About halfway through his Monday afternoon radio broadcast Rush Limbaugh turned to a short essay written by blogger and law professor Glenn Reynolds two days before. Calling his work "A GOP Pre-Mortem," Reynolds gave his etiology of what would happen when, as he believed likely, "the GOP fares badly next month." Testily, Limbaugh depreciated the argument as soon as he introduced it, rejecting Reynolds' thesis — "Republicans deserve to lose"— as "a fool reason," and then asking, rhetorically, if the congressional alternative was just as deserved. He enumerated some of what Democrats had themselves promised to bring, as a majority, to the 110th Congress: arbitrary military withdrawal from Iraq, higher taxes, dudgeon and public inquiries and indictments over the White House's war conduct. The list was accurate, surely compelling in an exchange other than this one, where it was something of a red herring.
Would that Limbaugh have directly addressed Reynolds' own numbered sequence, "unforced errors" of the Republican Party, six of them in all. Step back. Reynolds' critique is strongest as a personal statement; not as a recounting of congressional events over the last twenty months, or an appraisal of Republican fidelity to rightist convictions. Applied broadly as Reynolds intends it to be, the argument, under omissions and inconsistencies, falters.
What is not immediately, or ever, apparent in the "pre-mortem" is which part or parts of the electorate — on whose support majorities have depended for the last two elections — will abandon Republicans this time, or why. That adjoining constituencies must accept some interests to be advanced in mutual exclusion of others ought not need mention, yet Reynolds concludes that "Republicans have managed to leave every segment of the base unhappy." Not quite so, or else candidates would be polling around zero.
Of the six transgressions: one is posited to have angered libertarians; another, judicial ideologues; two more, national security voters; and the last pair, the scrupulous. Over what? "Things that weren't even all that important." Leave aside the matter of withholding support where exculpation would be more appropriate, and consider the elections themselves. These are midterms, the House and a third of the Senate in contention. But in only three of the "unforced errors" did Congress affront public opinion. Where the White House was responsible for unpopular and inadvisable policy, why turn on the legislature? And if Republicans on Capitol Hill defied the Bush administration to assume politically favorable positions, as they did in force during the events on the other half of Reynolds' list, how and whom did they betray?
Limbaugh might have expounded on the left's escape from Reynolds' scrutiny. Reynolds qualified his essay only with the empty remark "Democrats don't really deserve to win, either." So — what, a two-year recess? The phrase "unforced error" has a very specific connotation, and Republicans made the decisions they did in response to certain counteractions — political circumstances, the Democratic Party and George Bush.
For the 2005 court-ordered privation of Terry Schiavo, the first "error," Reynolds does note Ralph Nader, one of the strange bedfellows made during the final legal dispute. Ten more bedfellows constituted one-fifth of the Democrats voting with Republicans for federal review of Schiavo's case, and nearly one quarter of the Congressional Black Caucus. If the religious are an electoral pillar of the right's, the monophonic American black vote is such of the left's — and there, as part of the bifurcated Democratic vote on the House floor, proportionally three times that of all Republicans voting against, was a wing of the Caucus.
Reynolds refers to the Supreme Court nomination of White House Counsel Harriet Miers as an eponymous "debacle," which is curious, since the compromise nomination a) produced very little negative mainstream press; b) polled with only slightly less popularity than the previous nominee, John Roberts; was c) retracted amid ululations from some rightists; and finally d) followed by the successful appointment of Samuel Alito. "The damage was done," writes Reynolds. OK, but why would restitution consist of replacing Republican senators, who didn't like Miers, with a selection to ensure another benign jurist like the counsel?
The White House was also at odds with Capitol Hill on a rescinded Emirati bid for a British port company operating in the United States, and various sutural measures for the border shared with Mexico. Congress, President Bush protested, "ought to listen to what I have to say to this." Congress answered him by anathematizing Dubai Ports World in committee. Not one week ago, there were rumors that the president would lose a border-fence bill, passed by an adjourned congress, in his pocket. Reynolds argues that all of this diminished the president's standing in national security. Maybe — but opposite Bush each time was an unsympathetic Republican congress. And the president isn't on the ballot.
Back in May, House Speaker Dennis Hastert rebuked the Justice Department for having collected evidence for graft charges against Democrat William Jefferson through a raid on the Rayburn House Office Building. He was one of a few representatives to call the action unconstitutional and demand the forfeiture of materials seized — a recondite position that made for bad politics. Hastert was not one of several congressmen who insinuated that Jefferson's troubles were the work of precipitate bigots. The speaker was, however, joined in his demurral by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Who threatened to bring down the San Francisco Democrat's party this November? Exactly one person to date, an anonymous staffer from the Congressional Black Caucus who was quoted by The Hill.
Reynolds' justification for the last "error" is inchoate — whatever the details, he writes, exiled lecher Mark Foley was "probably enough" to make the majority party irredeemable. So the impression of Republican obscurantism shall lead the right to elect a legislature that will, where Republicans simply failed, promulgate disappointments as a matter of ideological course, perhaps save for a sex outrage — unless, say, an elder stateswoman has been chasing after somebody's granddaughter? Reynolds is supported by polls, certainly. But the worst criticisms of Republicans come from judging the party in isolation. To the sense of rightist voters waiting until a general election to express displeasure — there are reasons, other than Republican vapidity, why statist ennui overshadows the Gingrich spirit. Two hundred twenty-something, if the right's avengers have their way.