RALEIGH – The political class has been in full “Dear Abby” mode since Election Day. The pundits’ advice is gushing out. The party is fractured – so work to heal the divisions. The party is arrogant and condescending to voters – so learn to speak their language and address their real concerns rather than feeding them platitudes and demagoguery. The voters rejected the party’s extremism – so move to the center and seek opportunities to work with the other party to get things done.
This advice, in case you haven’t already figured it out, is meant for the Republican Party. Apparently, unbeknownst to me and some 59 million Americans, it managed to lose last week’s national elections. President George W. Bush, the Republican House, and a significantly more Republican Senate weren’t elected because most of the electorate wanted them to continue their policies. No, the election results were a repudiation of Bush’s first term in office.
You think I’m exaggerating? Check out the cover piece in Business Week. Supposedly a news story, it states matter-of-factly:
[G]iven the deep divisions rending the nation, it would be a stretch to interpret [Bush’s] triumph as an overwhelming endorsement of anything concrete – much less “stay the course” entreaties on Iraq, a deficit-be-damned drive for more tax cuts, or a dimly perceived “Ownership Society” that proposes partial privatization of Social Security and aims to replace the employer-based health-insurance system . . . What the president mainly won on Election Day, experts say, is a chance to revise the script of 2000, when he ignored a contested victory to govern more from the conservative than the compassionate end of the spectrum.
In other words, never mind what the voters just said, President Bush. The “experts” say your agenda is unacceptable. You should run away from it as rapidly as possible and, essentially, adopt John Kerry’s.
I hardly know where to begin in dissecting this oddball, demented take on representative government. Actually, it gets worse. In the same issue, a columnist urges the president to pick Sen. Joe Biden, who detests Bush’s foreign policy, to be his secretary of state. Another piece recommends that Bush entirely reshape his foreign policy – “pause, take stock of mistakes, and adjust course” – even though foreign policy was the single-highest priority for voters this year (yes, even higher than “moral values”) and exit polls showed that foreign-policy voters favored Bush over Kerry by nearly 20 percentage points.
Of course, the president would be well-advised to replace poor appointments on his staff and seek opportunities to involve moderate Democrats in his Cabinet and legislative strategies. And yes, if Bush can find some way to tamp down lingering resentments on Capitol Hill without discarding the agenda for which he just received a national vote of confidence, he should do so. But what’s the point of having elections if the victors don’t get to shape the subsequent agenda?
Here in North Carolina, Gov. Mike Easley won a clear victory over Patrick Ballantine. There is no doubt his re-election means that a state-lottery bill will again be submitted in the General Assembly. Given the agenda he ran on, one would hope the governor will also submit a balanced 2005-07 budget that contains no tax increases and stays underneath an annual spending cap. I’m not saying these policies will pass. Indeed, the idea of a government gambling monopoly will surely face some significant opposition and debate, as it usually does. But no one doubts that the governor has earned the right to propose it as he promised to do during the campaign.
In Bush’s case, tax reform and Social Security accounts will be tough to get through Congress. But he should try. He won the election. Eventually, the media establishment will hear the news.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.