No panic at the ‘Wednesday meeting’

November 10, 2006

I have to say, for a group of folks who just got their hats handed to them, the gang at Grover Norquist’s Wednesday meeting sound quite content.

Awaking to the dismal reality of widespread defeat, more than 100 of the conservative movement’s most ardent leaders gathered as they have every Wednesday for more than a decade in a downtown conference room to discuss strategy.

And although they had lost control of the House, where Newt Gingrich launched the “Republican revolution” 12 years ago, they showed few signs of despair.

Instead, speaker after speaker declared that voters had not rejected conservative ideas but had merely rejected Republican Party leaders who strayed from the movement’s basic values.

“There was no ideological rejection in this election,” said Richard Lessner, former executive director of the American Conservative Union.

I’ve been reading that on just about every conservative site online, but I’m still not quite sure what makes conservatives believe it.

As I understand it, these activists believe Republicans lose when they fail to act like real Republicans (championing smaller government, moral issues as defined by Dobson & Co., tax cuts for the wealthy, etc.). Of course, Santorum probably enjoyed universal praise from activists like those at the Wednesday meeting, and he was trounced. Jim Talent in Missouri was with the right 100% of the time, but it didn’t save his campaign.

Ah, the Wednesday meeting participants respond, Santorum and Talent lost because they were Republicans in an anti-Republican year. Because the midterms focused on party instead of ideology, they say, there wouldn’t have even been an anti-Republican year if more GOP lawmakers had voted the way these two losers voted.

They seriously seem to believe this. I can only hope they don’t change their minds.

Even if we put aside the fact that voter rejection of several major statewide ballot initiatives severely undercuts their thesis, what’s their prescription for a comeback?

On a day that President Bush and many analysts said the voters appeared to be demanding an end to the hard-line politics of division, these conservative insiders insisted they could return to power as soon as 2008 by hewing closer to their traditional course. […]

A Republican National Committee memo laying out talking points for conservative pundits, bloggers and other supporters — which was obtained by The Times — underscored that message, calling for the party to “refocus conservative principles of less government, lower taxes, less regulation, strong national defense, judicial restraint and fiscal conservatism.”

The memo lauded a “strong party and a philosophy that works.”

It may make these guys feel better to believe it, but the Republicans haven’t exactly been liberal the past six years. They executed a conservative vision of government. It failed. Voters chose the other guys. Why is this so hard to understand?

For his part, meeting host Grover Norquist said in an interview that he viewed the election as a bump on an otherwise smooth road to continued conservative dominance. […]

Despite short-term setbacks, Norquist said, the conservative movement is “perfectly healthy. No one is losing because they favor tax cuts, are pro-life, pro-gun or pro-growth.

If we’re really, really lucky, the Republican establishment and the conservative base will believe all of this.

I don’t think their thinking is so far off. There are a lot of social conservatives out there, and the simpler messages put forth by the GOP resonate with a lot of Americans who don’t pay much attention to what’s going on. And really, who likes paying taxes?

  • The “our failure is proof of our success” take is similar to the rationalization used by members of apocalyptic cults when the deadline for the apocalypse passes by leaving them unscathed. Rather than admit that everything they believe is wrong they cling even more desperately to their religion and turn even more inward to their insular group.

  • Right, the clean-up crew is here. They screw everything up for a few years, the Democrats come in and fix it all, the people forget and elect more incompetent fools, the cycle repeats.

    And really, who likes paying taxes? beep52

    I don’t mind at all. But I guess I believe in paying for what we have, not financing and making my grandchildren pay for it. Fiscal responsibility is one of the major reasons I support Democrats.

    No Republic administration has been fiscally responsible in my lifetime. They’ve set an awful example for the people. Who cares if you can afford it, that’s what credit is for; it works for the government, why not me?

  • So if Grover thinks that bi-partisanship is akin to date rape, where does that leave us, the public?
    They won’t work with the majority, look at Bush’s renomination of Bolton and his drive to legalize warantless wiretaps.
    A big problem is that they own the Media, except for the bloggers. If there is any reason for their confidence, that is it.
    So, my suggestion would be to RELENTLESSLY dog them with investigations, and mention that this corruption is Republican in every other sentance. Let’s make Norquist lawyer up & spend a few hundred hours talking to Grand Juries. Put them on their heels & keep them there. If nothing else, it may minimize additional damage that they can do.

