Retirement can apparently be liberating for congressional Republicans

March 16, 2008

As a rule, Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican, has generally been considered a “team player” in his party. He hasn’t always been quite as conservative as some of his rank-and-file colleagues, but on the big issues, Davis has always stood toe to toe with his Republican caucus. It’s why he was rewarded a few cycles ago with the chairmanship of the NRCC.

Davis was preparing a Senate run, right up until he realized he’d lose to former Gov. Mark Warner (D), and he’s now preparing to leave elected office altogether. Apparently, it’s had a liberating effect.

Earlier this week, Davis acknowledged, “The House Republican brand is so bad right now that if it were a dog food, they’d take it off the shelf.”

Today, he went a little further in describing his party’s troubles.

“It’s no mystery,” said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.). “You have a very unhappy electorate, which is no surprise, with oil at $108 a barrel, stocks down a few thousand points, a war in Iraq with no end in sight and a president who is still very, very unpopular. He’s just killed the Republican brand.”

I mention this, not only because it’s an interesting quote, but because I wonder how many Republicans who aren’t retiring from Congress feel the exact same way.

My hunch is, quite a few.

It’s not a question of ‘if’. The Republican brand *is* dogfood, and they have only themselves to blame for it.

  • Bush has done nothing other than take being Republican to it’s logical conclusion. I would suggest that the Republican brand was an illusion all along. I see no reason to vote Repub until I am VERY VERY rich.

  • Davis and his wife were burned pretty bad by his party this year. I bet he’s got a lot to say as a thank you.

  • Curmudgeon, I wouldn’t feed Republicanism to my beloved dog. But I might put it out for the crows and vultures to pick at.

    So the two political parties are “brands”? Like Ford vs. Chevy? Bud vs. Miller? Coke vs. Pepsi? Is it all simply about marketing?

    Shallow and cynical. If that’s the way Republicans think, no wonder the vultures will be picking at their bones next year.

  • He’s just killed the Republican brand.”

    Boo Hoo. The Republican “brand.” Nice to see this is what Mr. Davis cares about. What about the things bush has done against the constitution?

    “Signing statements” for example- totally unconstitutional as Bush has used them.

  • “I see no reason to vote Repub until I am VERY VERY rich.”

    and to paraphrase james garner in the moving “barbarians at the gates”: we’re not talking “fuck you” rich. we’re talking “fuck EVERYBODY” rich!

  • Not to get pedantic, but I think that “brand identity” is shorthand for the overall impression and beliefs one has about the party in question. I know that we don’t like to think of our party and values as a commodity, but in the “marketplace of ideas” they are. I wish that the Democratic Party paid more attention to brand identity. We have a great story to tell. We need better storytellers.

  • glen’s absolutely right above. The only thing Bush has really done to change the Republican brand is to live it. Voters like Republicans who talk tough and say that government is the problem and should get out of the way. Make’s ’em feel all manly and full of testosterone. Voters don’t much like Republicans who actually act on what they say and go invading willy nilly and making government the problem by having government get out of the way of things like government officials who want to listen in on your phone calls on a reasonless and unchecked whim or banking industry people who want to make a quick buck by pushing millions of bad loans on unwary homeowners in the middle of a housing bubble.

  • “I see no reason to vote Repub until I am VERY VERY rich.”

    Or completely dead inside. Whichever comes first.

  • “Boo hoo this all GeeDubya’s fault,” is going to be the GOP’s war cry for years to come. Tom the Turd is just getting an early start.

    Don’t give these cowards credit unless they give a full accounting of their sins and then beg forgiveness on bended knee.

  • RepubCo was a swollen tin can of way past pull date toxic by products when they slapped Shruby’s face on the label and sent it out for the world to choke down.

    Shruby was the compassionate/conservative Gerber baby face that made too many simpletons think of wholesome goodness. But the stuff in the jar was rotten before he arrived.

    With the beguiling new model taking everyone’s eye off the ball, RepubCo boldly stepped up with their trusty little can opener, cracked ‘er open and poured the fetid goo all over everything.

