REFLECTIONS ON THE 2006 MIDTERM ELECTION

• First, a few comments about the significance of the Democratic victory.  There is no question that the Party’s victory is important, and, since Nancy Pelosi will be the first woman Speaker of the House, historic.  Also, the Republican Party brought much of this defeat on itself (more about this later).  Besides, as William Safire argues, “A political shakeup every dozen years is a necessary cathartic for the two-party system.”  Any political party that remains entrenched for too long becomes sterile, void of ideas and often corrupt.  This is what happened with the Republican Party.  It was also important for the Republican Party to learn a little humility—and I believe the Republicans will learn this, for the conservative domination of the federal government that began in 1980 is probably over.  As David Brooks contends, “The [voters’] disaffection with the GOP was not philosophical.  It was about competence and accountability.  It was about the accumulation of Rumsfeld, Katrina, Abramoff, the bridge to nowhere and the failure to quarantine Mark Foley.  Bill Clinton captured the electorate’s central complaint about the GOP: ‘They can’t run anything right.’”  Hence, the voters eliminated the Republican majorities in a rather decisive manner.  But in doing so, they exchanged moderate Republicans for conservative Democrats.  Joe Lieberman was reelected as an Independent, despite the appeal of the political left in Ned Lamont.  Rick Santorum was defeated by conservative, pro-life Bob Casey.  Further, conservative Democrats like Heath Shuler of North Carolina and Brad Ellsworth of Indiana will bring a strong pull to the right for the Democratic Party.  No matter how one views this, you cannot argue that this election was a swing to the left.  It was not.  The country remains rather conservative, but it voted on the issues of competency and accountability.  Over the last two years especially, but going back to at least four, the Republican Party betrayed a significant incompetency and refused to be accountable.  For those reasons, the American people voted them out of power.  Brooks writes that “If you wanted to pick out a stereotypical swing voter in this election, it would be the white evangelical suburban office park mom in a blue state suburb.  She’s part of the one-third of white evangelicals who voted Democratic this year, as did 20% of self-described conservatives.  She supported the Iraq war once but believes it has been conducted terribly.  She doesn’t have a lot of faith in government generally—54% of voters believe government interferes too much, while only 37% want it to do more, according to a recent CNN survey—but she does think government should be able to accomplish its core missions.”  The bottom line of all this is that Americans want people in office who are more interested in governing than politics.  The Republican Party messed up big time and lost control of Congress as a result.  The Democratic party must send the message that it is interested more in governing than in politics—and it does not have very much time to do so.

• Second, an important word about corruption.  In 1994, conservatives came into power with a strong mission to clean up all the corruption in Washington, D.C.  By 2006, the Republican conservatives had become as corrupt as those they defeated in the 1990s.  Many years ago, Lord Acton of England stated that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  His comment reflects a major characteristic of the human condition.  Once exposed to the machinations of government and the lure of money and political favors, the Republicans were drawn to K Street and the pervasive culture of corruption.  As Chuck Colson has observed, “We had fifteen congressmen alone with ethical challenges!  It has been an epidemic.  It’s bad when anyone in public office betrays their trust, but particularly bad with a conservative, because the first principle of conservatism is the preservation of the moral order.  And so when conservatives misbehave and betray the trust, it goes to the very definition of who we are, it goes to our very character.”  So, conservative Republicans lost because they deserved to lose.  Colson writes that “when a conservative has a much-publicized affair or is outed for impersonal sexual behavior with pages, or dips into the congressional budget pot to hand out earmarks to his own district, he is a hypocrite to be scorned.”  At least 8 Republican House seats fell largely due to scandal, and campaign-finance ties to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff probably cost Conrad Burns his seat in Montana.  But this failure of character was personified in Mark Foley.  His behavior was reprehensible and the Republican Party leadership did not deal with it decisively or in a timely manner.  There is every evidence that the leadership stonewalled, delayed and tried to hide this whole affair for purely political reasons.  That is scandalous and unacceptable.  It is also hypocritical because conservatives stand for moral order and for decency.  The typical American then will not tolerate this kind of stonewalling.  Thus, the Foley affair heightened this image of incompetency and of corruption.  I repeat, they lost control of Congress because they deserved to lose control of Congress!

