Let The Shit-Flinging Begin

What is apparently already happening to the GOP as a result of the imminent defeat in the midterm elections is something I call "The Terrell Owens Effect." TO was a cancer when the Eagles went to the Super Bowl, and he was a cancer the next year. It only mattered when the Eagles started losing. Because nothing hides problems like winning.

In the case of the Republican Party this year, the skirmish among conservatives over what is going wrong has begun unusually early and turned unusually personal.

But almost regardless of the outcome on Nov. 7, many conservatives express frustration that the party has lost its ideological focus. And after six years of nearly continuous control over the White House and Congress, conservatives are having a hard time finding anyone but one another to blame.

The most interesting of this blame-gaming is toward the social conservatives, playing into what I noted yesterday as a move away from the culture war focus (which honestly won't leave the GOP with much of a hardcore base left).

This year’s antagonists also include some new critics, including Mr. Gingrich’s one-time lieutenant, Dick Armey, the former House Republican majority leader.

In recent weeks, Mr. Armey has stepped up a public campaign against the influence of Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and an influential voice among evangelical protestants. In an interview published last month in “The Elephant in the Room,” a book by Ryan Sager about splits among conservatives, Mr. Armey accused Congressional Republicans of “blatant pandering to James Dobson” and “his gang of thugs,” whom Mr. Armey called “real nasty bullies” — arguments he reprised on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and in an open letter on the Web site organization FreedomWorks.

In an interview this week, Mr. Armey said catering to Dr. Dobson and his allies had led the party to abandon budget-cutting. And he said Christian conservatives could cost Republicans seats around the country, especially in Ohio.

“The Republicans are talking about things like gay marriage and so forth, and the Democrats are talking about the things people care about, like how do I pay my bills?” he said.

Mr. Armey also pinned some of the blame on Tom DeLay, the former Republican House majority leader, who “was always more comfortable with the social conservatives, the evangelical wing of the party, than he was with the business wing.”

Mr. Armey, who identifies himself as an evangelical, said he was tired of Christian conservative leaders threatening that their supporters would stay away from the ballot box unless they got what they wanted.

“Economic conservatives,” he argued, were emerging as the swing voters in need of attention, in part because they had become more likely to vote Democratic in the years since President Bill Clinton was in office. “A lot of people believe he brought us from deficits to surpluses, and there is a certain empirical evidence there,” Mr. Armey acknowledged.

There is a delight in this entire article that opponents inevitably take at the infighting of the other side. That's why this election is so important, because after a victory, the narratives will change on a dime. It'll be the GOP in disarray and the Democrats with the ability to get their people out. In fact, you're already seeing this, as stories highlight broad Democratic health care policy objectives. Only the party in power gets to talk about ideas. My representative, Henry Waxman, is quoted in the article saying that, obviously, Democrats will not have carte blanche to implement an agenda so long as George Bush is President. This is why it's so completely ridiculous to see these scaremongering attacks by Republicans about how Democrats would raise your taxes by billions and let terrorists kill you in your bed. Um, the President has spent six years bolstering the powers of the executive and ignoring Congress. Do you honestly expect people to believe that a Democratic takeover would have them rule the country? It's called a veto, Pres. Look into it.

But the change in narrative, the aura of inevitability, is a very positive development. You get to see articles like this, a full-throated airing of Democratic values and Democratic principles without the normal "The Democrats are fighting" theme tacked onto it.

Former president Bill Clinton said yesterday that the governing Republican majority has abandoned the common good in favor of ideologically driven politics that demonize its opponents, has forced ordinary Americans to fend for themselves and has too often left the United States isolated internationally [...]

"They believe the country is best served by the maximum concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the right people," he told a mostly student audience at Georgetown University. "Right in both senses."

Clinton went on to say that while Democrats "believe in mutual responsibility, they believe that in large measure people make or break their own lives and you're on your own." He continued: "We believe in striving, at least, to cooperate with others because we think there are very few problems in the world we can solve on our own. They favor unilateralism whenever possible and cooperation when it's unavoidable."

Let's have the debate over how best to allow for the common good for all of our citizens. The country works best when everyone has a voice. And let's allow everyone to get their message on policy out instead of having to constantly deal with the process stories of "being in disarray." It's amusing to see Republicans struggling with this the way Democrats have for the past half-decade.