    What did the chagrined “Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican” ever do to get this crap taken off the shelf?

    Eat your……whatever it is Rep. Davis. And smile. Don’t you remember helping to put the crap in the can?

  • And yet, in what should have been a slam dunk, the democrat party is busy tearing itself apart over which unelectable, PC “minority”, to nominate. Accusing each other of racism, sexism, voter fraud and manipulation is certainly the message of “hope and change ” the average voter is looking for. It all makes McCain, an old, angry, possibly “crazy” guy almost look appealing. Hell, even Nixon, of all people, survived in a climate like the current one, how more unappealing could you possibly get?

  • He’s just killed the Republican brand.

    He? Seems to me that Davis was the chairman of the House Government Reform Committee from 2001 through 2006. In the absence of oversight, I would conclude that Davis was more of a henchman than a disinterested observer.

  • Excellent point, Danp. I’d forgotten about that.

    When did the House GOP rig the rules so that the Oversight Chairman became the only one in Congress who could issue subpoenas on his sole authority? Waxman’s using that power now to bore into them, and if it were a rule change for Davis, that’d be too sweet.

  • Bush ruined the Republican brand while being aided and abetted by every Republican member of Congress, and Senate, by all the right leaning think tanks and all the right radio and tv hosts and the MSM. The Republican Brand was always rotten to it’s very core, but always before there were outside players and events that rolled back some of the more egregious Republican platforms. For 6 of the last 8 years it was full bore open field one-sided Republican Uber Alles that got us to this current state. And by golly all of the appeasing and enabling Dem quislings need to get their share of the blame. Throw them all out! Impeach them all, hold hearings for the traitors of the Constitution, and then take all the ones guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity to the Hague and re-open Spandau Prison.

  • “Well put, Jeff Farias.”

    Yes, definitely.

    “Accusing each other of racism, sexism, voter fraud and manipulation is certainly the message of “hope and change ” the average voter is looking for.”

    Yeah, they are stealing the Republican playbook. Right Jeff Farias? Its disappointing to see Democrats using the ugly strategies that Republicans have consistently exploited for years. Don’t you think Jeff Farias? Republicans’ institutionalized and overt racism and sexism almost look good compared to the ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’ that must occur when a black male democrat and a white female democrat criticize each other in a ratings-driven media dominated by vapid people-magazine level analysis and political false equivalence. Is that what you meant, Jeff Farias? Right.

  • Having waited for this change-of-power moment since 2001, I’d like to hate the Republican party, but frankly…! Honesty requires an acknowledgement that Democrats have handled their 2006 gains rather badly and that the party machinery, leftover from Clinton days, is bad news. We felt a good deal of hope in 2006, seeing the possibility of a return to civility and at least some progressive leadership within the party. But civility is not something I’d associate with the national party’s post-Clinton machinery. It’s hard to see much if any progress. And the progressive leadership which is getting so much support out here in the “small” states risks getting shot down in Denver at the end of the summer. All that taken into consideration, watching the Republican death throes is like watching a preview of our own mortality from the same diseases. Not a moment for celebration…

  • Sorry Mr Davis, but “He” didn’t ruin the brand, you all did.

    Since 1995 you have been looking to slash social programs and spending money on a military buildup to fight a war that had been over for almost a decade. I mean really. Trent Lott put a half billion dollar allotment into a spending bill so Mississippi shipyards could build a new aircraft carried that the Navy didn’t want. Ted Stevens put a quarter billion dollar earmark in to build a Bridge to Nowhere. Chuck Grassley put up $50 million to build an indoor rain forest in Iowa. You’ve broken down a big chunk of the wall between church and state to give billions to religious groups to push fundimentalist christianity on everyone. The list is nearly endless.

    In addition to being a party that claimed to want to reduce the size of government, you’ve presided over increasing it dramatically then leaving the bill for TRILLIONS to me and my children and grandchildren.

    No Mr Davis, you and all those lying hipocrites are the ones who destroyed your brand.

