The most remarkable thing about last night’s over whelming GOP victory in the midterm elections is the utter lack of triumphalism.
“This is not a time for celebration,” said John Boehner, the main who’ll become speaker of the House, last night.
In 1994, riding their previous tsunami, Republicans literally danced in the Washington streets and partied for 48 hours. In 2008, Democrats wept and sang. There was none of this last night, even though the GOP victory might have been larger and more decisive than either of those.
The spirit of the evening was captured best by the most important GOP victor, the come-from-nowhere Floridian Marco Rubio — whose brilliant and imaginative campaign for Senate has already placed him on everyone’s short list of possible presidents down the road.
“This is a second chance for Republicans to be what they said they were going to be,” Rubio said.
Rubio’s words were echoed nationwide. No Republican I heard dared to claim the election represented a positive endorsement of his or her party — which must be a first in political history. This is a rueful GOP. A 60-plus seat win in the House and significant gains in the Senate have not given the victors a reason to gloat.
The polls tell the tale: The party is unpopular, viewed favorably by maybe a quarter of the American people — even as 36 percent of them told exit pollsters last night they were Republicans. This means a third of self-described Republicans don’t have a positive view of the Republican Party.
This has created a dynamic new to politics: The party that won this election did so because it has explicitly promised to oppose. That’s not the usual path to victory. The GOP resisted the proposition that it needed to provide a positive governing agenda as it did in 1994 (instead, a confusing and uninteresting general statement of principles was produced and instantly forgotten).
Nobody cares what the GOP might want to enact. Instead, the voters want the GOP to oppose, block and prevent.
They want the GOP to oppose any further expansion of government, and block any new programs the president and his party might want. A major corollary to this is a general desire to see the size of government reduced, though how this is to be accomplished no one actually knows.
They want the GOP to block tax increases, which presents the party with an enormous challenge given the expiration of the Bush tax cuts will happen automatically on Dec. 31.
And they want the GOP to prevent the imposition of ObamaCare, which will only be fully implemented starting in 2013.
The problem for the Republican Party — the problem that accounts for the sobriety with which it greeted the news last night — is that its elected officials in Washington have no way to accomplish all that much.
They can probably keep the size of government from growing to some degree, but if the president opposes significant tax cutting, Republicans GOP can’t prevail over his veto.
Whatever efforts they adopt to defund aspects of ObamaCare will meet with its namesake’s vitriolic opposition.
Unless Republicans can meet the voters in 2012 with something to show for what they were given last night, they will find themselves treated with scorn and derision — and with third-party insurgents interested in trying an even more radical path to reforming government.
The election was indeed a referendum on Barack Obama. But the grant of power his opponents received last night is conditional, and will be hard to fulfill. No wonder nobody’s dancing.
johnpodhoretz@gmail.com