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Friday 10 February 2012

If Dick Cheney had won the Republican nomination last year...

Tuesday, 28th April 2009

Ross Douthat's debut column for the New York Times begins with a good joke, designed (one might think) to have the Upper West Side howling that all the talk of young Mr Douthat being a conservative we can do business with must be so much baloney:

Watching Dick Cheney defend the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, it’s been hard to escape the impression that both the Republican Party and the country would be better off today if Cheney, rather than John McCain, had been a candidate for president in 2008.

But Ross makes a persuasive case that the country could have benefitted from a discussion of national security and interrogation policies during the campaign and, vitally, that Cheney's landslide defeat would have awoken the GOP to the fact that the electorate did not decide to elect a Democrat to puish the GOP for having abandoned the comforting rigours of conservative orthodoxy. But that, alas, is the message it has imagined for itself.

And what has this brought? Well, a narrow loss in an upstate New York congressional race in which the Democratic candidate was, of all things, a former investment banker making his political debut in a district that, while close, had historically favoured Republicans. More significantly, it's brought a renewed assualt upon Senator Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania. Specter is a "poor" Republican and not much of a conservative and he's in trouble as he fights off a primary challenger from Pat Toomey. This is the race that excites conservatives, while questions about how to recapture once solidly Republican Virginia and Colorado attract little interest at all. There is next to no evidence to suppose that, absent an economic apocalypse, Toomey can win a general election in increasingly-Democratic PA.

But what does that matter? Nothing! Seats in the Senate are for wimps and losers and appeasers and all the rest of it. The GOP is intent upon proving the Seriousness of its Conservatism that it will willingly throw away a seat for a generation to prove a point to other fainthearts in the party.

As a way of cheering yourself up this may be good sport, but it lacks a certain seriousness if reviving an exhausted party and returning to power is your idea of progress. Events may, as they tend to, decree otherwise and it may well be that the Obama administration will crumple but presuming that is not, it seems to me, a wise bet for the GOP to make. And yet there we are. As it happens there is a good fiscal case to be made against the long-term spending plans Obama is proposing. But the hysterical fashion in which too much of the the GOP too often seems to approach policy makes getting that mesage across to people who aren't already true believers more difficult than it need be.

The United States is changing. The GOP can decide whether it will change too or whether it will insist that the old tunes just need to be played more loudly. So, yes, there's something in Ross's suggestion that Candidate Cheney might have helped advance this debate.

Too late, much too late now of course. And of course pickin McCain was - at the time - the most sensible move the GOP could have made last year. It's only in retrospect that Cheney might have been the more useful loser.

Filed under: Americana (459 more articles) , GOP (304 more articles)

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porkbelly

April 28th, 2009 2:17am Report this comment

The New York Times on the best way forward for the Republican Party is like Der Sturmer on the best way forward for European Jewry.

Josh M

April 28th, 2009 4:32am Report this comment

"The GOP can decide whether it will change too or whether it will insist that the old tunes just need to be played more loudly."

On the one hand, it's obviously correct that the current GOP platform is a political loser right now. On the other hand, isn't this the same thing everyone told the Democrats in 2002/4 after getting whomped in successive election cycles, but in reverse? In the end, what brought Democrats back to power was not getting more conservative, or running a military hero (the logic behind the Kerry choice), but enjoying the out-of-power benefits of letting the incumbents screw everything up.

It may not be 2010 when the pendulum swings back again, but an emboldened, large-majority Democratic government will eventually screw things up and the GOP will pick up seats again.

Ronnie

April 28th, 2009 6:56am Report this comment

You are 50% right Josh M. The GOP can't just sit back and wait, it must begin to exude competence and inclusive common sense or it will remain an ever-shrinking sect and voter- repellent.

For example, in the UK it is definitely the Conservatives' 'turn' but many people are unsure because the party still seems unprepared for government.

David

April 28th, 2009 7:29am Report this comment

It would have been the Conservative's turn in 2005, but the party was still seen significantly to the the right of the electorate.

There is no guarantee that the US electorate will simply swing back to the GOP as a pendulum. As things stand, the GOP is turning into a dogmatic echo chamber, and in doing so will appeal to a smaller and smaller hard core. It can't win like that. And won't.

Jake

April 28th, 2009 11:23am Report this comment

No, no, no - the fundamentals remain the same, Alex, we are under attack. This is just your defence version of the Conservatives policy to stick with Labour's spending targets.

If you want to make long-term headway in American politics, defence is a long-term hold.

Massie, you are a disgrace.

Conservative Cabbie

April 28th, 2009 12:18pm Report this comment

No doubt someone will report on the latest WaPo poll which shows Republican ID at 21% and use it as evidences of the GOP's terminal decline. The only thing I would say to this, and to David, Ronnie and Mr Massie, is that in the most recent important poll, the election, the GOP still won 47% of the vote. And that was with decidedly unpropitious circumstances.

I agree that the GOP are on the ropes. But isn't that a fact when it comes to parties falling out of power - that they move towards their more extreme base before moving back to the middle. That's what happened to post-Carter Democrats, post-Callaghan Labour and post-Thatcher/Major tories. I would suggest that this process is even more pronounced in America due to the lack of a party leader.

James Forsyth

April 28th, 2009 1:01pm Report this comment

Isn't it odd that the NYT is going to run its two conservative columnists on the same day?

YouCannotBeSerious!

April 28th, 2009 1:20pm Report this comment

Conservatives actually came very close to depriving Labour of an overall majority in 2005. If memory serves, I think if 30,000 people had voted differently in the 35 most marginal seats, there would have been a hung parliament. Indeed with a more voter-friendly leader than Howard, the Tories could well have become the largest party. There was no love for Labour during the 2005 campaign, who won largely by default.

xochi

April 28th, 2009 5:14pm Report this comment

Wow, porkbelly. Godwin's Law is in effect, and so quickly. Such knee jerk responses to the NYT as the great nemesis of the Republican Party are a window into exactly why they are in the situation they are. The party has been fueling itself by these kinds of petty rivalries for a long time, and the general public is less inclined to care. As I am typing this, it's been announced that Sen. Arlen Specter has just defected to the Democratic Party (long story, but suffice it to say that it will make it that much more difficult for Republicans to keep that seat), and the hopes of a rational conservatism coming to the fore are that much more unlikely.