  • “and a president who is still very, very unpopular. He’s just killed the Republican brand.”

    Jackass. Maybe he has forgotten the 109th already, but I seem to remember a Congress that couldn’t say no and didn’t like oversight.

    Representative Tom Davis, just another victimized republican.

  • Isn’t this the MOD of pretty much the Republican ‘brand’? ALWAYS blame someone else for any troubles. It can NEVER be due to ‘conservative’ policies.

    When the trouble is undeniably caused by a ‘fellow’ republican, then you just throw that ‘fellow’ under the bus and cleanse your self-righteous hands from the embarrassment. EVERYBODY can be redeemed and deserves a ‘fifteenth’ change (when you’re a Republican – not if you don’t belong to the party)

    They’ve all gotten their ‘fifteenth’ change and they want a few more Freedman cycles to prove that eventually their ideas will work out.

    It’s laughable, and even the 28 % morons living here in America, won’t be able to do anything about it. The other 22 % who are embarrassed to have ‘believed’ the Republican Brand was for real and voted for Bush a second time, will either stay home or proudly proclaim to be ‘independent and vote democratic (to give them a chance)

    Either way… republicans are toast for the foreseeable future.

  • Well, of COURSE Davis is going to blame Bu$h for ruining the “brand.” He’s the lame duck, and they have to start bending over for McCain now (although going from dog food to roadkill isn’t exactly what I’d call moving up—or even moving sideways. It’s a pretty much downward move)….

  • and yet .. a new poll today shows john mc cain beating either obama or clinton .. go figger on that ..eh ??

    the greatest danger to a democracy .. or apparently a democratic republic .. is a stupid uninformed and intellectually lazy electorate ..

  • I mention this, not only because it’s an interesting quote, but because I wonder how many Republicans who aren’t retiring from Congress feel the exact same way.

    My hunch is, quite a few.

    It will have to stay a hunch because you won’t see any evidence of this feeling in their voting records, hear it in their speeches or otherwise see any evidence that they no longer enjoy spit shining the Chimp’s arsehole.

    It’s all good though. When the Republicon’s deny their one-time saviour on 21 1 09, it will confirm BushBrat’s belief that he is the second coming of Jesus. Everybody’s happy.

  • It’s hard to know which of the Republicans and their media lackeys and enablers to detest the most, they are all so guilty of contributing to the gigantic mess that we are in. The easiest solution, and one that is not far from just, is simply to blame all the Republicans equally. It’s not as though any of the recent crowd has fought seriously against the abominations of the current administration.

    Okie: “But I might put it out for the crows and vultures to pick at.”
    Why are you trying to poison the vultures? They’re an important part of the ecology.

  • There’s a quite a list of politicians who say candid things after they have left office and it no longer makes any difference to anything. Tom Davis joins this honest-after-the-fact club.

    Several commenters have already made the point, and I agree – the Republicans in congress are as responsible for their plight (and ours) as the President is. Gingrich and Delay were acting like George W. Bush before he made it out of Texas.

  • amen to Jkat @ 26

    “…stupid uninformed and intellectually lazy electorate ..”

    The poll was probably asking conservative leaning people — wouldn’t pay too much attention to that.

  • The real question is what will the U.S. be like as a one party state. Will national politics look like District of Columbia, California, Mass. or New Jersey politics? What will the U.S be like when the first Tuesday in November is unimportant because the elections have all been decided by either the Democratic primaries or by the DNCC recruitment efforts.

  • Like clockwork… superdestroyer is back @ 31 with his worries about a ‘one party state’

    As if that would be a bad thing for the next Democratic Presidential term. It would actually be the best thing for this country, because it is the most probable way to clean up the mess left by the ‘one party – Republican country’ we’ve been living under during the Bush administration.

    The Republicans were handed the ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ opportunity to make a difference in the world; to be a leader in America as well as the rest of the world. Oh.. You’re wondering what that opportunity was? The opportunity they squandered royally was 9/11/01. Regardless of who the President was during that time, or what Party was ruling in the Senate as well as the House, the country would have rallied behind whatever the President wanted.

