 billion stimulus, concocted a partial nationalization of the auto industry and then forced ObamaCare on a recalcitrant nation after a year of pushing. Only a few months into his tenure, the most effective and spontaneous grass-roots movement in American history arose almost out of nowhere.
The Tea Party organized itself, dedicated to the proposition that Obama was changing America in fundamental ways and in opposition to the vision of the Founding Fathers.
In November 2010, when the dust cleared, the GOP had made history with the most lopsided partisan midterm sweep ever — 63 house seats and 738 legislative victories at the state and local level. A “shellacking,” Obama called it.
Once again, the GOP slammed the brake on the president’s new initiatives. Once again, he used their ideological opposition to government spending to his advantage in a showdown on the debt ceiling in 2011. Obama did not say “the era of big government is over,” and he did not sign Republican legislation, but he also had a larger constituency than Clinton (he’d won 53 percent of the vote compared to 43 for Clinton in 1992) and therefore less of a need to compromise.
Sure, the GOP wanted control of the House. But what it and its rank-and-file wanted most was to take Obama down.
Instead, after Obama’s shellacking two years ago, the GOP got shellacked right back.
This may be the real reason the GOP needs more women and blacks and Hispanics. Because, in the words of those great political philosophers, the Go-Gos, those Democratic constituencies “got the beat, they got the beat, they got the beat. Yeah — they got the beat.”