Following on a theme addressed in this earlier post from last fall, this timely OpinionJournal op-ed points out that the real problem to the Republican Party represented by Tom DeLay is not his dubious ethics, but that he is devoid of ideas other than self-preservation:
The real danger for Republicans now isn’t ethics; it is that, like those 1994 Democrats, they seem to have grown more comfortable presiding over the government than changing it. No one typified this more than Mr. DeLay, who has always been more fiercely partisan than he is conservative. . .
. . . [T]he GOP Congress has become mostly about its money and muscle–and the incumbency it helps to sustain. The policy and intellectual fervor, such as it was, has all but vanished. Nothing typified that more than Mr. DeLay’s comments on September 13, when he declared post-Katrina that there was nothing left in the federal budget to cut. They had already trimmed all the fat. . .
Read the entire piece. As OpinionJournal points out, if voters come to the conclusion that the GOP’s primary ambition is simply to remain in power, then “no amount of money or muscle will save Republicans at the polls.”
Paul Gigot hopes to advance the supply-side cause on his editorial pages, of course, and no, Tom DeLay isn’t a giant thinker in that cause (for that matter, though, neither is Gigot really).
But, unlike the man who picked him to become chief of those pages (Robert Bartley), Gigot in mature life as an editorialist has never experienced the joys of having those great supply-side ideas and being completely out of power (like Bartley, Art Laffer, Bob Mundell, Jude Wanniski, and others who helped fuel the supply-side revolution that saw success finally with Reagan’s election).
Parties need idea men, yes, but they also need men focused on building the party’s majority (like Karl Rove, like Tom DeLay, like Ken Mehlman, although all three men approach partybuilding differently) and moving its legislation. Tom DeLay is more of a party builder and legislation mover than idea man, yes, but majority parties need a combination if they are to remain majority parties and/or to thrive.
Gigot discounts DeLay’s importance in moving the Bush Administration’s agenda with a slender majority. We are too close to the action for most folks to understand how different that agenda has been from standard boilerplate conservatism, although (the reactionary) criticism from both left and right should indicate to careful observers of American politics that something different is afoot (alas, there are far more ideologues than careful observers of American poltiics). Gigot says there have been no legislative accomplishments; I’d suggest he ought to start reading the BrothersJudd blog regularly to correct that mistaken assertion. 🙂
When Gigot wrote Potomac Watch, it was regularly the best column on politics in the nation. Now that he’s moved to New York to oversee the editorial pages, I think he’s lost his edge. It’s still good, but he hits quite a few doubles where he used to hit homers, and he whiffs occasionally (which never used to happen). This is about aq single. He gets some things right, but he missed delivering insight on things he never would have missed in his Potomac Watch days.
Here’s a slightly different twist in the form of a question (damn that Lence) — What’s more stale, – DeLay’s work on moving a third-way Bush agenda, or Gigot’s editorials lamenting today’s GOP is not the GOP of Bob Bartley? 🙂
The “Do-Nothing” GOP
Republicans DeLayed: The GOP leadership deficit is one of ideas, not ethics (OpinionJournal).
Except for the 2003 tax cuts, we can’t think of a single recent major policy accomplishment. There…