Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Power And Disconnections
In Monday's OpinionJournal, John Fund looked at a conversation he had with Dick Armey on how the Republican party has gone wrong. It's a very interesting read, but I think the summary paragraph is this one
The dirty secret of the 1994 Republican capture of the House was that everybody voted to "nationalize" the House, except for their own district. In an increasingly consumeristic and narcissitic nation, can we not expect voting patterns to follow that lead. If House Republicans really want to "recapture the dream" as they say they do, they need to start by telling their voters, in their district that they need to give up their pork. It's time to stop pointing at the other guys pork and start cutting your own. It's time to lead instead of to pander.
Related Tags: House, Dick Armey, Delay, John Fund, OpinionJournal, politics, Republicans, 1994
At a time when the late British theologian C.S. Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia" has become a hit movie, Mr. Coburn urges his colleagues to recall Lewis's warnings about what befalls those who would seek what he called the Inner Ring of power. "The more those in Congress seek only to penetrate each ring in order to gather power or prestige, the more they lose sight of why most voters entrusted them with their position in the first place," Mr. Coburn says. "Once voters catch on that is your primary ambition, your days accumulating power are ending."There is a lot of truth to that, but I wonder if that is the whole truth. Earlier in the piece, they dicuss pork and particularly "earmarks."
The base's despair is crystallizing around the issue of special-interest earmarks, home-district projects that are often secretly dropped into legislation at the last minute without scrutiny. Scott Lilly, until recently the chief Democratic aide on the House Appropriations Committee, said the lust for earmarks has become an "obsession" of members from both parties. "That's all they do," he told the Washington Post. Last year, the House Appropriations Committee received 10,000 requests for earmarks on one spending bill alone--more than 25 projects per House member. Mr. Lilly says it's amazing the overall number of congressional earmarks last year was held to 14,000, although that number is up from barely 2,000 five years ago.What nobody seems to realize is that the voters like pork -- as long as they are the beneficiaries of that pork. The despairing base they refer to are those that are able to take some sort of national viewpoint, but the average voter does not see beyond the end of their nose.
The dirty secret of the 1994 Republican capture of the House was that everybody voted to "nationalize" the House, except for their own district. In an increasingly consumeristic and narcissitic nation, can we not expect voting patterns to follow that lead. If House Republicans really want to "recapture the dream" as they say they do, they need to start by telling their voters, in their district that they need to give up their pork. It's time to stop pointing at the other guys pork and start cutting your own. It's time to lead instead of to pander.
Related Tags: House, Dick Armey, Delay, John Fund, OpinionJournal, politics, Republicans, 1994