  • There’s a nice Krugman article at http://select.nytimes.com/2006/11/10/opinion/10krugman.html

    He argues that we migh have just seen the average voter express great revulsion at republican incompetence and corruption. He concludes, “Two years ago, people were talking about permanent right-wing dominance of American politics. But since then the American people have gotten a clearer sense of what rule by movement conservatives means. They’ve seen the movement take us into an unnecessary war, and botch every aspect of that war. They’ve seen a great American city left to drown; they’ve seen corruption reach deep into our political process; they’ve seen the hypocrisy of those who lecture us on morality.”

    Two well-choreographed years of investigation and oversight (look at it as a two-year cavity probe of the Bush White House) combined with making Bush veto a long series of laws favoring the civil rights and the middle class should cement that view very nicely.

  • Norquist and his ilk are still fascists who are trying again to launder their clothing to mask their true identities. Keep shining the light on them.

  • I wish their moms would march in there and grab them by the ear and make them go out and get real jobs.

    We need Democatic paparazzi to catch these leeches living high off the pork and inform their deluded followers that their elite is as hypocritical as any other useless elites.

    These people along with talk radio are just hate groups.

  • I keep remembering the lesson they learned after the backlash for shutting down the government. We were too weak! We didn’t hold firm! So they tried holding up some stupid disaster relief. We didn’t hold firm! So when they got Lewinsky, they never let go, no matter how bad the polls got, and we got Bush for a scandal fatigue.

    It is at once unbelievably inept and stupid, yet they never quite suffer as you would think one would. Out of power, they can go Gingrich again, and I’m pretty sure they’ve learned nothing.

  • 2 much Kool-Aid makes u stoopid.

    On the one hand, I hate to see the word conservative besmirched by people like Grover “Muppet” Norquist. On the other hand, I hope he clings to the Repulisivecons like the big leech that he is, along with Dobson and his ilk. The moderates will be driven out and we might see a viable third party in these parts before long.

  • “They executed a conservative vision of government. It failed. Voters chose the other guys”

    Actually, they didn’t execute the “traditional” conservative vision. The size of government has grown. Spending is out of control. Corruption is rampant. We might have a stronger military overall, but the “Patriot” Act has angered many traditional republicans.

    I’m a liberal. But I can certainly see the value in a smaller government, a strong military and a less invasive government. I don’t like to pay taxes, especially when they are wasted (think Halliburton).

  • Norquist said, the conservative movement is “perfectly healthy. No one is losing because they favor tax cuts, are pro-life, pro-gun or pro-growth.

    Hey Grover! Two words: South Dakota.

    The public were finally given a chance to decide for themselves whether they agreed with your “pro-life” position and a conservative state soundly defeated yoru vision.

  • The anti-tax conservatives and the social conservatives are at each others throats right now. The Sponge Dobsonites say the GOP would have done better if the GOP was more theocratic. The Nordquist ninnies think the GOP would have done better if there they were less theocratic and instead stuck with the tried and true old time supply side religion.

    Their marriage of convenience, i.e., Big Government Conservatism, seems on the rocks. Too bad. Can’t blame folks from turning away from this cast of clowns whose main goal is to put a beaurocrat in every bedroom while bankrupting a future generations of Americans with the burden of either drowning in debt or drowning the government in a bathtub.

    Together they slowly consolidated a power base in the South. Today the grand marriage of convenience has bled away GOP support in other parts of the country. So is it time to revise tricky dick’s grand Southern Strategy now? Have they painted themselves into a corner? Time will tell.

    Here’s to 2008. Let’s throw some more bums out.

  • Take a look at Rhode Island. Chaffee lost in RI despite having a 67% approval rating among those taking the exit poll on Election Day. Not only did Chaffee vote against the war, he voted against Bush. The voters of RI were concerned with corruption, and wanted to take exclusive control away from the thugs in Congress. At least in RI, it was about defeating the Republicans in order to rid Congress of corruption, and not about embracing a liberal agenda.

  • I think this was primarily a referendum on incompetence and corruption in government.

    The extremes of the consevative ideology such as the nonsence with Terry Shiavuo hurt Republicans, but it wasn’t a mortal wound.

