The morning after Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980, I sat down at a desk in my college English class. The professor stood before us, dead center in the room, raised his head and tightened his eyes. “How does it feel,” he asked, “to wake up in a conservative world?”
Twenty-eight years later, I ask you, Republican leaders, how does it feel to wake up in a liberal world?
Although each of the five Orange County Republican congressmen won his or her race, voters repudiated your party all over the country. You lost Southern and Western states vital to your coalition. Blowing Nevada and Colorado hurt, but watching Virginia leave the solid South, that stings. And Indiana? Indiana has not voted for a Democrat since Johnson thrashed Goldwater in ’64.
Just before the 2006 elections, Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, 232 to 202. Now, after last week’s wreck, you’re hobbling around with 173. In just four years, you’ve had to say goodbye to about 50 of your fellow Republican representatives.
Don’t blame the war for the debacle in 2006, or the economy for 2008. Blame your own leaders in the Congress who’ve done nearly nothing to deal with middle-class agonies. Let’s be specific:
n Since 2000, many Americans sweated as their wages stopped growing. Alan Greenspan says earnings have stagnated because skilled workers in India and China have taken American manufacturing and service jobs. But did Republicans adjust tax policy to encourage more domestic jobs? No.
n Ask your barber and dry cleaner about how energy prices have scuttled their budgets. Energy costs may be down since their recent peaks, but they are still high. Yet, Republicans did little to encourage new exploration, refinery construction, nuclear power, or alternative energy sources.
n Anxiety over healthcare costs, of course, is nothing new. It’s been showing up consistently in polls as one of the American voter’s top three concerns since before Bill Clinton was president. The Republican response? Just about nothing.
In the meantime, Republicans, who once had street cred on fiscal issues, pumped up social spending under President Bush,not defense expenditures, mind you, but social spending,by 17.5%, a rate far greater than under Clinton or Carter. Republican self-mockery was complete when, under their leadership, earmarks ballooned from 3,000 in 1996 to 13,000 10 years later.
From 2001 through 2006, with the presidency and both houses in their hands, Republicans could have done nearly anything about any of these problems. But they didn’t. So we’ve relearned the eternal lesson that, when you blow off the average voter’s anxieties, year after year, regularly, repeatedly, and spectacularly, he or she will turn on you.
And when the storm comes, such as discontent over the war, or a financial crisis, you’ve run out of credit, and the voter doesn’t trust you to deal with it. This is how bad it’s gotten: For solutions, the nation now looks to Barack Obama, a complete and untried experiment, and two demonstrably childish legislative leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.
Capaldi is a partner in the business law firm of Spach, Capaldi & Waggaman LLP in Newport Beach and chairman emeritus of The Lincoln Club of Orange County.
