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Tancredo on what the GOP needs to do; and, the Gingrich phenomenon
In 2006 the House GOP stood, as I said at the time, like a stone wall against the horrible immigration bill that had been passed by the Senate, refusing, in an unusual departure from Congressional etiquette and practice, to go into a Senate House conference on the bill. That bold refusal led to the bill’s happy demise. For months after that event, as Republicans worried about their ability to maintain their majority in the House of Representatives in the November elections, I argued that their one sure ticket to victory was to put their magnificent anti-open borders stand front and center in the campaign. If they had said, “Elect us Republicans back to the House, and we will keep back the open borders forces, just as we did this year,” they would have won. But they didn’t do anything of the kind. Out of the same lack of aliveness that has always been Republicans’ chief characteristic, they never mentioned this important achievement or played it up. Yes, they were willing to refuse in silence the 2006 bill—but they weren’t willing to campaign actively against it. Instead they behaved as though they were ashamed of it. And as a result of the GOP’s ultimate lack of guts and follow-through, the Democrats now run the House and are in a position to enlarge their majority very significantly in 2008. Writing at Townhall, Tom Tancredo makes an argument similar to the one I made in 2006, saying that a strong stand on immigration is the GOP’s best winning issue this year. I would add that a GOP victory—or least the prevention of a major defeat—is far more urgent now than it was in 2006, since a big GOP loss in the Congress coupled with the election of a Democratic president would mean a hard left turn by America. But I fear the same lifelessness that immobilized the GOP in 2006 will immobilize them now. What I’m calling lifelessness is at bottom simply adherence to—or at least a radical disinclination to challenge—liberalism.
In his article, Tancredo also skewers Newt Gingrich’s latest nine-point plan to save the Republican party—or is it a twelve-point plan, or a seven-point plan? Who can keep Gingrich’s constantly exfoliating to-do lists straight? And who could possibly care? Gingrich wakes up every morning of his life with a new ten-point—or is it eighteen-point?—answer to America’s problems churning in his head, gives several interviews and a speech about it, writes an article about it, gets talked up in a prestige newspaper, stirs up excitement in conservative circles, and then forgets it all by bed time, when he drifts into a restless sleep and wakes up the next morning brimming over with a new twenty-seven point plan. Which gets the conservatives just as excited as on the previous day. Which shows that they are just as distracted as he is. And the problem is not just that his to-do lists and other statements keep changing. It’s that they consist largely of hyperbolic blather. I’ll never forget the long letter he wrote about the Islam problem on behalf of some conservative women’s organization, which a friend gave me. The thing seemed very important, so I read it carefully. In the opening pages he described Islamic extremism as the most alarming threat in the history of the world, and spoke of the necessity of serious action against it. Then, in the second half of the letter he got to his “plan,” which consisted of … promoting women’s participation in democratic movements in Muslim countries. That was what he was pushing to defeat the greatest threat in human history. Gingrich is a joke, a cartoonish parody of a political visionary. Yet such is the absence of talent and principle in today’s Republican party that a certain number of (understandably) desperate conservatives persist in putting their hopes in him.
Gerald M. writes:
Ha! I laughed out loud this morning as I read your takedown of the Newtster. Waking up each morning with a 17 point plan for what ails America churning in his head, then scurrying over to the nearest TV studio to tell us all about it. Kind of like Moses come down from the mountain except more assertive. Or, actually, now that I think about it, more like a hamster on crack, if hamsters could talk. You have Gingrich to a “T”: not quite a buffoon, but definitely one of the most overrated public intellectuals bloviating today.LA replies:
Thank you. I’m not familiar with Lewis Black, and I’m not sure I’d want to be, if he’s like me.Adela G. writes:
Your gift for reducing an entire process—or person—to utter absurdity by a dry recitation of mundane details never fails to delight. I’m glad Gerald enjoys it as much as I do.LA replies: Thanks to Adela. Her juxtaposition of my description of Gingrich with my description of bowling suggests something very funny that I hadn’t thought of and that had me laughing as I was reading it: that the state of zoned-out repetitive meaninglessness I attributed to bowling also applies to today’s Republican politics, and especially to Republicans’ discussions of “what we need to do.” Such discussion can only go in circles, so long as the Republicans remain within the gravitational field of liberalism.Spencer Warren writes:
I don’t necessarily disagree with your criticism of Gingrich. May I note, however, that it was his intellectual leadership that roused the House Republicans out of their decades-long lethargy, producing the first Republican Congress in four decades, in the 1994 election (with a big assist from the Clintons). This made him the conservative heir to Reagan. However, due to his serious political and personal shortcomings (so far as I can tell), he was turned out by his members only four years later, an unprecedented action against so powerful a figure as a Speaker of the House. It is because of Gingrich’s serious faults that there is no conservative leader today. Yet I must qualify this by noting that Gingrich suffers from certain underlying philosophic tendencies toward liberalism.Spencer Warren writes:
Tancredo writes: Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 17, 2008 08:26 PM | Send Email entry |