Republican Governor: House/Senate GOP “Inconsequential”
By Doug Mataconis | Related entries in Politics, RepublicansUtah Governor John Huntsman doesn’t have many nice things to say about the Republicans in Congress:
The Republican governor of Utah on Monday said his party is blighted by leaders in Congress whose lack of new ideas renders them so “inconsequential” that he doesn’t even bother to talk to them.
“I don’t even know the congressional leadership,” Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. told editors and reporters at The Washington Times, shrugging off questions about top congressional Republicans, including House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. “I have not met them. I don’t listen or read whatever it is they say because it is inconsequential – completely.”
(…)
He said congressional Republicans failed to score political points for opposing the bill – only three Republican senators supported it – because the public saw them as objecting to being shut out by Democrats from helping write the bill rather than as taking a principled stand.
The governor said congressional Republicans are being frustrated by a lack of credibility on the party’s No. 1 tenet: fiscal responsibility.
“That’s why no one is paying any attention,” he said. “Our moral soapbox was completely taken away from us because of our behavior in the last few years. For us to now criticize analogous behavior is hypocrisy. We’ve got to come at it a different way. We’ve got to prove the point. It can’t be as the Chinese would say, ‘fei hua,’ [or] empty words.”
Huntsman is, of course, totally correct. House and Senate Republicans totally blew whatever credibility they had on issues like fiscal responsibility and small government by actively participating in Bush’s reckless spending spree. For them to expect the public to now accept them as the new guardians of fiscal responsibility is, well, just plain absurd.
This much is true — the future of the Republican Party does not lie in Congress, it lies in the Governor’s Mansions and Statehouses around the country. The guys in Congress have, with a few notable exceptions that seem to prove the rule, ceded any claim to the principles they now shout out with such vigor.
Here’s Huntsman’s interview in full, it’s worth watching:
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February 25th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
How anyone can even think the GOP has been about fiscal responsibility is such a laughable joke as to make my head hurt. It is absolutely indisputable that the national debt as a percentage of gross national product skyrocketed under Reagan and Bush I after declining ever since WWII, climbed briefly then fell under Clinton, and then climbed back under Bush II.
Indisputable.
When has the GOP ever been fiscally conservative? Not since Nixon.
The myth of GOP fiscal responsibility is the biggest con-job in history
February 25th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
It’s an issue of perception, in large part.
None of this makes the GOP wrong, per se, on any given issue. But that fact notwithstanding, it will avail the GOP precisely zero to grumpily pound their fists and repeat the same viewpoints over and over that they’ve been using lo these many years.
Seems to me that when it comes to blamestorming, most of the GOP faithful is focusing on what a poor job they did in following through on their rhetoric once they gained power. They all GET the credibility issue.
What I think they miss is the audience issue. Rebuilding credibility is a necessary but not sufficient condition for revival. If you cast an adequately written movie with lousy actors and and a clumsy director, the movie generally fails. For your next project, you don’t use the same script with better actors and a more talented director. You need a new script, too. Otherwise, way too much of the audience has the perception that what they are being sold the same crap they just rejected.
This is a bit of a subtle point. But what it boils down to is that the GOP needs to find some different approaches to connect with average people under their current circumstances and find different ways to communicate their basic ideas. Boilerplate repetition of standard formulations is very likely to lead to the audience shutting down on the GOP. Not listening, in other words.
The GOP needs to look new and improved. And even if the new improved part is only 5% and the other 95% is the same old, they need to focus on making a big deal about the new improved part when speaking to the national audience.
Currently, the GOP is looking like it is obstructionist or irrelevant or whatever by doing things like voting against bills in a near-unanimous fashion. Maybe Obama really is only throwing token bones to the GOP by doing things like saying charter schools are good. But if the GOP doesn’t find a way to appear to be working as part of a solution, all of the good ideas like charter schools will just get co-opted. Imagine if Obama becomes known as the president who really helped charter school become a big part of the national education solution because the GOP castigated the ed reform bill that made it possible. What if, instead, the GOP did a last minute about face on such a bill and said “we think that the growth of charter schools are SO important to reforming education that we will support this bill despite all its many flaws etc etc?
When Clinton was President, he presided over a balancing of the budget that the GOP had been insisting on for a long time. And Clinton got most of the credit for it even though budget balance was never something Clinton seemed interested in as a candidate. The GOP is quite possibly poised for a repeat of that if every bill the senate passes goes through 61-39 or whatever, and the same goes for the house.
I don’t advocate that the GOP should give away their house or adopt a new philosophy. But I do think they should be looking hard for places to agree with the admin and then to take decisive action. Instead, I think too much of the GOP is convinced that the current political environment is primarily a d!ck-measuring contest, and that they’ll look weak and useless if they say yes to 45% of a loaf.
Voting unanimously is a dangerous game of rubber biscuit for the GOP. Sure, it heartens their own faithful. But if it don’t bounce back with the broader public, the GOP will go hungry. Bow-bow-bow.
February 25th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Perhaps we can look to the people to whom the Republican politicians are pandering to find out why the pols have become inconsequential. I agree that the “script” of the Republican party, i.e., that which they will commit to paper is arguably sound. But the “poor actors” in kranky’s analogy might just be the base. These are the people that are supporting the failed ideology, and the failed pols, and the failed meanness and selfishness. These are the people to whom these pols must pander. Call me elite if you must, but giv-me-a-break – - it’s the people.