    Well we had a Republican, and the nation rallied behind him, and did whatever the Republicans wanted… Now the mess is here for all to see. We will never know what Al Gore would have done, if he had been inaugurated. But that is beside the point. Only Republican morons would bring that up, to try distancing themselves of the opportunity they screwed up, worse than any party has ever screwed up anything in the history of the USA.

    So superdestroyer… you better hope for a Democratic one-party rule for the next 4 years. Would you really want to have some obstructionist Republicans in the House and Senate, for the sake of having 2 parties? Once some of the mess is cleaned up, the Republican screw-ups can try to vote themselves into office. Republicans have only themselves to blame if your worst nightmare of a One-Party state comes true. After all, that is exactly what they wanted, except they assumed it was going to be the Permanent Republican Majority.

    The funny part is that the Republicans are going down, and it is by their very own play book, with their very own rules, with their very own ideology.

  • Quick! We must offer the Republicons some sort of bail out. Hmmm. How can you bail out a totally corrupt political party? Money?

    No, they’ll only steal it.

    Another war?

    No, the army isn’t up to it.

    Um… I know! We’ll ask people to keep voting for them even if they find the GOP morally repugnant and inept. But we won’t actually bother voters by saying “Will you vote for a Republican to keep us from becoming a one party state just like DC (ie full of brown people)?” We’ll just get the guys at DieVote to switch a certain number of votes.

    Yeah. That will work. Democracy is saved!

    All in favour raise your purple fingers of freedom.

  • Bruno,

    The Republicans never had 60 seats in the Senate in 2005 and 2006 the Republicans were unable to pass anything through Congress. People write stories about the Republican collapse but fail to carry them to their natural conclusions.

    The real question is not that the Republicans will make some comeback because in the long run demographic changes in the U.S. will see that the Republicans do not make a comeback.

    And yes, the Republicans are the ones mainly responsible for the coming one party state. They failed to implement anything that could be called conservative.

    However, the real question is what the U.S. will be like as a one party state. 11 of the 12 Democratic senators will basically running for relection unopposed. What happens with a majortiy on Congress is running for re-election unopposed. What happens when the general election is a moot exercise. How will people react when the political process cannot be used to make changes? People can mow vote with their feet to move out of one party states like DC, Mass, California, etc. When they cannot move out of the U.S., will people resort to corruption to make up for lack of political options?

  • I understand what you are getting at ‘superdestroyer’ @ 34

    I don’t think you have to worry about a Democratic One – Party Country. Why? It is in every Democrat’s genetic make up to screw it up with infighting and insisting on ‘consensus’. Have you looked at previous times when Democrats could get a lot accomplished? Well it didn’t take much to get them voted out again.

    There simply are not as many Democrats who will ALWAYS vote a democratic ticket regardless of what the Party proposes, unlike the Republican counterparts, where the party ideology comes before everything else. Republicans have more people that vote party line, than Democrats do. So you don’t have to worry.

    For all the years I’ve voted, I’ve never voted a straight democratic ticket. Sure I’ve voted for democratic Presidential nominees every single time, but when it comes to Senators and Representatives and local elections… I vote for who I feel will best represent my perspective. Sure it is mostly on the democratic / independent leaning side, very few times Republican, but I have voted for some republicans myself. They are not all bad.

    Being open minded and considering a candidate from another party than you regularly vote for, is very rare in Republican / Conservative circles, but not uncommon for Democratic leaning people.

    In my opinion, it is far easier to get rid of a Democratic One-Party system, than it is to get rid of a Republican One-Party system. Look how horrible the situation has to be before a Republican looses faith in their chosen leaders. Bush still got re-elected in 2004, despite the mistakes he had made. All it took for the last Democratic President not being able to hand over the torch to his successor: a Blow Job.

    Does that make sense?

  • I forgot to add to my previous comment that this election cycle; I will vote an entirely Democratic ticket down the line. To make a point, even if I don’t believe in what some of the democratic candidates stand for.

