Two Fools Discuss the Election
Only people who have ingested serious hallucinogens could come to the conclusion that Republicans have been swept out of office in the last two elections because they were insufficiently conservative. Tony Perkins says:
"What Tuesday was, was a fact that people wanted change, and it's a rejection of a moderate view."
So in state after state, voters who elected the more progressive Democrat over the more conservative Republican were actually dumping the Republicans because they were too moderate? Tony's evidence for this insane view is the wedge issue of gay marriage, which didn't do well in the polls. Nice try, Tony, but conservative success on a single wedge issue does not prove that voters elected Democrats over Republicans because they thought the Republicans were too moderate.
Dick Armey is equally clueless in his contention that voters rejected the Bush administration's policy of "compassionate conservatism." [more ...]
Given the absence of compassion in the Bush administration's conservatism, it's difficult to see what voters were rejecting. Armey points to No Child Left Behind and the Medicare drug benefit, two laws that were much criticized by the left and the right for different reasons, but it's ridiculous to assert that either one influenced a significant number of voters on Tuesday, or that Republicans would have been reelected in their absence.
Perkins and Armey both talk about small government and limited government, by which they mean a government that does nothing ... unless it's doing something bad, like banning gay marriage or finding new ways to redistribute wealth to the top 5 percent of the populace. Armey holds himself out as a model, along with Newt Gingrich, of the kind of new leadership the Republican party needs, while Perkins invokes Ronald Reagan. It's morning in America -- except in the Republican party, where it's 1980 or 1994.
Twenty-first century voters who ended Republican rule after watching the economy tank due in no small measure to the anti-regulatory fervor of "do nothing" Republicans, and who remember the aftermath of the government's "do nothing" response to Katrina, don't care so much whether government is large or small. They want government to be effective. They want government to work, to solve the problems that government is capable of solving. Neither Perkins nor Armey are speaking for those voters, as much as they want to pretend otherwise.
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