The Fall (GOP-style)

There will be calls that the party has lost its way. The party, we will hear, has lost its way. It has lost its connection to the American public, and must suffer the consequences if it doesn’t find new vision, a new commitment to its principles. There will be calls for new leaders to step forward to re-ignite the fire of principle tied to action, to build a new path to political glory. Or else.

The funny part is that they’ll be talking about the Republicans this time.

As a result, the GOP race for the White House looks a helluva lot more entertaining than the Democrats’.

The Dems will have the usual lineup of several moderates, and one or two fire eaters from the left. One of the fire eaters will catch fire with the activist wing, but primary voters will go for “electability” and select someone who will then spend the rest of the year running as far from the fire eaters as possible. And people wonder why MoveOn.org is so successful.

The GOP, on the other hand, will be looking at an intriguing battle for the presumed soul (cold and dark as it is, it’s still in there somewhere) of the party’s principles and nothing’s more brutal than a holy war among holy warriors. Fiscal hawks will fight war against chickenhawks; social conservatives against “limited government” conservatives; moderates will call for reason and get bum rushed out of the door. It’ll be bloody; it’ll be cruel and for a liberal Democrat, just loads of fun.

The skirmishing has already begun. George Will has written extensively on the party’s need to re-affirm its principles. In 1995 he gushed over the radical changes the House Republicans would bring. Political newbies for the most part, they didn’t have the “go along to get along” personal ties to the Washington establishment to hold them down. Oh no, they were going to get things done, or get un-done as the case would be.

Ah, but then … temptation, sweet temptation.

Like all folks who feel they’ve been deprived of power for far too long, the soft chairs of the Big House proved too soft for them to resist. All those billions and billions of nice federal dollars just sitting there. Why shouldn’t the hard working men and women who command American business get their fair share? After all, they’re so generous in patriotically answering our call for support for campaign dollars to win power; they’ve certainly shown their public spirit. Service needs to be rewarded, and business certainly knows how to spend those billions and billions better than mere public employees could.

Perhaps the new GOP logo should be a serpentine Halliburton standing in Eden’s garden handing a nice golden(for money) apple to a naked elephant.

What the GOP doesn’t see is that the larger issue on spending and taxes is the larger issue we Californians are forced to look at. Simply put, Americans like more services than they’d like to pay for. The public service pie doesn’t get bigger because it’s being forced on a poor undesiring public. It’s the collective wishes of what that public wants. So you have even conservative wingnuts like my nearby Rep. John Doolittle saying that the GOP should be appreciated for supposedly holding down spending but don’t say we’re throwing the widows and orphans out on the street because we’ve actually expanded funding for them.

In short, people like spending on widows and orphans. They just don’t want to see the bill. That’s the conundrum in a democratic society where one party constantly hammers at the social contract, yet underneath it all, people still want it because they fundamentally recognize that we need it. Years of GOP hammering at the social insurance network has ended up tying the party into an ideological and governance knot it can’t get out of.

This is why it’s easier to be a nice tax-and-spend liberal. We don’t have to go through all this. Not that I have any sympathy for the Republicans on this one. They brung it on themselves. If they were true and pure they’d tell the public that there’s a gap between our hearts and our pocketbooks and that we need to find ways to bring them into harmony. But pounding on “government”, even when it’s them, and giving tax breaks to the rich are too tempting short term gains, and we see how weak the Republican spirit is in dealing with temptation.

So I get to watch them twist and turn and punch and kick and scream and shout over the next couple of years. Who knows, they may still end up back in the White House in 2009. Odder things have happened. But they’ll be picking over their own scabs after it's all over, which will serve as my consolation prize. I win, whether my party wins or loses.