    I’m willing to be an ideology for one election cycle, to get rid of the corrupt obstructionist Republicans.

  • Bruno,

    If you look at 1992, the bottom number for republicans was around 37% and around 43% for Democrats. Since then, the demographic groups that vote overwhelmingly Democratic has grown and the groups that vote overwhelmingly Republican have shrunk relative to the size of populations. Around 2030, the Democratic Party wil have over 50% of the vote automatically. If blacks and Hispanics turned out at the same rate as whites, the Republican Party would be irrelevant today.

    Also, I doubt bad performance will affect the future Democratic party as much as republicans. When you look at DC, Baltimore, Philly, Detroit, Cleveland, St Louis, etc, I doubt that there is a level of bad performance that will ever get blacks or Hispanics to vote Republican.

  • Don’t worry superdestroyer, new polictical parties will be forming as we all line up to piss on the grave of the Repub party. The Greeens will be the new Left and the Dems will be the new Right and the debate will be about how quickly we get to single payer healthcare, not if.

    Aint Democarcy wonderful?

  • Will someone please give the server that houses the StD Post Generator a whack? It keeps running the same post over and over and over and over again.

  • OT, what’s up with huffingtonpost (HP) and its new intense level of monitoring/censorship? Their lead article about McCain back in Iraq for a re-visit had one (1) comment posted at 6:24 PM, PST, 3 16 08, with some 50 or 80 more posts pending… Reading the new controlled HP is less fun than a barrel of Bush crime family members… Gees, just drop all the censorship and let er rip. We can always quickly scroll through the obviously stupid troll comments.

    Also, Yahoo News used to have a vast comment section below their news articles, but it was extremely vile and vulgar, so I guess that they got tired of them and dropped the lot. Probably not up to the uptight Microsoft Corporation’s standards anyway…

    Free speech is such a sticky wicket for corporate America…

  • Bush may have been the biggest dog that killed the brand but Tom Davis certainly gnawed on the carcass himself as well. There are too many good comments on this thread to give my “me toos” to, so I’ll take another tack.

    I just received in the mail the IRS’ notice about the soon-to-be-mailed federal cash give away. I have yet to see anyone connect that this too is a repudiation of the Republican brand, of sorts. Since good old Ronnie Reagan and David Stockman, giving to the rich to trickle down to the poor has been the mantra of the Republican party. The better the rich do, the better the country will do, so they say. For once that mindset has been reversed to the point to where George “the haves and have mores are my base” Bush, Republicans and Democrats finally agree that the way to a healthier economy is by getting more money into the hands of the less than supremely rich. We, after all, are the engine of the US economy, not the top 1/2 of 1% of us in terms of wealth.

    The Democratic party needs to capitalize on this point that perpetuating the tax cuts to the uber-rich is not the way to a healthier economy but to do more for the rest of us, like making taxes more progressive, minding the minimum wage, keeping more jobs in the US, working to rebalance our trade deficit and otherwise quit coddling the wealthy, as if they need coddling and won’t make money otherwise. Progressivism is what is needed to heal this nation and even George W. Bush recognizes that with this ill-conceived money-palooza scheme.

    The Republican brand is to do things that kill this nation. Tom Davis needs to look at his own bloody hands and take some responsibility too.

  • I just received in the mail the IRS’ notice about the soon-to-be-mailed federal cash give away.

    If I recall correctly, that little “coming soon!” mailing cost us all $42 million.

  • Tom Davis is a wank-stain.

    First, as others have pointed out, Dubya simply took Reaganism to its logical conclusion. He didn’t kill it, he just dangled the corpse out here for everyone to see.

    Second, I didn’t see Davis or any other Congressional republics even *saying* anything about the cliff Dubya was driving us over, let alone doing anything about it. The entire Republic party (and much of the Democratic party, it turned out) were enablers of the whole thing.

