The Left’s Preemptive Sour Grapes

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, November 04, 2014

The scale of its eventual defeat may not be known for a couple of months, but at this point we know one thing for sure: This evening is not going to be an enjoyable one for the Democratic party and its partisans. Contrary to the wild predictions that simmered and swirled after the fractious government shutdown of October 2013, there is no chance that Republicans will lose control of the House of Representatives, nor are Democrats likely to escape with fewer than five losses in the Senate. At the state level, moreover, the party’s decline is likely to be accelerated rather than checked. And so, as Obama’s winter of discontent sees its first, hesitant snowfall, the spinners have begun to spin the cold away.

Conservatives are accustomed to being informed that their victories are in fact losses, and that all apparent triumphs are mere pauses on the road to irrelevance and annihilation. But this year the tendency seems to be especially pronounced. In the New York Times, reporters seem incapable of noting probable Republican advances without telling tales of disillusioned voters and a climate of general dejection. Nobody, it seems, votes happily for the GOP.

Our psephologists, meanwhile, have taken to tempering each prediction of Republican success with the reassurance that the Right’s victories cannot possibly last for long. Never mind that the presidency of Barack Obama may well leave the Democratic party in its worst shape for decades, that the Left has been reduced in its legislative appeal to a handful of urban areas, that young people could be trending Republican for the first time in years, or that we are witnessing an ongoing conservative sweep of state-level governments that will have real consequences in people’s lives. The preferred story here is that Republicans will not be able to hold onto both houses of the federal legislature in a couple of years’ time — and this, it seems, is what matters most of all.

This is not to imply that this critique is false. Indeed, should they win control of the Senate tonight, Republicans are not only unlikely to retain control of that body in 2016, but they will almost certainly struggle to regain the White House, too. By and large, the GOP now has the problem that the Democratic party did in the 1980s: Namely, that the geographical distribution of its voters makes it relatively easy for Republicans to win majorities in the House of Representatives and the state legislatures but difficult for them to win the presidency.

There are structural problems, too. If, as seems eminently plausible, Republicans begin next year with control of both chambers of Congress, it is going to require considerable political skill for the party to stay united. Predictions of a fatal Republican civil war are almost always overstated, but persistent rumblings from Ted Cruz and his ilk do seem to suggest a showdown of sorts. At the very least, observers might conclude that the suicidal instincts that provoked the calamitous shutdown of 2013 have not been entirely suppressed. Reports of a wholesale Republican demise have been premature, yes. But all is not well in paradise.

Nevertheless, interesting as these observations might be in the abstract, one has to wonder why our ostensibly non-partisan journalistic class is so keenly focused on them. At times, the media comes to resemble a group of spurned and spoiled children who, having lost control of a favorite teddy bear, resolve that they never wanted it anyhow. Many are the tales of impending doom. If the GOP wins, Bloomberg’s Francis Wilkinson confirms, it will still be “a wreck”; while even a stellar victory, per the Chicago Tribune, will represent “no cure for Republican ills in 2016.” The Democratic party, the Times’s Nate Cohn avers meanwhile, should not be too worried by a hammering, for conservatives are winning over the wrong sorts. At Politico, Todd Purdum puts this case even more harshly: “Republicans,” he exclaims, will “lose by winning.” This theme was picked up this morning by Joe Scarborough, who spent the majority of his Election Day broadcast explaining why a Republican victory would, in fact, serve as a defeat.

What, I am curious to know, are Republicans supposed to do with the assurance that their gains will be short-lived? Are their candidates expected to deliberately lose? Certainly, control of the Senate may be temporary — on paper, at least, the map in 2016 is brutal. But, if so, would this not suggest that the GOP would benefit significantly from running up the score now — and that, in consequence, any significant electoral victories should be regarded not as a problem to be pondered but as a crucial part of the rebuilding process? In my view, commentators who are playing down potential Republican wins on the grounds that the party will eventually lose whatever it gains are rather missing the point. Of course the GOP is not where it needs to be. Of course it has not overcome its long-term structural difficulties. Of course these elections do not suggest that conservatism is back in any meaningful way. And yet, history teaches us that politics is as often about eking out victories as it is about being strong in theory. Just as the underdog in a World Series would be better off going into Game 3 with a couple of early victories, if Republicans can give themselves a head start going into 2016, they are likely to benefit from it later on in ways we cannot currently imagine. However it is achieved, are we honestly to believe that racking up the score would be a bad thing?

Allied closely with the presumption that any such accomplishment will ultimately be empty is the fashionable notion that midterm elections are in some way “dangerous” per se, and that gains made during the off-years do not therefore count. Leaving to one side for a moment how utterly silly it is to propose that winning control of Congress represents a hollow victory if it does not eventually lead to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, it strikes me that the routine insistence that the diminished “midterm electorate” serves as a poor barometer of public opinion is resting heavily upon a tautology: Essentially, the Democratic party’s dismissal of the midterms boils down to the acknowledgment that they tend to lose in certain years because people don’t go and vote for them.