    The American people will tolerate a lot of sound and fury if the economy is humming along and the mail is delivered on time.

  • There are a lot of strange theories floating around after this election. Is everybody smoking the weed or something?

    Yes, the Republican’ts lost a portion of their conservative support, but they lost them because they hewed to THE BASE and in doing so enlightened so many to the nature of their Unholy Alliance.

    The further right they try to go, the fewer supporters they will have.

  • I’m not sure we can even have an informative conversation until we define the overloaded words of the past election.

    What do these words mean anymore:

    Right
    Left
    Conservative
    Liberal
    Values

    What does the typical person in “the base” believe? I’m always reminded that my wife ran for office as a Republican back in the 70’s, but she’s now a registered Democrat. Her values haven’t changed appreciably since then.

  • What can we do with people like Norquist, who haven’t been elected but have taken it upon themselves to hold meetings, demand alliegence from OUR representatives, and draft legislation for them? How do they get this power? How can we take them down? I’m willing to bet that if the majority of people didn’t know who Nancy Pelosi was before the election, that the majority of people don’t know that people like Norquist exist and hold so much power over OUR legislators. How do we get the word out?

  • “They executed a conservative vision of government. It failed.”
    That true.
    But you know all sorts of commentators are saying in different words the same stupid thing that Rush Limbuagh said: “Conservatism won” in the 2006 election. But as Steve points out: No–it didn’t.

  • Thing is, the operational vision of a Norquist is that government can intrude into your bedroom, but damn well better stay out of your meatpacking plant. (I stole that from someone; if it’s someone here, I apologize and give credit.) He claims to want “less government,” and occasionally will bleat about too-intrusive Republican rule.

    But if a little theocracy-tinged fascism is the cost of turning the instrument of collective action (“by the people, for the people, of the people”) into his cherished goal of a constant-motion fellatio machine for billionaires, he’ll happily pony up.

    Norquist’s vision of human nature itself is miserable and deeply sick: frak everyone, I’ve got mine. Tuesday we saw Krugman’s “Great Revulsion” against that worldview. I hope (probably against hope) that a similar disgusted reaction will take root within the Republican Party itself.

  • Spending may be out of control, but the amount of help people get from their government is certainly shrinking, just not fast enough for Norquist’s liking. He wanted that Social-Security phase-out real bad.

    When Grover said he wanted to shrink the federal government to the point where he could flush it down the bathtub drain, he was referring to its scope, not its budget. Reaganesque deficits aren’t a problem for the Club for Growth gang, as long as all that spending is going to corporate welfare, non-corporate entitlement programs are gone (with the notable exception of faith-based initiatives), and the tax burden is assumed by the lower 99% (Leona Helmsley’s “little people”).

    Some of the local wingnuts have asked me how that Lamont challenge worked out for the Democrats, I tell them that it worked out a lot better than that Laffey challenge did for the far right. By forcing Chafee to embrace Bush in order to survive the primary (you don’t have Laura Bush come to Providence in May to help you campaign if you’re trying to distance yourself from the president), they mortally wounded Chafee for the general election. At least Lieberman is caucusing with the Democrats. I don’t think Sheldon Whitehouse is going to be helping the GOP anytime soon.

    Any chance we could convince Mr. Norquist to go after Susan Collins in 2008? After all, she stray’s from the conservative movement’s “basic values”.

  • […] refocus conservative principles of less government, lower taxes, less regulation, strong national defense, judicial restraint and fiscal conservatism.”

    And, had they stuck to those principles *and* actually implemented them, they’d probably be slapping themselves on the backs, basking in victory. But they broke *every one* of those principles (except lowering the taxes. And, even there, they lowered them in all the wrong places, not to mention at the wrong time). Then, they added all those “soap in the eye” issues like abortion, stem-cell research, gays and other “godly” stuff…

    Taxes (beep52). I don’t mind paying them *if* I have the money to pay them on (minimum wage increase, anyone?). And *if* I know where they’re going. And *if* I have some say about their distribution. Education? Fine. Pensions? Fine. Health? Fine. Tax loopholes for Cheney? Up yours.

    But I agree with CB; the longer they think that their only fault was not staying the course with enough vigor, I’m happy. We ought to be able to poach off some more seats in both chambers of Congress come ’08.

  • Let’s give them their due where due: they didn’t execute a conservative government. They created a radical far right government. There is a difference.

