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Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Some Reasons Why The Republicans Lost The House
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To quote [the English boarder] in Ulysses, it seems history is to blame. As far as I can tell, it is virtually unheard of for a president to go 4-0. To accomplish this, a president must be elected twice in a row and his party must avoid defeat in both off-year congressional elections. I don't know whether Andrew Jackson did it, but I don't believe it's been done since. Even 3-0 is rare. If a president is fortunate enough to be re-elected, odds are that the voters will punish him (and his party) in an off-year election.
Reason two: Bush and Congressional GOP leadership abandoned fiscal conservatism. A modest tax cut isn't enough. We voted for Bush in 2000 not only to turn back the Clinton/GHW Bush tax hikes, but also to bring government into spending control. Bush spent like a liberal Democrat (as I recall, one of those spending programs was an education sponsored by Ted Kennedy), and Congress refused to hold his feet to the fire. Hastert's Congress refused to read the tea leaves and take a serious blow at pork barrel spending. Republicans ax-murdered one of the chief distinctions between the two parties.
Republicans didn't make a bigger issue of the economy. Jobs are being created, unemployment is shrinking, incomes (and tax revenues) are going up. This should have been plastered all over campaign ads.
Bush infuriated Americans by pandering to illegal aliens. He went soft on enforcimg immigration law. Period. Sure, the Dems would play the racism car if he did otherwise, but that can be countered by highlighting that illegal alien amnesty is unfair to the many immigrants who play by the rules to get into this country.
Republicans did not counter the Democrat message on the war. Dems treated WMDs as if that were the only reason we invaded Iraq, claimed that no WMDs were found, regarded Saddam's nuclear ambitions as if they were nonexistent, and told us that the war is making no progress. The Republican PR machine should have constantly been doing the following:
- Reminding voters of all the ceasefire violations that justified the invasion.
- Detailing all of Saddam's ties to terrorism. One example: its intelligence support for anti-US forces in Somalia.
- Confirming Saddam's nuclear ambitions and bringing home the message that nothing short of the war would end them - and that addressing Iran's nuclear ambitions would be far more difficult if its chief enemy in the region has nukes.
- Conforming that WMDs were found in Iraq.
- Contrasting the impact of the war on Iraqis to the impact of Saddam's tyranny and mass murder on Iraqis.
- It wouldn't hurt to contrast the troop casualty rate in Iraq to the murder rate in California.
Labels: Politics
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