My crack yesterday, denigrating Ramesh Ponnuru's integrity and intelligence was admittedly mean-spirited, and he has justifiably responded to me in kind. But in the course of responding to my substantive claims, he has essentially acknowledged that economic forces drive anti-incumbency sentiment, but without addressing why any discussion of these forces is absent in his original essay.
To review, Ponnuru begins with a comparison between 1994 and 2010, stating baldly that the former was "first and foremost a referendum on the first two years of Bill Clinton’s presidency" and that the original Contract with America, while not entirely on the public's radar, nevertheless provided "the party with an image of being forward-looking problem-solvers rather than merely anti-Clintonites." Fair enough, and as Rep. Jeff Flake recently remarked, "In 1994, nobody had any memory of Republicans in power. Now they do, and it wasn’t pretty. And so we have something to overcome that we really didn’t in 1994." Ponnuru acknowledges the differences between 1994 and 2010, but it's after his review of this history that he goes astray.
Ponnuru chastises me for omitting his contention that 2010 will "primarily" (why not "first and foremost?") be a referendum on Obama and the Democrats. Fine. But what is the nature of this referendum? I think it's undeniable that 10 percent (now 9.7) unemployment would drag down any president, a point Ponnuru himself makes in his response. But this fact is not mentioned anywhere in his original essay. In fact, I searched the text for the terms "job," "employ," and "econ" to ensure I didn't miss some discussion of the economic conditions facing the country. Of "job" I found an unrelated reference ("That will be the job of Rep. Kevin McCarthy"), "employ" a hit against government workers ("Pay for government employees has been booming at a time of private-sector layoffs") and "econ" an attack against the supposedly dire consequences of cap-and-trade ("...economic damage that cap-and-trade legislation would entail").
The balance of the essay is devoted to describing how Republicans ought to harness public anger and incorporate it into a new Contract. He offers the usual boilerplate Republican solutions ("new energy technologies," "tax policies that are pro-growth and pro-family," "no new bailouts," repealing "Obamacare," fighting corruption, etc.) but does not offer even a vague proposal for dealing with unemployment. I presume that the tax policies he has in mind are across-the-board tax cuts that will somehow produce growth and hence create jobs. But therein lies the problem. As always with conservatives, a tax cut is the appropriate response to any economic situation. And viewed that way, such a tax policy is less a demonstration of competent conservative governance, and more a demonstration of rigid and thoughtless ideology. Ponnuru is taking it as axiomatic that a tax cut will lead to hiring and hence doesn't need to explicitly talk about unemployment. But from outside the bubble, the conservative response would seem to be let it burn.
This is why Ponnuru equates middle-class tax cuts with electoral success. He would like to believe that the public responded in 2006 and 2008 not to endless war and economic ruin but "in part" because Republicans didn't promise to cut taxes. He is recasting an ideological position (tax cuts are a permanent prescription) as a bread-and-butter issue, and assuming that the public will punish Democrats come November not just for being poor stewards of the state but being ideologically incompatible as well. As I keep saying, this is an article of faith in the conservative movement: the public, unchanging, ideologically conservative, is a permanent silent majority that occasionally takes leave of its senses and foolishly elects Democrats because Republicans lost their way and were not conservative enough. Ponnuru's essay doesn't say this explicitly, but his focus on a Republican strategy that exploits public anger without even acknowledging the source of the anger is quite telling.
--Mori Dinauer
