The victory of Rand Paul in Tuesday’s Republican senatorial primary in Kentucky – with the strong support of the constitution-obsessed, small-government Tea Party movement – shows that Republicans are ready to offer the public a drastic reduction in the size of government. They offered this before, of course, in 1994, but ran aground on their own corruption and the public’s shallow understanding of what cutting government actually meant. ~Christopher Caldwell

It can hardly be a bad thing after the last decade of illegality to be more Constitution-obsessed, but leave that aside. Most Republicans today aren’t ready to propose a “drastic reduction.” At most, we can say that a majority of Republicans in Kentucky apparently favor this view. Given the tendency of the Kentucky electorate to elect Republicans to statewide office over the last two decades, almost any Republican nominee would be in a good position to win in the fall there. Throughout the Midwest and the old border states, the NRSC has mostly recruited bland, presumably electable candidates such as Mark Kirk, Dan Coats, Rob Portman, and Roy Blunt, and they have no intention of campaigning on a platform of drastic spending cuts.

That isn’t meant to take anything away from Rand Paul’s success so far or from the importance of his message, but it is important to distinguish between one candidate’s fiscal conservative message that is necessary and politically viable in a particular state and the national party’s message that is basically unserious on fiscal policy but unfortunately also more competitive nationwide. Most Republicans are the new champions of the entitlement status quo, and their motto seems to be “Medicare Forever!” They cannot flee from Paul Ryan’s budget proposal fast enough, because they are terrified of being tied to its proposed cuts.

So most Republican candidates aren’t proposing any significant cuts at all, because they do not want to jeopardize their chances of winning in a favorable election cycle. There will always be the usual noises about “waste, fraud and abuse” and earmarks, but these are irrelevant to the fiscal problems we face, and for the most part Republicans are relying on the public’s ignorance about the budget to make their irrelevant anti-earmark rhetoric sound important and credible. In other words, when presented with what they claim is an unprecedented favorable election year they are content to sit back, take no serious risks, and provide no real leadership. Republican overconfidence in their political fortunes might be less annoying if it were matched by a similar confidence in proposing a relevant agenda.

The GOP did not propose “drastic reduction” in government before the ’94 election, but they did take their victory that year as a mandate for at least some reduction in spending. They were undone partly by their own misreading of the public mood and their misinterpretation of the election result, and partly by their poor leadership that was frequently outmaneuvered by a savvier Democratic President. There was corruption in the Republican majority, but it did not become an obvious, major issue until the 2000s, and even then it didn’t cost them much until 2006. The public may have a shallow understanding of what is involved in cutting government spending (in part because most people vastly overestimate how much money is spent on foreign aid), but what the majority does seem to understand is that there are some kinds of spending that it does not want reduced at all. The same Medicare spending that leading Republicans now treat as sacrosanct and untouchable was one of these. For the sake of short-term positioning, the Republican absolute defense of Medicare, which is at the core of any push for health care repeal, has made it virtually impossible to make a credible argument for getting public debt under control.

Caldwell does have a more interesting take on Tuesday’s election results than most:

Tuesday’s elections hint at a darker and more destabilising outcome: a Republican party not quite strong enough to stop the president’s plans and a Democratic party too weak and unpopular to pay for them.

This is possible. The difficulty is that a real Republican austerity agenda designed to eliminate the debt would be hugely unpopular, and their rank-and-file would not tolerate the tax increases that would probably have to be part of any solution. Having relied heavily on emphasizing how the unpopularity of a measure justifies opposition to it, as they did throughout the health care debate, they are in a uniquely bad position to argue for unpopular but necessary proposals for eliminating debt.

The GOP expects to win by default and expects to be rewarded for opposing the stimulus and health care bills. On the whole, the party leadership does not offer any proposal for how to pay off the staggering debt we are accumulating, and as I already mentioned it distances itself from the few serious attempts to grapple with that problem. Misinterpreting their losses in ’06 and ’08, they have adopted an anti-spending posture without any real fiscal conservative substance. Having lost the public’s trust during their time in the majority largely for other reasons they still cannot face, Republicans have done nothing to win it back and have been counting on weakness in the economy and the normal midterm correction to do all of their work for them. Despite the poor economic conditions and general discontent, this is why they remain the more unpopular of the two parties. That may partially avoid the destabilizing future Caldwell describes. It suggests that the public can thoroughly dislike the Democrats in Congress and will still trust their party more when it comes time to vote.