fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Even If It Works, Ask Why

I think what we’re seeing is a rejection of the Obama Democrats’ big-government policies. The president and his party thought that in times of economic distress most voters would be supportive of or at least amenable to a vast expansion of the size and scope of government. ~Michael Barone This June poll was the most […]

2010 Congressional Legislative Priorities, by Party ID

I think what we’re seeing is a rejection of the Obama Democrats’ big-government policies. The president and his party thought that in times of economic distress most voters would be supportive of or at least amenable to a vast expansion of the size and scope of government. ~Michael Barone

This June poll was the most recent one I could find that specifically addressed the question of whether the public favored more government spending.  The result makes it fairly clear that as far as government spending is concerned most of the public is not recoiling from having too much of it.  Clearly, almost two-thirds support having more.  As you can see from the graphic, 52% of independents favored more spending at the start of the summer, which should make us question the assumption that Democratic woes are the result of defections by independents alienated by too much spending.  On health care, opinion was slightly negative and more closely divided than on any of the others, which makes the health care bill rather different from the Kansas-Nebraska Act in terms of the backlash against it.   

One of the reasons I have distrusted Barone’s analysis for most of the last year is that it is obvious that he very much wants his perceived backlash against big-government policies to be true, and he has been forcing the evidence to fit that interpretation.  I would actually be very pleased if there were a widespread popular rebellion against intrusive and expanding government, but I’m not going to kid myself that this is what we’re seeing.  Barone is trading on an idea that many conservatives want to believe, which is that adherence to principle and political success go hand in hand.  This is a lovely, horribly deceptive idea.  Generally, it isn’t true, and I’m not sure where anyone got the idea that it was. 

According to the story Republicans tell themselves, they lost power because they spent too much, and they believe they are proving that they understand where they went wrong by opposing all forms of new spending.  Even though they may be winning by default because of economic conditions, they very much want to link any success they have with this new opposition to more spending.  It’s a very neat, tidy, convenient and completely false narrative.  According to the same narrative, the public supposedly soured on the stimulus because they became anxious about deficits.  In fact, the stimulus lost support because it wasn’t enough of an actual stimulus bill, and so did not “work.”  In some of the early Republican criticism of the bill, there was a basic acceptance of the belief that enough money spent in the right way would be stimulative.  Now that a majority finds fault with the original bill, the new interpretation is that there should never have been one at all. 

This makes the same mistake that Barone and a thousand others have made about the health care bill.  They take all opposition to a complex, flawed, compromised, unaffordable bill and treat it as if it were all one thing, but opposition to the bill came from many different sources, including from those on the left who thought it was too weak, too much of  a sell-out to insurance companies, or insufficiently ambitious in some other way.  Hostility to the compromised bill that was passed does not imply support for returning to the way things were, and hostility to the compromised bill does not necessarily reflect opposition to an increased government role in the health care sector.  Barone wants you to think that it does, and he is basing almost his entire interpretation of the public mood and his expectation of a big midterm victory for the GOP on this misunderstanding.  Barone’s mistake is the national GOP’s mistake in miniature: he is treating the election as a national one with a unifying theme that has a clear ideological meaning when it isn’t and it doesn’t.  Barone may end up being right that the GOP is going to win the House, but it will have been mostly by accident, because he refuses to acknowledge the real reasons why the GOP is in a position to win.  The party is in a similar position: possibly on the verge of a great victory, but unable or unwilling to accept the real reason for it.

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here