Last week was a bad week for the Atlanta Braves. It wasn’t exactly glory days for the Falcons either. Neither, however, could match the bad week that Republicans have had.
As late as Tuesday, GOP hardliners were still talking brash. Paul Broun, a Georgia Republican and candidate for the U.S. Senate, warned on CNN that “Obamacare is going to destroy everything we know as a nation.”
“Wolf, I’m a doctor. I’m a medical doctor!” Broun told Wolf Blitzer, going on to repeat that ObamaCare is “going to destroy our liberty, it’s going to destroy everything” and must be repealed.
Another Georgia congressman and Senate candidate, Phil Gingrey, told Washington reporters that anybody who thought the GOP might blink in its confrontation with President Obama is “missing the determination of the Republican Party.”
“I mean, they seem to think that we will miss this opportunity for a ‘Braveheart’ moment to do the right thing for the American people and that we’ll back down for fear of losing the House and not gaining control of the Senate,” Gingrey said.
Sadly, those comments accurately reflected the romantic self-indulgence that has driven this entire episode. It’s almost like the picnic scenes from the first reel of “Gone With The Wind,” with the doomed Southern hotheads eager for war, certain that “one Southerner can lick 20 Yankees” and unaware of what the future held.
On Wednesday came a Gallup poll showing that the Republicans’ favorability numbers were dropping like a rock. The percentage of Americans who viewed the GOP favorably had fallen by 10 points in a single month, to the lowest point in the almost quarter century that the question had been asked. Internal GOP polling must have been turning up similar numbers, because by Thursday, the retreat was on and the “Braveheart moment” was revealed as the fantasy it had always been.
Gone was the talk of repealing, or defunding, or delaying or even curtailing Obamacare. In its stead came cries of betrayal and frustration from the Republican base, with party leaders scrambling to find something that could be extracted from the Democrats that might give their retreat a little cover.
And unfortunately, this is not just a one-time example of party leaders overplaying their hand. It is an article of faith among Republicans that this is a conservative country and that they are its natural majority party, yet somehow that is never reconciled with the cold hard fact that they keep losing national elections. And that’s before looming demographic changes have even begun to take real effect.
Look around. In the governor’s race in Virginia, until recently a deep-red state that Republicans have to win to be viable nationally, a hard-core conservative candidate is losing handily to a mediocre Democrat. Conversely, in New Jersey, a state that went heavily for Obama, a moderate Republican by the name of Chris Christie is about to be re-elected governor by a record margin. If you want to win elections, those two very different signals are trying to tell you the same thing.
But unless mindsets change, leaders such as Christie have no chance to be their party’s 2016 presidential nominee. He may win elections, but he is considered by many in his party to be a RINO. He may offer competent governance, but he doesn’t promise them “Braveheart moments.”
The voters of this country are loathe to give the responsibility of governance to those who behave irresponsibly, and that’s exactly what Republicans on the national stage are doing.
