- Aug 25, 2009
- 557
- 15
- 27
- Faith
- Presbyterian
- Marital Status
- Single
- Politics
- US-Democrat
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/us/politics/04bai.html?_r=1&hp
Political Times
Republicans Face a Choice in How to Oppose
By MATT BAI
Published: November 3, 2010
- Recommend
- comments (9)
- Send To Phone
- Reprints
- ShareClose
The day after the election always dawns sunny and full of hope in Washington. From Representative John A. Boehner on down, Republicans talked on Wednesday about how open they were to working with the president (except, perhaps, for repealing that whole health care thing). Rand Paul, the next senator from Kentucky, said on MSNBC that his family was hoping to meet the Obama girls. You could almost see the two dads stretched out in front of the TV, sharing a laugh at Phineas and Ferb.
Results: Senate | House
@thecaucus on Twitter
NYT Politics on Facebook
Multimedia
Interactive Feature
A Historic Shift
Related
- Political Memo: Republican Base Expands to Midwest (November 4, 2010)
- Ouster of Iowa Judges Sends Signal to Bench (November 4, 2010)
- Deep Rifts Divide Obama and G.O.P. (November 4, 2010)
- Palins Endorsements Lay Base for a 2012 Run (November 4, 2010)
Blogs
The Caucus
The latest news on the new Congress and midterm election races from around the nation. Election Night Live Blog »
FiveThirtyEight
On his blog, Nate Silver provides continuing
analysis of the election results as they come in. Election Night Live Blog »
Readers' Comments
Share your thoughts.
Reality will intrude soon enough, and Republicans will have to decide what kind of opposition they intend to be. One could argue that the most fundamental choice facing the new Republican House majority, in particular, is whether to stand on cultural or intellectual dissent or, put another way, whether they want to cast themselves principally as the party of Sarah Palin or the party of Paul Ryan.
The election only enhanced the stature of Ms. Palin, who bucked her partys leadership by endorsing several outsider candidates among them Mr. Paul and Nikki Haley, the governor-elect of South Carolina who won this week. A powerful force in the party, Ms. Palin represents an aggrieved, anti-elitist strain of conservatism that goes back to Richard M. Nixons Silent Majority. It is a rural conservative impulse, rooted most firmly in the South and West, that equates liberal government with tyranny and anti-Americanism.
In the kind of opposition Ms. Palin represents, issues arent always meant to be addressed through governance, but rather to be deployed as blunt instruments in pursuit of more electoral gains. For the new Republican-led House, that would mean more questions about the presidents birth certificate, more subpoenas flowing down Pennsylvania Avenue, more votes on abortion and flag burning and all of that.
And it might mean passing a bill on gun rights or school prayer that excites the base, knowing full well that the Democratic-controlled Senate will simply let it die anyway.
Mr. Ryan, of Wisconsin, on the other hand, is the author of a radically austere plan to scale back federal spending, and he is about to become chairman of the House Budget Committee. Mr. Ryan, a Washington insider, is heir to the side of the conservative movement that grew out of think tanks and policy journals in the 1960s and 70s.
To Mr. Ryans way of thinking, liberals in government arent cultural imperialists; in fact, he gets along with them just fine. Rather, Mr. Ryan sees the president and his allies as hopelessly misguided, reliant on unsustainable government spending rather than the market. Mr. Ryans kind of opposition would offer up an alternative, polarizing agenda, forcing President Obama and his allies to defend their philosophy and their intransigence.
In a sense, Ms. Palin and Mr. Ryan represent opposite sides of the Republican conundrum at the moment. Ms. Palin is an outsider with a serious following in the partys grass roots, but she has not shown that she has a plan to actually govern. Mr. Ryan is a powerful Washington figure with an office full of detailed flip charts, but he has little, if any, following out among the faithful.
Mr. Boehner or his newly empowered lieutenants probably see some peril in pursuing either kind of opposition. Translating all of this Tea Party rhetoric about spending and deficits into some kind of alternative governing plan is a sobering undertaking so much so that most Republican candidates this year refused to endorse Mr. Ryans version, which would partly privatize Social Security and Medicare.
But to adopt a less substantive, more cultural kind of opposition, while it might satisfy a lot of Tea Party types, would be to court another voter revolt in 2012 or 2016. After all, if exit polls and conversations with individual voters are any indication, a lot of the unrest that came to the surface Tuesday had to do with the perception that no one in Washington is serious about solving problems like the national debt. Its hard to see how more subpoenas and more blocked judges are going to change that perception.
Many Republicans seem to hope they wont have to choose the direction, that they can just sit back and respond, either culturally or intellectually, to various pieces of Mr. Obamas agenda. But there will be pivotal moments of choice for the Republican opposition, and one of them may be only weeks away.
In December, Mr. Obamas debt-reduction panel (of which Mr. Ryan is a member) is supposed to release its findings on the budget, which, assuming the bipartisan panel cant reach a consensus, will most likely encompass several options for reducing spending in the long term.
A Palinesque opposition would probably seize on proposed tax increases or benefit cuts in the plans, accuse Mr. Obama of creating the commission as a gimmick and dismiss the whole exercise as just another waste of the citizens money. A more intellectual approach would be to embrace the most conservative option offered by the panel and take it up for debate, in hopes of pressuring the White House into some meaningful compromise.
Which way the new Republican majority goes will say a lot, perhaps, about whether it intends to oppose the presidents identity or his ideas.
