It seems to me like Senate and House Republicans in Washington, D.C., have a tremendous challenge ahead of them. If I had to give it a title, I would call it, "Mending the Credibility Gap."
When you are the party in power, you have to govern. This means that you move beyond the world of rhetoric, and you actually have to enact policy. I believe that a large part of the reason why Republicans their majorities in the Senate and the House in this last election was because a lot of core Republican voters had finally stopped mustering up the support to re-elect Republicans who were long in rhetoric about limited government, but who presided over unprecedented growth in the size and scope of the federal government.
According to Ed Fuelner, the President of the Heritage Foundation:
Federal lawmakers have found other ways to insert themselves into what should be local issues. Since President Bush took office, lawmakers have larded spending bills with more than 35,000 earmarks, including such wasteful measures as $223 million for the Bridge to Nowhere and $50 million for an indoor rainforest in Iowa.
Earmarking is nothing more than an attempt by members of Congress to show folks that they’re “bringing home the bacon.” Conservatives should focus on the lesson of this election: This sort of federal spending is wrong. It doesn’t work, and it should be stopped.
The other side of the spending coin is entitlements. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are on a path to bankrupt our country. Medicare spending alone is projected to leap $112 billion over the next two years to nearly half a trillion dollars. There’s a crisis looming.
Yet instead of addressing these problems, in 2003 our lawmakers made them worse. They passed the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, adding trillions of dollars in costs to an already flailing program. It was the largest entitlement program passed since the Great Society of the 1960s, and many saw it as nothing more than an attempt by lawmakers to buy senior citizen’s votes by giving them “inexpensive” drugs (to be paid for by their children and grandchildren’s taxes).
In a recent column in National Review, Club for Growth chief Pat Toomey revealed some startling information that they Club got back when they did a survey of voters in competitive House seats:
We asked which party is doing a better job “eliminating wasteful spending.” The Democrats led 39 percent to 25 percent. Which party is “the party of big government?” The Republicans, by an 11 point margin.
When Republicans have a track record like this when in power, they now have a new challenge… Credibility. How are Senate and House Republicans going to convince their base voters that anything will be different if they are returned to power? Now that they are in the minority, they only have the tool of rhetoric — hardly a very helpful tool when the rhetoric of Republicans has so drastically contrasting their actual actions – especially on spending issues.
To make the challenge more difficult, the "new" Republican messengers, those who will be the leaders of Republicans in the minority, are the same people who lead the GOP into a K-Street fed massive spending spree. So we start out dubious about the message, and the messengers.
It is clear that Republicans are going to have to figure out how to rise up to this challenge. I suspect it will have to start with some very real introspection, and probably some very specific admissions of where the GOP went off track, and what they would do differently if they reclaimed the majority.
The biggest problem is that it is unclear whether Republicans in Washington understand that there is a credibility gap. A "spendaholic" – like an alcoholic – if they are going to recover, must first admit to themselves that they have a terrible problem. Then they must acknowledge this publicly, and apologize. Then begins the long road to recovery.
Care to read comments, or make your own about today’s Daily Commentary?
Just click here to go to the FR Weblog, where this Commentary has its own blog post, and where you can read and make comments.