In today’s Wall Street Journal, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn says that the Republican Party is beginning to look like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck:
As congressional Republicans contemplate the prospect of an electoral disaster this November, much is being written about the supposed soul-searching in the Republican Party. A more accurate description of our state is paralysis and denial.
Many Republicans are waiting for a consultant or party elder to come down from the mountain and, in Moses-like fashion, deliver an agenda and talking points on stone tablets. But the burning bush, so to speak, is delivering a blindingly simple message: Behave like Republicans.
Unfortunately, too many in our party are not yet ready to return to the path of limited government. Instead, we are being told our message must be deficient because, after all, we should be winning in certain areas just by being Republicans. Yet being a Republican isn’t good enough anymore. Voters are tired of buying a GOP package and finding a big-government liberal agenda inside. What we need is not new advertising, but truth in advertising.
As Coburn notes, though, before that can happen, Republican on Capitol Hill and the party in general have to come grips with what has gone wrong over the past seven years, or longer:
Becoming Republicans again will require us to come to grips with what has ailed our party – namely, the triumph of big-government Republicanism and failed experiments like the K Street Project and “compassionate conservatism.” If the goal of the K Street Project was to earmark and fund raise our way to a filibuster-proof “governing” majority, the goal of “compassionate conservatism” was to spend our way to a governing majority.
The fruit of these efforts is not the hoped-for Republican governing majority, but the real prospect of a filibuster-proof Democrat majority in 2009. While the K Street Project decimated our brand as the party of reform and limited government, compassionate conservatism convinced the American people to elect the party that was truly skilled at activist government: the Democrats.
(…)
Regaining our brand as the party of fiscal discipline will require us to rejoin Americans in the real world of budget choices and priorities, and to leave behind the fantasyland of borrowing without limits. Instead of adopting earmarks, each Republican can adopt examples of government waste, largess and fraud, and restart the permanent campaign against big government.
(…)
Regaining our brand is not about “messaging.” It’s about action. It’s about courage. It’s about priorities. Most of all, it’s about being willing to give up our political careers so our grandkids don’t have to grow up in a debtor’s prison, or a world in which other nations can tell a weakened and bankrupt America where we can and can’t defend liberty, pursue terrorists, or show compassion.
Coburn doesn’t admit it, but it’s fairly clear that none of these goals can be accomplished before the November General Election. The Republican “brand” has lost so much credibility with the public, especially that segment of the public for whom fiscal conservatism and limited government actually mean something, that the idea that they can turn things around on a dime is, quite simply, absurd.
No, it won’t happen overnight, and a bunch of speeches at the Republican National Convention isn’t going to accomplish anything either. Moreover, the fact that the GOP’s standard-bearer this year who has shown far too much willingness to make deals with Democrats who really do want to expand the size, scope, and power of the state, it’s simply laughable to believe that putting the GOP back in power in 2009 is going bring a world any different from the one we’ve been living in.
The Republicans could have, and should have, learned these lessons from the results of the 2006 mid-term elections, but they didn’t. No, there isn’t any way of sugarcoating it — even if McCain walks into the White House, 2008 is likely to be a bad year for the Republican Party.
Maybe after that happens, they’ll realize what they’ve done wrong.
