By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I was in Buenos Aires on Election Day and had a difficult time keeping track of the election results. My hotel room had CNN, but a Spanish version that displayed little interest in what was happening in the United States, and there were no newspapers in English that I could find to help me out. No Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly either. The morning after the election I was able to figure out — despite my very limited grasp of Spanish — that the Republicans had carried the day decisively; that the much-discussed “wave” had taken place. When I got back home about a week later, I rushed to get the newspapers and to my cable news stations to get the details.
I am writing these words the day after my return. Much of what I have learned was unsurprising. Many Democrats are abandoning Obama, blaming him for the party’s poor showing. You could have expected that to happen. Others are bemoaning the “stupidity” of the American people for not appreciating the substantial achievements of the Obama administration. There are others who are doubling down, blaming Obama for not pushing more vigorously for the kind of wealth redistribution policies that Elizabeth Warren is promoting.
There is also some talk of the end of the “celebrity” status once attached to Obama. There is something to this theory, in my opinion. I find it hard to put a number on the percentage of voters who voted for Obama without any regard to his positions on the issues. But there were a lot of them. They were drawn to him for emotional, irrational reasons, much the way teenage girls at one time were drawn to Princess Diana. Judging from the adoring crowds that greeted him on his world tour in the months after his election, much of Europe reacted the same way, including the Nobel Peace Prize committee.
All it took for this segment of the electorate to turn from Obama was the realization that he was not some demigod who was going to remake the world, but a self-important man in over his head, more interested in the trappings of the presidency than in working at the job. No one likes an empty suit.
But there was another reaction that I came across. It is one that those who are exulting in the Republican wave need to be ready to deal with. It is snake oil, but sometimes snake oil sells. A good example could be found on the Huffington Post website on Monday, November 10. It was written by Leo W. Gerard, international president of the United Steelworkers.
Gerard agrees that “Republicans spilled Democratic blood across the country last week,” but he warns Republicans that it would be a mistake to “perceive their victory as a mandate.” He urges Republicans to remember that their sweeping victory means that they now represent parts of the country with many Democratic voters, not just “solely climate-science-denying, immigrant-hating, Ebola-scare-mongering tea partiers.” You know, not just your typical conservative Republican.
He contends that the Republican victory was not rooted in a preference for the Republican agenda: “Voters don’t like Republicans any better than Democrats. What they mainly think is that the economy stinks. And they want Washington to fix it. Though the recession is officially over and employment up, they’re not feeling it on Main Street. They held their noses at the ballot box and gave Republicans responsibility for doing something about it.”
Gerard points to polls to underscore his point: “Voters told exit pollster after pollster the same thing: Though they pulled the lever for Republicans, they don’t like them. Fifty-four percent of voters told National Election Pool tabulators that they had an ‘unfavorable opinion’ of Republicans. That’s the same percentage that had an unfavorable opinion of Democrats. That’s no mandate. That’s a pox on both parties.”
Now here comes the snake oil. “What voters want is economic revival. Repeatedly, they named the economy and jobs as their priorities.” But, “though they picked the GOP, voters harbor no hope that Republicans will improve the nation’s financial standing . . . they believed Republicans in Congress have no clear plan to strengthen the economy or create jobs.”
Gerard interprets that to mean that the voters do not want the Republicans to come up with ideas associated with past Republican administrations, with plans that would “cut taxes for corporations, slash federal programs for the poor and elderly, and kill” Obamacare. “This would hobble the economy, not heal it.” He argues that “repealing Obamacare would be reaching into workers’ pockets and pulling out money. . . . It’s not what the voters want.”
The American people are “not interested in cutting taxes for the rich and corporations either. Just the opposite.” They “support increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy to pay for job training, education, and deficit reduction. . . . Absolving corporations of their responsibility to pay for the public services that enable them to reap huge profits while simultaneously slashing public programs that provide equal opportunity for all citizens to succeed is austerity economics.”
Moreover, Gerard is convinced the country does not want “to balance the budget on Grandma’s arthritic back. In fact, 61 percent told Hart pollsters they want Social Security benefits increased. Also, 76 percent opposed raising the eligibility age for Medicare and cutting Medicaid.” They also want to boost “infrastructure spending” on the “nation’s roads, bridges, railroads, pipelines, locks and dams.” They want to “invest in America,” to “do something that works.”
Pretty shameless stuff, no? Do you think Gerard was cautioning the Democrats after Obama’s victories to go slow with their agenda so as not to put too much of a burden upon middle-class taxpayers and social conservatives? I’ll give odds he did not.
Consider what Gerard is calling for: He is telling us that the Republicans should interpret their victory as a mandate to do a better job than Obama at implementing the big government, big spending, command economy liberal Democrats favor.
Gerard wants the Republicans to accept that the voters were not recoiling from the massive national debt and failed big government policies. That the botched Obamacare rollout, the Veterans Administration and IRS scandals, Michelle Obama’s heavy-handed remaking of the nation’s school lunch menus, the Solyndra insider giveaway, the bumbling bureaucratic reaction to the Ebola threat, and the government’s inability to control our Southern border made little difference to the voters; that what they want is a bigger and more efficient wealth redistribution effort from Washington.
Gerard calls upon the Republicans to seize the moment of their victory at the polls to carry out precisely those programs that they have been blocking the Obama administration from implementing all these years.
There is no guarantee that the modern Republicans will be able to replicate the successes of the Reagan administration in reviving the economy through an application of supply-side economics.
But trying to out-Obama Obama does not make sense. It would be a textbook example of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. If the Republicans fall for the temptation to sell themselves to people like Gerard by trying to do a better job at implementing the liberal Democratic agenda than the Democrats, Election Day 2016 will be a nightmare for the GOP. They will fail as surely as did Obama.
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