This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 31, 2013 - Listen, George Will is feeling good about his party’s prospects and I’m not quite sure why. A reliably conservative commentator, he’s known for thoughtful, if sometimes esoteric, arguments on behalf of free markets and limited government. Though his political predilections are predictable, Will is unfailingly polite and tirelessly civil — hardly a member of the bomb-throwing right. He also uses the word “condign” more often than does the balance of humankind.
For readers too lazy to hunt up a dictionary, condign means deserved or appropriate. A condign reward or punishment, then, is one that is richly deserved.
At any rate, Will believes that a conservative revival is imminent and he finds that prospect to be — you guessed it — condign. It seems that Obama’s leftist agenda has just about run out of gas and voters are poised to flock back to the welcoming arms of the GOP. To substantiate his theorem, Will cites a Gallup poll indicating that Mr. Obama has “…the lowest approval rating … of any re-elected president when inaugurated since the Second World War.” Well, hmmm…
At first blush, it would seem that George had to shovel his way through a surfeit of horse droppings to uncover a nougat of hope for Republicans in the results. After all, Dick Morris was on Fox News as recently as election eve, confidently predicting a Romney win with an electoral vote count of 300 +. Though not everyone was quite so brazen, pundits on the right seemed convinced that liberals had distorted the sampling models used in mainstream polls, thus making the president appear to be more competitive than he actually was.
In the event, Obama took 26 states and the District of Columbia, won the popular vote with a 5 million ballot cushion and garnered 332 votes (61.7 percent) in the Electoral College. If this was good news for the GOP, I shudder to imagine what bad tidings may look like…
Rather than wait for the electorate to catch up to the Republican vanguard, political pachyderms may be better advised to heed the advice of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal who recently admonished his compatriots to stop being the “stupid party.” He’s got a point.
At present, Democrats control the Senate 55-45 (two independents caucus with the Democrats). I can name five seats off the top of my head that far-right Republicans essentially gift-wrapped for their rivals in the past two years.
In Delaware, tea party favorite Christine O’Donnell wound up buying ad time to assure voters that she was not a witch. (Hint: If you have to mount a media campaign to refute charges of sorcery, your candidacy may suffer from deeper flaws. To the extent that the public finds it plausible that you could be a witch, you might as well admit being one and try to capitalize on the appeal of novelty.)
Harry Reid went home to Nevada to defend his seat a broken man. He’d just used his position as majority leader to shove Obamacare through the Senate. The program was wildly unpopular in the rural west; and I honestly wondered whether Reid might be a modern profile in courage — a politician who sacrificed his career for a principle he believed in.
Alas, we’ll never know because Republicans ran Sharron Angle against him. Asked for her alternative to health care reform, Angle suggested a return to bartering with doctors for their services. (Q: how many chickens for a double-lung transplant?)
Commenting during a polling place exit interview, one Nevada voter may have spoken for the multitudes: “It is time for Harry to go,” he said, “but Sharron’s crazy.”
In Colorado, Ken Buck narrowly lost to Democrat Michael Bennet. As a prosecutor, Buck had raided a tax office used largely by Hispanic immigrants in his home base of Greeley. The seizure of thousands of confidential tax returns was ruled unconstitutional by the state high court and was seen as evidence of Buck’s anti Hispanic positions. He also was hurt with women voters when he declared that people should vote for him because “I do not wear high heels.”
In the most recent cycle, GOP fixture Richard Lugar was unseated in an Indiana primary challenge from the right in the person of one Richard Mourdock. Meanwhile, Todd Akin took on Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, a Democrat in an increasingly red state and widely thought to be the upper chamber’s most vulnerable incumbent.
Each race was trending comfortably Republican until Akin assured female voters that they would not conceive so long as they were victimized by “legitimate rape” and Mourdock proclaimed rape-induced pregnancy to be the will of the Lord. Needless to say, Dems captured both seats.
While George Will, et al, await the next Great Awakening and subsequent return of old-time religion, Maine and Maryland voted in gay marriage, Minnesota voted down a constitutional amendment defining marriage as a contract between a man and a woman, and Colorado and Washington legalized recreational marijuana use.
House Speaker John Boehner now publicly frets that Barack Obama wants to sweep the GOP into the “dust bin of history.” Should party leaders use Will’s predicted conservative revival as an excuse for inaction, such a result would be, well, condign.