• Third, what about the religious breakdown of voters in the election?  Has the Democratic Party closed what some have called the “God Gap?”  When it came to turnout, white evangelicals and born-again Christians made up about 24% of those who voted, compared with 23% in the 2004 election.  And 70% of those white evangelical and born-again Christians voted for Republican Congressional candidates nationally, also little change from the 72% who voted for such candidates in 2004.  In Ohio and Pennsylvania, Democratic Senate candidates who intentionally tried to appeal to religious voters did succeed at winning back a significant percentage of Romans Catholics and white mainline Protestants.  Never before in any election has the religious left been so organized and so active.  They held rallies and passed out hundreds of thousands of voter guides, all with the message that religious conservatives’ traditional agenda of opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage was too narrow.  But the Democratic Party deserves enormous credit for recruiting a sterling set of candidates.  Many of the new candidates embraced conservative values, such as right to life and the sanctity of traditional marriage.  These candidates in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, for example, won large numbers of religious voters, both Roman Catholic and Protestant.

• Fourth, what does all this mean for conservatism?  George Will poignantly argues that conservatives “were punished not for pursuing but for forgetting conservatism. . . they are guilty of apostasy from conservative principles at home (frugality, limited government) and embraced anti-conservative principles abroad (nation-building grandiosity pursued incompetently).”  In short, the nation did not embrace liberalism in this election; the nation remains conservative but simply wants government to work better and more effectively.  As stated above, Americans really do not want more government in their lives; they want less!  And they want competency, something the Republicans did not model.  What is the evidence that the nation remains fundamentally conservative?  (1)  The property rights movement gained ground as voters in nine states passed measures to restrict governments from exercising eminent domain in order to enlarge their tax revenue.  (2)  In seven states, the marriage amendment won decisively, losing only in Arizona.  (3)  In Michigan, opponents of racial preferences in public hiring, education and contracting (affirmative action) easily passed their referendum, 58 to 42%, in spite of being outspent more than three to one.  (4)  In Nebraska, voters decisively defeated a gambling initiative that would have expanded Keno gambling.  (5)  As Will observes, the number of Republicans in the House (at least 200) will still be larger than the largest number during the Reagan years (192 in 1981-83).  (6)  Many of the elections were very close, which should not surprise us.  A switch of just 1,424 votes in Montana, for example, would have kept the Senate Republican.  This reality validates what we have seen in the last several national elections.  The nation is fairly evenly divided.  The Republican majority had a very thin majority and the shift of a few votes changed power in Washington.  Further, Joe Lieberman, scorned by his Party on Iraq, handily won reelection as an Independent.  His left-wing opponent, Ned Lamont, lost!  In short, this was an event driven election.  As Charles Krauthammer observes, “The electorate threw the bums out in disgust with corruption and in deep dissatisfaction with Iraq policy.”  The election was shrewdly portrayed—and correctly I might add—as a referendum on Republican governance.  The American electorate, still fundamentally conservative, said “enough.”  If the Republican Party is to make any gains in the short run, it had better come up with a governing philosophy that reflects the basic principles of conservatism embodied by Ronald Reagan.  Its failure to do so these last six years has cost it dearly—and will continue to do so for years to come.

See Wall Street Journal editorial (9 November 2006); Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post (10 November 2006); “End of Day” (8 November 2006); George Will, Washington Post (9 November 2006); Laurie Goodstein, New York Times (9 November 2006); “Breakpoint” (9 November 2006 and 8 November 2006); David Brooks, New York
Times (12 November 2006; and William Safire, New York Times (12 November 2006).