Let’s have a little perspective, please
By Wes Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com
Woe
is us. But next time, the woe will be for the other
guys. Keeping that in mind is the secret of
surviving the morning after.
Losing an election always hurts; winning hurts the
other guys, which is why winning is so sweet. This
one hurts conservatives a lot, and it’s particularly
painful for those with unrealistic great
expectations.
Pessimists abound. Rep. Ron Paul, who holds the
North American franchise for pessimism, says we no
longer have to worry about the “fiscal cliff”
because we’re already lie in the rocks and weeds at
the bottom of Gruesome Gulch. Rep. John Boehner, the
speaker of the House, who promised defiantly on
election eve to hang tough on the Republican mantra
of “no new taxes” even if the president were to be
re-elected, now sounds not so sure.
Some
of the more prominent conservative pundits are on
their way to New York City in search of a building
high enough to jump out of. Rush Limbaugh went to
bed on Election Night “thinking we had lost the
country, I don’t know how else you look at this.”
Sean Hannity told his Fox News audience that he
wouldn’t succumb to depression but it looks like to
him like America is “no longer the center-right
country that it once was” and “has been conditioned
to be an entitlement society.” If that’s not
depression it’s a reasonable facsimile of it. When
Ann Coulter, the prolific author and pundit who
writes exclusively in purple ink, told talk-show
hostess Laura Ingraham that the nation is now
interested only in handouts, “There is no hope.”
Miss
Ingraham told her: “Pep up, move forward, girl.”
Good advice. It’s easy for anyone to be misled by
the media, whose patron saint is Chicken Little. The
media covers politics the way television
“journalists” cover the weather: all panic all the
time. They can’t help it, it’s all they know. The
coverage often reminds me of my devout grandmother,
beyond elderly when she called me in tears one day
many years ago to tell me that “God is dead, they
just announced it on the television.”
We’ve
read obituaries for the political parties and
philosophies before. The Republican Party was doomed
to an unmourned grave after LBJ dispatched Barry
Goldwater in 1964; eight years later Richard Nixon
won 49 states and the Republicans and Democrats
traded places in oblivion. Jimmy Carter was the
author of Democratic renaissance in 1976, but the
renaissance faded in just four years and Ronald
Reagan won 49 states in 1984. The Democrats were
sent back to the graveyard. Anyone who believed
everything he read would have imagined the landscape
littered with the bloated corpses of the two
not-so-great political parties. The corpses always
got up to dance again.
The
problem with lugubrious morning-after analysis is
that it’s nearly always wrong. Everything always
looks different later. Barack Obama is entitled to a
little basking – he won, fair and square – but he’ll
need the remembrance of how good it once felt.
Second terms are never as much fun as presidents
expect them to be. You could ask Messrs Nixon,
Reagan and Clinton. Mr. Nixon was chased out of
office, Iran-Contra exploded in the Gipper’s face
like a trick cigar, and Bubba was impeached with
only the consolations of a comely White House
intern.
The
conservatives misled themselves about what America
thought of a president who had inherited a bad
economy and made it worse. Americans have retreated
to two echo chambers, where everyone competes to see
who can say the most incendiary things about the
opposition. Some conservatives couldn’t give up the
notion that the president is a secret Kenyan
communist; liberals couldn’t give up the notion that
everyone who opposes the president is a secret Ku
Kluxer, listening for the dog whistle to send them
into the streets in search of the lynch mob. The
echo chamber where everyone gets his “news,”
filtered through ignorant and often inexperienced
“journalists” unchallenged by an editor with a blue
pencil and looking for opportunities to use it,
reinforces silly notions.
The
election did not settle much of anything. We’re
still a center-right country with a president of
diminished popularity (his 7-point victory in 2008
shrank to 2 points this year), a closely divided
Senate where Republicans can still work the rules to
derail radical legislation, and a House with enough
Republicans to prevail against the worst that
Democrats can devise.
Barry Goldwater
The
game is still on. Conservatives have the persuasive
case to make, but invective, insult, rant and rave
won’t do it. Reasoned argument will. This goes for
Democrats, too. They should remember the infallible
Pruden Principle: Nothing recedes like success.
History proves it.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington
Times.