By Timothy Birdnow ——Bio and Archives--October 24, 2014
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"You remember this. It was like it was yesterday, and it was never-ending five years, folks, every day, every night, they body count. The Democrat Party and the media did everything they could to lose that war and saddle that loss around the neck of George W. Bush. And of course leading their charge, which they thought gave them credibility, was there weren't any weapons of mass destruction. The whole thing was unnecessary. Bush lied, people died, remember all this? So in the midst of it we now learn there were weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons and so forth that were found, military people are coming out of the woodwork now admitting it. They were told to put a lid on it back then because the Bush administration didn't want to go back in time. They had a philosophy in the White House: Never respond to criticism. Never defend yourself against any criticism no matter what happens because that'll just prolong the story. They had a belief, just let it go because the news cycle will take care of it. "Okay, they're calling us chumps today, but there will be a new story tomorrow and everybody will forget about it." That's not what happened. All of these charges and all of these allegations just piled on, one on top of another, and it became a full-fledged indictment and an allegation against the entire premise of the Iraq war. And over half of this country was talked into literal hatred for the administration, for the military, for the war, and even to a certain extent the War on Terror. And it was unnecessary. And Rove has even admitted now that one of the big mistakes he made strategically while he was chief of staff of the White House was letting some of these allegations day to day, whatever they were, not just about the Iraq war, but let 'em all go by and not comment on it. And he's absolutely right about that."
"I am more convinced than ever that the paralysis of the Republican Party stems from those five years of never-ending defamation that the White House chose to ignore and not reply to. There were numerous reasons why. "Well, you know, we have such reverence for the office that we're not gonna respond to these political charges. We're not gonna get down the gutter with these people. We're gonna maintain the aura of the office above all of this."But blame for this should not rest solely on Karl Rove or even on George W. Bush; this mindset goes back to the Clinton era, and indeed before. In the 1998 midterm elections, Democrats picked up 5 seats in the House of Representatives. Now, this was the first time in 58 years that the party in power picked up seats in a midterm, and only the third time since the Civil War. Bill Clinton was not especially popular at this point, facing impeachment for lying to America about the Lewinsky affair, and yet his party actually gained seats in the House (although they lost some in the Senate). Why was that? Well, it was partly a function of dislike for Newt Gingrich, and the Democrats were successful via their media allies in nationalizing the elections. But why was Newt so unpopular? Because he and the Republicans developed a strategy of duck and cover; Newt, a former history professor, knew the historical trends and exhorted the GOP to lay low. According to Nancy Gibbs and Mike Duffy at CNN:
"Among the people who tried to warn him off the strategy was Ralph Reed, the boy genius who had injected the Christian Coalition directly into the Republican bloodstream in the past decade. Reed, who left the Christian Coalition last year to found his own consulting firm, was sending alarm memos as early as September 1997. He privately warned G.O.P. leaders that "Republicans face the most severe agenda vacuum since Ronald Reagan ascended as their leader in 1980." He urged the national party to "make education a major theme in the 1998 campaign" and "avoid capitulation with Clinton." And four months before anyone had heard of Monica Lewinsky, Reed even cautioned Republicans not to "put all your eggs in the Clinton-scandal basket." It was a warning he would repeat in similar private memos to Gingrich, Lott and other leaders for the next 12 months. In the last one, dated Sept. 23, 1998, Reed predicted that "if we rely entirely on the scandal, we will come up short on Election Day."" [...] "Last spring Gingrich was boasting to other G.O.P. leaders that they didn't have to do anything, just wait for a crippled President to come to them. And sure enough, nothing resembling an agenda emerged from the Congress. This was the House that never even got around to passing a budget--the first time such a thing had happened since the budget process was established in the wake of Watergate. This guaranteed that Republicans would have little to brag about when they went home to their districts, other than renaming National Airport after Ronald Reagan and passing a fatty transportation bill that made fiscal conservatives shudder. "We say we are the party of keeping our fiscal house in order," says South Carolina Congressman Mark Sanford, "but we do a transportation bill that has all kinds of pork and go $20 billion over what we'd shaken on with the budget 12 months before. There's nothing more deadly."Gingrich and the GOP chose what they thought was the path of least resistance. They wrongly believed they would be able to ride a wave of voter dissatisfaction with Clinton, and that the endless drubbing they received in the press would not matter. This led to the infamous government shutdown. According to the CNN article:
"By deciding last summer to wrap all the unfinished business into a single massive spending bill, the Republicans handed Clinton a loaded gun. Failure to pass that bill would mean another government shutdown. That meant Clinton could pick anything he wanted with which to hold them up. With an eye on voters, Clinton chose to pick his fight on education--100,000 new teachers and 5,000 schools, to be precise--forcing Congress to stay around and bicker into October on an issue that played heavily in the Democrats' favor. The only thing the Democrats did wrong, says a Hill staff member, was not to force the G.O.P. to stay in session a week longer. That would have won them back the House. When the budget deal was cut, the Speaker turned on his own, calling his critics "the perfectionist caucus." That probably lost him the conservatives for good and put Gingrich on the defensive. Just four years after the Contract with America was unveiled, his own followers had become the enemy. The Field Marshal was no longer leading his troops anywhere