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Election Postmortem (#2)

Posted by kvryland on Friday, November 17, 2006 1:28:43 PM
Continuing the election postmortem that I started yesterday, let's get back to No. 2, the lack of leadership.

  1. (cont.) Forceful, committed leadership is essential to carrying forward an agenda, a philosophy of government. It was not, however, just a lack of leadership on the part of the Republican leadership team in the House and the Senate. The President is the de facto head of the Republican Party, and the President did almost nothing to force the congressional leadership to toe the line. In fact, the President gave the congressional leadership a blank check. He did not veto appropriations; he did not even threaten to veto appropriations. He just “went along to get along.” As a result of this abysmal lack of leadership from the White House, Congress floundered and finally ran aground in the congressional elections.

  2. Republicans who came Congress with a commitment to conservative principles allowed the years to eat away at their integrity and commitment to those principles. They became career politicians as the Democrats had become prior the the Republicans' “Contract with America.” Their commitment had become, “stay in power.” They failed to realize that the only way to stay in power was to carry out the promises they had made to the voters that put them into power. The citizens who had voted them in because of their philosophy of government, now voted them out because of their failure to live by that philosophy.

More later...

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Election Postmortem (#1)

Posted by kvryland on Friday, November 17, 2006 1:27:06 PM

Many people are writing election postmortems, and each has his own angle on why the Republicans took a whipping. I have no intention of restating what you have already heard and read. I would just like to make a few observations.

  1. Lack of Trust. This seems to me to be at the crux of the Republican defeat. The public had ceased to trust the Republicans. People wanted change, and the other game in town was the Democrats. I could go into quite a few reasons for the electorate's lack of trust of the Republicans (pork-barrel spending, lack of unity on crucial issues such as the war in Iraq, lack of commitment to border enforcement, lack of commitment to making the tax cuts permanent, lack of commitment to getting good judges on the bench, and you can probably name other issues that are important to conservative-minded voters), but I'll leave that up to the reader.

  2. Lack of Leadership. To a great extent the Republican's lack of commitment to conservative principles was due to a lack of leadership. It's not so much that Republicans in Congress did not believe in the principles that got them there. There was no one to enforce a discipline to those principles.

Gotta go. I'll get back to this issue of lack of leadership. --KVR
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