While the nation’s attention remains focused on the Presidential race, the battle for Congress matters even more and there are signs that 2008 could end up solidifying the losses that the GOP suffered in 2006:
Shellshocked House Republicans got warnings from leaders past and present Tuesday: Your party’s message isn’t good enough to prevent disaster in November, and neither is the NRCC’s money.
The double shot of bad news had one veteran Republican House member worrying aloud that the party’s electoral woes — brought into sharp focus by Woody Jenkins’ loss to Don Cazayoux in Louisiana on Saturday — have the House Republican Conference splitting apart in “everybody for himself” mode.
“There is an attitude that, ‘I better watch out for myself, because nobody else is going to do it,’” the member said. “There are all these different factions out there, everyone is sniping at each other, and we have no real plan. We have a lot of people fighting to be the captain of the lifeboat instead of everybody pulling together.”
Isn’t that what people usually do when they realize that the ship is sinking ? And, like it or not, it’s fairly clear that the Republican ship is on an unsteady course to say the very least.
Something even Newt Gingrich has recognized:
In a piece published in Human Events, the Republicans’ onetime captain, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, warned his old colleagues that they face “real disaster” on Election Day unless they move immediately to “chart a bold course of real reform” for the country.
(…)
Gingrich said Republicans cannot rely on the popularity of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, to carry them to victory in November. And he warned that attacks on Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s former pastor, could backfire.
“The Republican brand has been so badly damaged that if Republicans try to run an anti-Obama, anti-Rev. Wright or, if Sen. Clinton wins, anti-Clinton campaign, they are simply going to fail,” Gingrich said. “This model has already been tested with disastrous results.”
The NRCC ran TV ads tying Cazayoux to national Democratic figures in the Louisiana special election, only to see Democrats grab control of a House seat that had been in the GOP column for more than three decades.
Gingrich, who was pushed out as speaker following GOP losses in the 1998 midterm elections, advocated “an emergency, members-only” meeting of House Republicans in order to hash out a new reform agenda before Memorial Day. He also called for a “complete overhaul” of the NRCC.
The problem is, even Newt’s suggestions for a “reform agenda” don’t really amount to much:
Repeal the gas tax for the summer, and pay for the repeal by cutting domestic discretionary spending so that the transportation infrastructure trust fund would not be hurt. At a time when, according to The Hill newspaper, Senator Clinton is asking for $2.3billion in earmarks, it should be possible for Republicans to establish a “government spending versus your pocketbook” fight over cutting the gas tax that would resonate with most Americans. Lower taxes and less government spending should be a battle cry most taxpayers and all conservatives could rally behind.
This idea is slightly better than Clinton’s idea to tie the gas-tax holiday into a return of the so-called windfall profits tax, but that doesn’t make it a good idea.
As I noted when this idea came up last week, it’s unlikely that a temporary reduction of the gas tax would rebound to consumers at all, and, even if it did, it would only amount to an average of about $ 30.00 over the entire summer, an amount so small it would be unlikely to have any impact on the average family budget.
Redirect the oil being put into the national petroleum reserve onto the open market. That oil would lower the price of gasoline an extra 5 to 6 cents per gallon, and its sale would lower the deficit.
Unlikely, since the futures market would likely factor the temporary nature of this supply increase as rather minor.
Gingrich is right that the GOP needs to change, and change soon, if it to have any chance of regaining the majority in either House of Congress, but the change is going to have to be a heck of a lot more radical, and a lot more permanent, than what he’s suggesting.
