There is a growing consensus that the partisan power struggle in Washington has shifted somewhat in the direction of the Republicans. Will anyone draw the right lesson?
The Republicans weren’t cowed into submitting to new tax hikes by the Obama administration’s campaign against the across-the-board spending cuts mandated by the “sequester” — the very trigger the administration had originally proposed back in 2011.
To the surprise of just about everyone — liberals who believed the anti-GOP blowback would “break the fever” that had supposedly turned Republicans into maniacs, as well as conservatives who no longer trusted their own sense of the national electorate — President Obama’s tactic backfired.
The public hasn’t risen in anger at the GOP; instead, polls suggest Obama has fallen back to earth after flying high post-election, with approval ratings about where they’d been when it was far from clear he would win last year. They also suggest the parties are now at parity when it comes to which is more trusted on the economy.
This leaves us back at Square One. Republican politicians in Washington are confident they’re demonstrating to the voters who elected them that the GOP hasn’t been rendered ineffectual by the wizard in the White House. Democrats are still hankering after increased tax revenues but must now wait for the next budget crisis — and hope that the politics shift somewhat back in their favor.
This is a cautionary tale for most of us, who find it impossible during the heat of any political moment to remember the single most salient truth about politics: Things change.
We think harsh new restrictions on gun ownership are inevitable in December — and then watch as they peter out in March once they face significant opposition.
We think Republicans’ deeply reluctant assent to tax hikes in December means their ability to resist more tax increases in the future has been compromised, but then Obama overplays his hand and makes them seem reasonable again.
The Democratic Party’s outright advocacy of big government — forced upon it by the logic of opposing the sequester — is an important reminder that its default positions are highly problematic at best.
Indeed, the Democratic Party may be closer to the center than the GOP is right now, but that’s due in part to the fact that since the passage of ObamaCare in 2010 its unpopular agenda items (gun control, for example) have been on the back burner. Obama rode to re-election by highlighting controversial Republican ideas, not by pushing his own.
Once again, we’ve been given a real-world education in politics we will soon forget in the next hot moment. Last week, for example, important columnists and thinkers were seriously debating whether the Republican Party would ultimately survive the unhappy results in Iraq.
Oh, please. I have been as critical as anyone of the GOP’s blind spots, but this kind of talk is ridiculous.
The two major American parties are the largest, loosest, and longest-lived political coalitions in the world, and the dynamic between them remains as fluid as ever.
In 1988, the elder George Bush won the third straight GOP presidential victory by 8 points, with 40 states and 426 electoral votes. He lost to the Democrat Bill Clinton four years later by 5 points. Since 1994, control of the Senate and the House has shifted between the parties three times. The story is told and retold throughout the history of the United States since the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865.
History doesn’t end. Issues aren’t resolved. The fight between those who would enlarge government and those would restrict its size will be never-ending, and will never have a victor.