Now, it is absolutely true that we see differently composed electorates at different points in the cycle and that this has serious consequences. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that these electorates are the product not of hard and fast rules but of voters’ free choices. As it happens, there is nothing within the text of the United States Constitution that bars left-leaning Americans from the polls on off-years; nor are there any rules that limit the midterm plebiscite to those who have registered as Republicans. Rather, many Democrats simply decline to turn out and vote. For progressives to claim that they “would have won in a presidential election year,” then, is at best to acknowledge that their coalition depends heavily upon low-information voters, and at worst to count as their own the ballots of those who deliberately chose not to line up with them. If Barack Obama’s coalition does not turn out for his party’s next candidate, will we hear “Well, we would have won if those who voted for us in 2012 had done so this time?”

This attempt to substantially differentiate between midterm and presidential electoral results should be seen for what it really is: an attempt to render the presidency as the key focal point of our majoritarian politics and to cast the legislature as the tool of the intransigent. It should come as no surprise that the White House has started to subtly reapportion the blame for our present “gridlock” and to preemptively transform what may well be a healthy Republican legislative majority into an extreme collection of bitter clingers and out-of-touch ideologues, for the future of the administration depends on its successfully doing so. Where once the plucky little House was vilified for defying the combined will of the Senate and of the White House, now all of Congress has to be at fault. “Quite frankly,” Joe Biden told CNN yesterday, “going into 2016 the Republicans have to make a decision whether they’re in control or not in control. Are they going to begin to allow things to happen? Or are they going to continue to be obstructionists?” Biden then predicted cannily that the GOP would likely “choose to get things done.”

It is worth saying from the outset that I reject Biden’s premise here wholesale. In America, political powers are separated on purpose. The House, the Senate, and the president all enjoy equally legitimate — if sometimes contradictory — mandates from the people. No single person or entity enjoys “control” of the country, nor should they. In consequence, if Obama were to veto everything that was put on his desk by a Republican Congress, he should not expect to be termed a wrecker but instead to be regarded as a man who is using the powers that he has been accorded to get as much of what he can out of the system.

Likewise, if the House or the Senate — or the House and the Senate, as may soon be the case — were to refuse to acquiesce to the president’s agenda, that is their right, too. Contrary to the repeated complaints of our progressive friends lo these last four years, divided government is not inevitably “bad government,” nor is each branch’s electing to dig in its heels in any way “unacceptable” or “extreme.” Instead, it is the system working as it was intended to work: slowly, surely, and with its power fractured and divided by design.

Nevertheless, by focusing in on President Obama as he did, Biden has given us a preview of the message that we will almost certainly hear from the White House should Republicans come to control both houses of Congress: To wit, that the only actor that really matters in lawmaking is the president, and that Congress’s almost inevitable refusal to go along with his agenda constitutes unconscionable “obstruction” or a “failure to lead.” You will note, I suppose, that Biden did not submit that Republican “control” would involve Republicans’ making things happen, but that it would involve them electing “to allow things to happen” — “things,” one can only imagine, that President Obama proposes.

This, it should be perfectly clear, is self-serving and absurd — especially given that, while he has a role to play, the president is not primarily a legislator. Again, for the sake of clarity I should say that I will not regard President Obama as having done anything wrong if he stands firm for the next two years. He was elected, too. Still, if we accept Biden’s premise, it seems obvious that he has got his conclusion the wrong way about. If one honestly believes that the “minority” in Washington should not be obstructing the prevailing legislative agenda of the majority, one really has only one choice in the event of a Republican takeover: to conclude that Obama is now the “problem.” If, as he suggests he does, Joe Biden believes that legislation should move one way and one way only, can he honestly contend that the correct response to the American people’s having left the president completely isolated would be to blame the opponents by which he will be swamped?

In the age of Twitter, we often look for quick wins and immediate answers. But Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor will a conservative revival be. In truth, the asseveration that a good night tonight does not represent an end to the Right’s problems is useful only as a response to the suggestion that it might be: a submission that has not, to my knowledge, been forthcoming. Tomorrow, the 2016 campaign will begin in earnest, and all of the complications and challenges that existed yesterday will remain in force. Conservatives, let’s acknowledge, will still have their work cut out, even if they achieve a clean sweep. What may have changed, however, is the size of the climb ahead. The next battle for the Senate will look much different if Republicans have 55 seats than if they have 49, just as the presidential election will be recast by the number of opportunities that conservatives have to demonstrate their wares. Every little bit helps. The future is always “don’t know.” And you don’t win much by losing.