The Coming Republican Surge

by Paul A. Rahe

Back in early May, James Carville gleefully published a book entitled 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation.

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In part, an extended rant against George W. Bush and his administration, it also purported to show that “the Republicans are going to keep getting spanked again and again for forty more years because we’re right and they’re wrong, and Americans know it.”

Of course, Carville added, “the Republicans have been down before, and the Democrats have won Congress before, and we’ve still managed to lose.” But, he continued, “this time we strung our policies together into a coherent, appealing narrative. And we did it with the help of the historically diverse, historically Democratic young people who will be the foundation for a lasting Democratic majority.”

This may have seemed a plausible claim late in 2008 or early in 2009 — when the ragin’ Cajun sent off his book to Simon & Schuster. By the time of publication, however, the Republicans in Congress had shown that they still had some fight in them, and the Tea-Party Movement had already made its appearance.

To anyone with any political nous, it was obvious that the Democrats were not going to have a cakewalk. In the course of the summer recess, it became clear that they had a war on their hands.

There had been what I called in August “The Great Awakening,” and it threatened to turn American politics upside down.

That it really may do just that is now evident in the polling data.

I cannot think of any time in the course of my long life in which there has been a political turnaround on this scale in so short a time. If there is not another sharp reversal in public opinion, the Republicans will take the House in 2010 and may secure the Senate as well.

Some will, indeed, get spanked — but not the party that James Carville had in mind. So much for the dreams of the ragin’ Cajun.

The real mystery is how this happened — for it owes nothing whatsoever to the moxie of the Republicans. Of course, they were canny enough to get on board. But they intiated nothing.

No, their benefactors were Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama.

Back in 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt charged that, before he took office in 1933, “a small group” intent on concentrating “into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives” had been dominant in America.

Hearkening back to Thomas Jefferson’s campaign against the Federalists, he called this small group the “economic royalists.”

It was a brazem lie, of course. But in the situation it worked. Someone had to bear the blame for the Depression, and FDR effected a political realignment that lasted more than Carville’s forty years.

Now, however, the charge lodged by FDR is true.

As anyone who contemplates the recent decision regarding carbon made by the Environmental Protection Agency can easily see, as anyone who puzzles over the details of the various healthcare proposals being pushed in Congress cannot fail to notice, we are all now threatened by “a small group” intent on concentrating “into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives.”

If the Republicans have any wit, there will be a realignment in the course of the next few years. But it will not be the realignment that James Carville had in mind.

Americans do not like royalists of any kind.


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Posted Dec 12th 2009 at 4:21 pm in Congress, Obama, Politics | 233 Comments