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.
-
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.
-
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