they were willing to go."Does that sound familiar? How many times have Conservatives been accused of demanding perfection by the RINO wing of the GOP? We are forever hearing from the Establishment that we must accept a moldy crust of the loaf because we cannot get the loaf itself - even while we do not try for it. The Budget shutdown was as much Gingrich's fault as anyone. Gingrich would never commit to a steady course of action, not devise consistent policies or coherent messaging. And with the defeat in the government shutdown, many Republicans scurried for cover. The boldness that had characterized the "Contract with America" coalition died, to follow Gingrich's new "soft" policy, a "duck and cover" strategy that put political survival at all cost to the forefront. It claimed Gingrich's scalp shortly after the '96 midterms. Tom Delay explained this in an interview with Rush Limbaugh; "A group of conservative Republicans, not in leadership, were very upset about Newt Gingrich and the fact that he would change the agenda about every 15 minutes. They were getting upset with the fact that he was playing footsies with Bill Clinton too much, and they were going to take him out and take him down. At the same time the leadership was having the same problem and we were having discussions with Newt about his managerial style and how difficult it was to make things happen when he would change the agenda overnight." Despite this dissatisfaction the GOP adopted Newt's peace-at-any-price "footsie" approach. Pollster John Zogby explained in 1998: "During the first few months of this year, Republicans had been keeping somewhat of a low profile in Washington. They had found that their strident confrontational approach in dealing with President Clinton was costing them popularity. Thus, despite the President's many problems, the more Republican's attacked him, the higher Clinton's approval ratings rose and the lower the Republicans' ratings fell. The shift to a "kinder and gentler' Republican approach, in fact, did improve the party's standing. Even Gingrich himself personally benefited from this tactic. The release of his new book, Lessons Learned the Hard Way, and his cross-country tour to promote the book was designed to recast the Speaker's image. Gone was the attacking, acerbic Gingrich and in came the humble and contrite Gingrich. While the Speaker's ratings began to rise in response to his new image, polling data apparently began to tell the Republican leadership something else." So it was this non-confrontational approach that presaged the disaster that was the '98 midterm election. What does that tell us? In short, what good does it do to play this soft game? The GOP has been essentially been playing a prevent defense political game for decades, at least 16 years. Gosh, we still had global warming back then! And they have still not learned the futility of this approach. The GOP fumbled the ball on the impeachment too. According to the new York Times:
"This 'Be Patient' strategy, Republicans say, has many advantages. It deprives the White House of portraying the scandal as purely partisan. If Mr. Clinton stays in office but remains beleaguered, he will be all the more vulnerable a target as Republicans campaign against Democrats in the November midterm elections. And some Republicans go as far as to admit that they do not want Mr. Clinton forced out of office, because that would give his replacement, Vice President Al Gore, a leg up in the Presidential race in 2000. "''I do not believe in death by a thousand cuts,'' said Representative Bob Barr, a Georgia Republican who is the most outspoken advocate of having the House consider impeaching Mr. Clinton. ''The Presidency in our country is too important for that.'' [...] Asked about the go-slow approach of Mr. Gingrich and others in the leadership, Mr. Barr said, ''They're putting politics above principle, and I don't choose to do that.'' [...] "One House Republican official said the leadership was determined, at least for now, to resist the cries from the most outspoken party members to take more aggressive action. ''Why are we being quiet?'' said the official, who in keeping with the low-profile House strategy, spoke only on the condition of anonymity. ''We are not taking a pass on the character issue. By remaining silent at this juncture, we're simply saying the facts aren't in yet. When the time comes, the wind will change.'' An advantage of the keep-quiet strategy is that it allows Republicans, even ones who have hardly been shy previously about savaging Mr. Clinton, to appear high-minded on a scandal that is hardly that."And we know how well that particular approach worked; the GOP refused to subpoena key witnesses, refused to go after Clinton on more than one front, refused to do what was necessary to actually win the battle. Britt Hume, discussing the impeachment trial on Fox News Sunday, called it a farce. And they lost. So what Karl Rove did in regards to the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a tried-and-true strategy, at least as seen from the Establishment perspective. It is a loser, but it minimizes damage, or so they think. Actually, this approach predated the whole budget battle/impeachment; anyone remember George H.W. Bush's "kinder gentler America" and his unwillingness to get in the mud with Bill Clinton? Bush lost to Clinton because he tried to remain above the fray, and in the end was pummeled into retirement. Pusillanimity is the Ebola of America politics. Yet it has been at the core of the RINO/Establishment thinking all along. The notion of the patrician class, motivated by Nobles Oblige, permeates this particular wing, and they find the dirty nature of politics distasteful even while they covet the power and prestige. The old Rockefeller types certainly believed this, and were happy to remain in the minority rather than face off with the bourgeois Democrats. What Karl Rove did, and does, is simply the natural inclination of that particular political tradition. We shouldn't be surprised. It is uncouth to do real battle. Distasteful. And so America continues her long, horrible slide because those who covet leadership are unwilling to fight for us.
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Timothy Birdnow is a conservative writer and blogger and lives in St. Louis Missouri. His work has appeared in many popular conservative publications including but not limited to The American Thinker, Pajamas Media, Intellectual Conservative and Orthodoxy Today. Tim is a featured contributor to American Daily Reviewand has appeared as a Guest Host on the Heading Right Radio Network. Tim’s website is tbirdnow.mee.nu.