The 2006 GOP Agenda

I'm a bit slow getting to this today, but I have some thoughts on Dan Balz and Jonathan Weisman's piece in the Washington Post about the Republican Party's efforts to craft an agenda for the 2006 elections. Those efforts have proven unsuccessful so far.

Congressional Republicans are blaming Bush for a lack of leadership.

The president once clearly set the Republican agenda, and when his approval ratings were higher, congressional Republicans followed his lead. House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said that model hit a wall last year when the president's centerpiece proposal to restructure Social Security "turned out to be not doable."

This year, Bush came back to Congress with a scaled-back agenda -- including tax incentives to expand health coverage and some money to study using wood chips and switch grass as alternative energy sources -- that Blunt said "is not as easily defined." And in Bush's weakened state, his proposals command less allegiance. "It's always the challenge of a second-term administration to keep the agenda fresh, to keep moving with the same intensity they had in the first term," Blunt said. "Combine that with less popularity, and people are much slower to salute the flag."

I suppose "not doable" would be one way to describe an idea that generated more fear and loathing the more people learned about it. Another way to describe the idea would be "bad." It was just a bad idea and people hated it. But, at the end of the day, the GOP-led congress chose not to pursue it. They abandoned their so-called principles and ran away from the chance to realize a decades-long dream of the conservative movement: destroying Social Security. That isn't Bush's fault. He opened the door for them. They didn't have the guts to walk through it. If anything exemplified the beginning of the end of the conservative myth, the retreat on Social Security was it. What have they sought to do since then that anybody would characterize as a bold policy proposal? Nothing. Why? They have lost their nerve. They are out of ideas and paralyzed by fear. Is there any question why they can't come up with a winning agenda, or any agenda at all?

And, I have to say it is just downright refreshing to hear a Republican flat out admit that their entire political strategy is based on wrapping themselves and their party in the flag and, by extension, painting their opponents as unpatriotic. Wow. For this clown Blunt, loyalty to Bush and loyalty to the flag are the same thing. And, he's willing to articulate it. Wow.

Actually, congressman, Americans of all partisan inclinations are quite happy to salute the flag. It is the cynics in the Republican Party who treat it like toilet paper. For you, the Pledge of Allegiance is a punchline to a dirty joke. The thing is, you can only tell the same joke so many times before people stop laughing. The Republican Party has reached that point. It finds itself with nothing more to say to the American people.

Oh, and if disloyalty to Bush equals disloyalty to America, what exactly does that say to all those fair-weather Bush loyalists in congress who would have us believe now that they never liked him much to begin with? Irony is a mutha, ain't it?

But, the story gets better. A few paragraphs later, we learn that Republicans might not have an agenda, but they do have a plan of sorts to convince the American people that they should be re-elected in November. The message: We might be bad, but the other guys are worse.

Their goal is to concentrate less on the kind of positive message they have challenged the Democrats to produce and more on framing a choice that says, however unhappy voters may be right now with the Republicans' leadership, things would be worse if Democrats were in charge.

"If you are someone who favors small government," Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman said, "you're going to have a clear choice between someone who has cut taxes every year in office, who believes you ought to own your own health care . . . and who plans to cut the deficit over five years versus people who have consistently supported more spending, have opposed tax cuts and who oppose patients owning their own health care. The question is, who's on your side for reducing the size of government?"

It almost defies ridicule. Talk about stranger than satire!

Please, Ken, please go to the American people and tell them that you want them to own their own health care. Tell them that you want to do for their health care what you couldn't do for Social Security because those mean old Democrats wouldn't let you. You'll discover a whole new meaning of the phrase "not doable."

In fact, maybe that's it. A Republican message with a catchy slogan that sums up the entire conservative agenda: Not Doable.