Takeover by Viguerie Richard A

Author:Viguerie, Richard A. [Viguerie, Richard A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WND Books
Published: 2014-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

14

2007 AND 2008: GEORGE W. BUSH’S CRAVEN RETREAT AND SURRENDER

After the 2006 wipeout of Republicans, especially the party’s congressional candidates, establishment Republicans tried to explain the debacle, and their first instinct was to blame conservatives—but not for staying home. They tried to blame the few examples of Republican adherence to conservative principles they could find—for example, supporting the right to life—rather than Republican betrayal of those principles.

Sound familiar?

After the election, top Republican strategist Karl Rove specifically named the Foley scandal as the cause of the Republicans’ loss of Congress.

The big-spending Congress, the Bush failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the culture of cronyism and corruption that set the checks and balances the Founders built into the Constitution on their heads were not important factors in Rove’s eyes.

Even some establishment Republicans were honest enough to argue that the party lost its majority by straying from conservative principles, especially limited government spending.

John Boehner, who became minority leader after the 2006 debacle, accepted that argument when his leadership was challenged by conservatives, but later changed his tune to blame the Iraq war.

Boehner changed his tune because he probably recognized that by such an analysis he was implicitly holding responsible for the defeat those old bulls of the Republican establishment who had put him in power.

Most of the Republican establishment was similarly in denial. Oklahoma congressman Tom Cole, who had just been elected to lead the Republican National Congressional Committee, demonstrated such denial when he claimed, “Oh, I don’t think the problem was spending. … People who argue that we lost because we weren’t true to our base, that’s just wrong.”1

Of course, as a member of the Appropriations Committee, and a prolific pork-barreler, Cole would be indicting himself if he had placed the blame differently, and, as events would prove, continuing the old ways was not a successful strategy for the Republican National Congressional Committee under Cole’s leadership.

The way I saw it was that, yes, defeat stings, but in this case it was necessary and could lead to some good results in the future.

The election of Bill Clinton in 1992 led directly to the successful “Contract with America” two years later.

As I’ve said before, and it bears being repeated regularly, sometimes a loss for the Republican Party is a gain for conservatives.

A little taste of liberal Democrats in power is often enough to remind the voters what they don’t like about them, and more important, to focus the minds of Republicans on the principles that really matter. The conservative movement has grown fastest during those periods when things seemed darkest, such as during the Carter administration and the first two years of the Clinton White House; and the first two years of the Obama presidency led to the Tea Party wave election and the biggest GOP victory in seventy-five years.

Conservatives are, by nature, insurgents, and as the eight years George W. Bush was in the White House proved, it’s hard to maintain an insurgency when your friends, or people you perceived to be your friends, are in power.

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