John Gizzi, White House correspondent for Human Events, recently participated in the John Locke Foundation’s 2006 post-election Headliner event in Raleigh. He also discussed election results with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Go to http://www.carolinajournal.com/cjradio/ to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: Many different people have been trying to dissect what these election results mean. When you’ve had a chance to analyze what we know so far and what has been determined, what’s your general impression?
Gizzi: Well, I break it down into three categories. And I did not expect this election result at all. I believed, after a district by district analysis, that Republicans would cling to the majority in the House. I was wrong because I didn’t deal with three factors. I call them the freakish, the foolish, and the Iraqophobic.
The freakish, quite frankly, in a year when the tide runs against the party in the White House, races that one never looked at before and members that were considered safe often get caught up in it. Jim Leach, a 30-year member of Congress from Iowa, went down. Jim Ryun, the great Olympian and 10-year congressman from Kansas, lost a race that no one was looking at until the very end. Congressman Clay Shaw of Florida, the senior Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, had the misfortune of being in the district next to Mark Foley’s and got caught up in the tide.
In terms of the foolish, I believe with all my heart that anyone who abuses the public trust, for financial or personal gain, is going to get caught, and it’s going to hurt in the long run. Bob Ney of Ohio, who was forced to resign, became a poster child for corruption. The same was true of Duke Cunningham of California, now serving an eight-year prison sentence. Don Sherwood of Pennsylvania added a new venue to politics when he ran commercials admitting he had an extramarital affair but denying that he strangled his girlfriend. All of this brought down people, as I mentioned, Clay Shaw in a neighboring district. There were some unusually close races in the Buckeye State of Ohio. And overall, sometimes you have a hybrid between freakish and foolish. Tom DeLay and Mark Foley both left their seats in Texas and Florida, respectively. Neither could get off the ballot, and Democrats won by default.
Finally, Iraqophobic. There is no doubt that in this election cycle, the public frustration over Iraq and what seems to be a lack of direction or a failure to explain the policy hurt. And this has been a pattern in American history. Every time there has been a war, the party in the White House will lose an average of seven seats in the Senate and 32 in the House of Representatives. Franklin Roosevelt’s Democrats in 1942 came within eight seats of losing their majority in the House. Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam watched Republicans almost gain and make back the losses they suffered from his landslide election to the presidency, two years before. So it was with Iraq.
Kokai: There are some, especially those on the Left, who might suggest that, “Well, this is a return to the old style of politics in which people support the Center-Left candidates.” Others are saying, “This is the return of the moderate, and the center is where politics should go.” Do you agree with any of these assessments?
Gizzi: I categorically disagree with them. And I would point out that anyone who makes that case now forgets, either by omission or commission, that the Republicans, in modern times the party of conservatism, abandoned conservative principles in so many fronts. I’ll just cite two of them for the sake of length.
One was in spending. I had people from the Republican National Committee come up to me at their last meeting in Minneapolis and say, “We are no longer the party of smaller government and less spending.” And that’s been the gold standard of conservatism for decades now. I don’t have to give the details. The fact that the Department of Education grew exponentially, more under George W. Bush than Bill Clinton—the fact that this president signed a Medicare prescription drug package that was the largest entitlement since Medicare—and the fact the president vetoed absolutely nothing until this year speaks for itself.
Also, the issue of illegal immigration. I’m not going to get into the nuances of it except to say that when one part of the party, the executive, speaks in a voice and mixed metaphors vastly different from the party at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue—that is most people running for re-election to the House or seeking seats in the House—you are bound to have a confusing, mixed message, and that makes it easier for the other side to win.
Kokai: Regardless of which party controls Congress now, can this election result turn out to be good news for people with conservative values, a chance to show that straying from conservatism is what hurt the Republicans and sticking with conservatism might get them back in power?
Gizzi: Absolutely, because they certainly didn’t follow that in the last election, so why not go back to one’s roots? I point out to you that sometimes the heavy drinker has to fall down a flight of stairs to straighten out and sober up. Sometimes the heavy smoker needs to cough up and have a violent hacking cough to quit the habit. So it is that Republicans need to go through an election like this and suffer the worse setback of a sitting president in 12 years to get back to their roots on spending, immigration, and knowing precisely who they are. I might add that the most conservative president since Calvin Coolidge, Ronald Reagan, was also the president who had the most people from the other party cross over party lines to vote for him – Reagan Democrats—because he stood for something. I think it’s appropriate to quote the late chaplain Peter Marshall, chaplain of the U.S. Senate, that the person who stands for nothing will surely fall for anything.
Kokai: What should we, as people who are interested in seeing limited government, conservative principles, what should we be looking for from Republicans or conservative Democrats in the next couple of years to see that they are moving back on the right track or to see that, hey, you still need to make some changes before we are going to support you again?
Gizzi: [House Republicans] can put tremendous pressure on the man at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, George W. Bush, to get back to his roots as a conservative and begin fighting schemes for more government spending, possibly even getting the president to veto some bills. President Gerald Ford, when he was faced with the congress elected after the Watergate year of 1974, nonetheless vetoed spending measures and got enough votes from remaining Republicans and conservative Democrats to uphold his veto. George W. Bush could learn from him.