2010 As 1994, But a Messenger is needed

(Race42012).We’ve seen this before: a young, charismatic Democratic president, elected largely due to the screw-ups of a Republican president named Bush, finds himself totally unprepared for the job, ends up having his reformist agenda shelved by his own party’s congressional power-brokers, and allows his White House to become the property of congressional Democrats and left-wing interest groups, who run the president’s policies and approval rating into the ground. By the summer of 1993, President Clinton’s attempt at health care reform had been dealt a serious blow, many of the president’s social policies were viewed as outside the cultural mainstream by most Americans at that time, and the most significant piece of legislation to be signed into law by the president was a tax bill opposed by large numbers of Americans. As of the summer of 2009, President Obama’s efforts to reform health care seem to be flailing, the president’s Supreme Court nominee enjoys luke-warm support on the part of the American people due to her questionable statements on race, and the most significant piece of legislation to become law remains an economic stimulus bill that is increasingly seen as a giveaway to special interests on the part of a naive fledgling president.

As such, Republicans will probably do well in 2009/10 just as they did in 1993/94. The GOP will likely benefit from the return of the Atlantic-readin’, Tom Friedman totin’, moderate independents to the Republican tent for at least one election cycle in order to prevent Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid from gaining any more power than they already have, as well as from the regional dynamic that characterizes midterm elections. Without a single national leader, Republicans are free to run as the Anybody But Obama party, fielding regionally-appropriate candidates for public office in red, blue, and purple territory. That will mean that 2009/10 will see victories by an ideologically diverse group of Republicans, from Chris Christie to Bob McDonnell, from Rudy Giuliani and Carly Fiorina to John Kasich, from Charlie Crist and Mike Castle to Pat Toomey. And that will be good for the party, because fresh blood means new ideas, and new ideas are sorely needed in a party that, near the end of the Bush years, began to feel like just as much of a tired, old clearinghouse of interest groups as, well, the Democrats.

Still, there remains one main distinction between the present political environment and that of 1993/94, and that is the inability of today’s Republican Party to regain the trust and recapture the imagination of a majority of Americans,The problem with today’s GOP is that it is sorely lacking in both a message that resonates with the majority of Americans as well as messengers that can effectively explain that message to those Americans.

So ultimately, 2010 probably will not be 1994, but Democrats are busily sowing the seeds of their own demise and it will be up to the new Republican officeholders in 2011, such as Gov. Giuliani, Sen. Fiorina, Gov. Christie, etc., to come up with a modern Republican agenda that fits the times in which we live. And should President Obama fail to move back to the center after 2010 the way President Clinton did after 1994, Republicans will have a real opportunity to take back the White House in 2012, which makes the reformist messages of Gov. Romney and Gov. Huckabee all the more important and which provides an opening for a fiscally conservative, high-tech, socially inclusive Republican presidential contender should one make his way onto the political stage.