There Must Be a (Dead) Pony!

Jonah Goldberg is trying -- very hard -- to find a silver lining in the upcoming political tsunami that looks as if it might sweep Republicans from power in Congress in November.

In his latest column in National Review Online, he contemplates not only the utter failure of the Republicans to wield power in order to put forward their ostensibly conservative agenda, he also speculates on what a Democratic takeover of the House might portend.

And he thinks it might turn out to be a good thing. Imagine that.

"Republican control of the White House and Congress hasn’t resulted in lights being turned off in Cabinet agencies or enormous garage sales of office furniture. Instead, Uncle Sam is still looking like Marlon Brando at the end of his career: bloated, sweaty, and slow moving. The GOP has become a Brando-like parody of its former self, reading its lines about cutting government without plausibility or passion.

The rub of it, from a conservative perspective, is that Republican control of the House doesn’t equal conservative control. It may not seem that way to liberals who think Joe Lieberman is right wing, but from the vantage point of the conservative movement, GOP dominance has been an enormous disappointment — good judicial appointments and tax cuts not withstanding. Our hopeful joy upon the 1994 takeover of Congress was like finding a new pony by the Christmas tree. Now it’s more like finding it slumped over dead on top of the presents."

Ah, yes. You can always count on a conservative Republican for a fancy prose style.

Now, besides the ghastly writing, what's interesting here is that Goldberg is actually admitting what some of us on the left have been saying for years -- that the Republicans in Congress have been an utter failure even on their own terms, and that they deserve to lose power.

Irony is a wonderful thing, isn't it?

So where's the silver lining? Here's where he tries to get cute:

"This may be why some of us aren’t contemplating the possible, if not probable, Democratic takeover of the House with too much dread. (Losing the Senate would be something else.) [...] as a matter of rank partisanship, letting the Democrats run wild could be good for both the GOP and conservatives, [...] If you think Americans are itching for change now, wait until they break into hives after two more years of Republican monopoly on power.

But a Pelosi-run House could so horrify voters that it would probably prepare the soil for a Republican presidential candidate in 2008. Pelosi is, if anything, a moderate in the Democratic caucus, but she is indisputably far to the left of the American center, in part because she and her colleagues mistake passionately angry bloggers for the mainstream. Letting voters see this crowd try to have its way for two years would only help the GOP in the far more important 2008 election."

In other words, we should lose Congress now because it will help us keep the White House two years from now.

Logic 101 (you know, the course that Ann Coulter had to take over in law school) tells us that if a premise is wrong, the conclusion will also be wrong. And the problem with Goldberg's argument is that his premise is wrong. And here's why: he just assumes that the Democrats will govern in the next two years as badly as the Republicans have for the last 12. But there's no reason to think that will be the case.

You see, Democrats know how to use legislative power. Republicans don't. And the reasons for that are tied in with the very philosophies espoused by the two parties. If you think, as Ronald Reagan used to claim, that government is the problem and not the solution, how can you use government effectively to get anything done? But if you think, as Democrats have always believed, that government is a tool that when used effectively can dramatically improve people's lives (as it did with, just to give one example, the GI Bill of Rights), you can use that tool to make things better.

Republicans are awfully good at complaining but not much good at anything else. With any luck the next few years will give them a lot to complain about.

Tom Moran