    That said, for all these bozos who think they didn’t really lose, a good dose of Krugman (administered with a tube jammed down their throat) is what these boys need, and here it is, from today’s NYT:

    Here’s what I wrote more than three years ago, in the introduction to my column collection “The Great Unraveling”: “I have a vision — maybe just a hope — of a great revulsion: a moment in which the American people look at what is happening, realize how their good will and patriotism have been abused, and put a stop to this drive to destroy much of what is best in our country.”

    Tuesday’s election was a truly stunning victory for the Democrats. Candidates planning to caucus with the Democrats took 24 of the 33 Senate seats at stake this year, winning seven million more votes than Republicans. In House races, Democrats received about 53 percent of the two-party vote, giving them a margin more than twice as large as the 2.5-percentage-point lead that Mr. Bush claimed as a “mandate” two years ago — and the margin would have been even bigger if many Democrats hadn’t been running unopposed.

    The election wasn’t just the end of the road for Mr. Bush’s reign of error. It was also the end of the 12-year Republican dominance of Congress. The Democrats will now hold a majority in the House that is about as big as the Republicans ever achieved during that era of dominance.

    Moreover, the new Democratic majority may well be much more effective than the majority the party lost in 1994. Thanks to a great regional realignment, in which a solid Northeast has replaced the solid South, Democratic control no longer depends on a bloc of Dixiecrats whose ideological sympathies were often with the other side of the aisle.

    I do hope and believe that this election marks the beginning of the end for the conservative movement that has taken over the Republican Party.

    In saying that, I’m not calling for or predicting the end of conservatism. There always have been and always will be conservatives on the American political scene. And that’s as it should be: a diversity of views is part of what makes democracy vital.

    But we may be seeing the downfall of movement conservatism — the potent alliance of wealthy individuals, corporate interests and the religious right that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. This alliance may once have had something to do with ideas, but it has become mainly a corrupt political machine, and America will be a better place if that machine breaks down.

    Why do I want to see movement conservatism crushed? Partly because the movement is fundamentally undemocratic; its leaders don’t accept the legitimacy of opposition. Democrats will only become acceptable, declared Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, once they “are comfortable in their minority status.” He added, “Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate.”

    And the determination of the movement to hold on to power at any cost has poisoned our political culture. Just think about the campaign that just ended, with its coded racism, deceptive robo-calls, personal smears, homeless men bused in to hand out deceptive fliers, and more. Not to mention the constant implication that anyone who questions the Bush administration or its policies is very nearly a traitor.

    When movement conservatism took it over, the Republican Party ceased to be the party of Dwight Eisenhower and became the party of Karl Rove. The good news is that Karl Rove and the political tendency he represents may both have just self-destructed.

    Two years ago, people were talking about permanent right-wing dominance of American politics. But since then the American people have gotten a clearer sense of what rule by movement conservatives means. They’ve seen the movement take us into an unnecessary war, and botch every aspect of that war. They’ve seen a great American city left to drown; they’ve seen corruption reach deep into our political process; they’ve seen the hypocrisy of those who lecture us on morality.

    And they just said no.

  • For what it’s worth, I see “liking” to pay taxes as something different than rationally coming to terms with why they’re necessary or even beneficial. I don’t like doing laundry, but I see the advantage of having clean clothes to wear — and the disadvantage of wearing soiled clothes. The point was, if people don’t make the connection between taxes and benefits, lower taxes are an easy sell.

  • Republicans have NOT lowered taxes. They transferred them onto the children of the middle class. Adding on the interest and opportunity costs, they have RAISED taxes on our kids, considerably. The BS about lower taxes actually raising revenues has been thoroughly debunked. Unless they lower spending, they are simply stealing our kids’ money to buy votes from today’s “conservatives”.

    Next time someone complains about taxes, ask them to calculate how much it costs them per day to live in the US. It’s probably only a few bucks.

  • What I find interesting is that Republicans, their taking heads, and their proxies in the MSM are trotting out the “Democrats didn’t really win, people were voting against current Repulicans” or some such memo, and yet don’t bother to really wonder why Repulicans lost/were voted off the island. They delude themselves into thinking it was because they weren’t conservative enough, but maybe that the conservative that is today is not the conservative the average Americans actually want running this country.

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