  • While Tom Davis was concerned about his chances against Mark Warner, he quit the Senate race mostly because the VA Republican committee chose to nominate by party convention/caucus, strongly favoring ex-Gov Jim Gilmore, who is quite generally disliked around the state for his actions in office. Davis saw no reason for a losing battle against the Republican party bosses. Davis would have likely won a state wide primary, and would have only needed a few breaks to run a tough campaign against Warner. But VA Repubs decided to try the oft expressed belief that a pretty far right candidate will run better than a (relatively) moderate. Much amusement is anticipated in the fall as they try this type of campaign.

  • OT, what’s up with huffingtonpost (HP) and its new intense level of monitoring/censorship? — James K Sayre, @ 40

    I gave up on Huffpo 2 yrs ago — as soon as my son steered me to the Carpetbagger — because I couldn’t thole it any more. The lady who runs it is FM K9 (a femme canine) extraordinaire and her cohorts (commenters) take their cue from her; the whole outfit is shrill beyond bearing.

    I have — always have had — some issues with Clinton (and the Clintons) but the issues that Arianna has are different; like MoDowd, she just cannot stand competition (ie another strong woman, of “a certain age” and with a degree of public exposure). It’s, however, worth remembering, that Arianna and MoDo *both* had been Republicans long before the first turned Dem and the second started to pretend she was immoderately moderate. “Cum grano salis” principle has to be applied, a priori.

    IOW… Monitoring/censoring on Arianna’s website is nothing more than expected. If it’s recent, then it’s something she’s overlooked previously. She’s no different than Clinton in that respect and will happily stomp on the hoi-polloi’s “rights”, should the hoi-polloi be presumptuous enough to disagree with her.

    There’s a difference between people who are pro-Obama or pro-Clinton and those who are anti-Clinton and anti-Obama. Just as our Mary (and our Greg, and our Comeback Bill and, possibly, our Nell. And our Anne before them) are anti-Obama first, with any pro-Clinton argument tacked on as an afterthought, so are Arianne and MoDo anti-Clinton first, with Obama but a stick to hit the dog (or FM K9) with.

    I wish people would give a second *and third* — critical — thought to the idea that “an enemy of my enemy is my friend”. You need to consider that person’s motivation (and credibility) before you embrace them, wholesale.

  • How can the Greens become a second party when they will have at little ability to attract black or Hispanic voters as the Republican Party does now.

    Also, given the Greens inability to implement any meaningful reforms inside Democratic Party, what makes you think that they would do better as a separate party?

  • I believe there will be a concerted effort beginning now and lasting long after Bush has left office to blame all of the ills of the last several years on Bush. The problem is that the Democrats will play right into the hands of this attack, I think.

    The Republicans will wash their hands of it, and to paraphrase Stephen King, will crawl through a mile of shit and come out clean on the other side.

  • Jeff Farias, I whined “But they did too”?

    Your clever wit aside, my comment was not that Republicans are “doing it too”. It was that they are several orders of magnitude worse, so much so that direct comparison is inherently misleading. This is not complicated.

    Do you know what false equivalence is? Ever heard of this term? Apparently not.

    Let’s say you and I are brothers, and you have a 5 dollar bill. I steal it from you, and you go tell mom. Mom says, ‘don’t fight. Let’s be fair, $2.50 each.” That is not fair, that is false equivalence.

    Claiming that some bullshit ‘scandal’ that was manufactured by the media is equivalent to republican malfeasance is outragious. It is dishonest. And it is tiresome. It is one reason why many people now get their news from blogs like thecarpetbaggerreport.com instead of more traditional mainstream outlets. Almost all ‘journalists’ or ‘personalities’ in these outlets feel the need to falsely equate the two parties, when one is clearly in its own league. This is exactly what you are doing.

    And what’s with the ‘democrat party’? the ‘ic’ key broken on your keyboard?

  • “Davis was preparing a Senate run, right up until he realized he’d lose to former Gov. Mark Warner (D)…”

    Not quite. The Virginia Republican party decided to hold a convention, not a primary, to decide their candidate to replace John Warner, which Davis knew would select former governor Jim Gilmore. That’s when Davis decided not to run.

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