Uh-oh!
In that never-ending saga of “Have Republicans learned the lesson of the 2006 elections?” the answer is apparently . . . no.
The Washington Post recently did a story on Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), the new head of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC). That’s the committee that oversees the selection and campaigns of Republican candidates running for the House.
So what Tom Cole thinks are the lessons from the election, when Republicans lost control of both the House and Senate, is important.
According to the Post story: “Cole has run the numbers, and he doesn’t think the GOP was doomed by appropriating federal money for bridges to nowhere in Alaska. His diagnosis includes Iraq, corruption scandals and a general sense that Republicans ‘overreached’ after taking over Washington.”
The story quotes Cole as saying, “‘Oh, I don’t think the problem was spending. . . . People who argue that we lost because we weren’t true to our base, that’s just wrong.’”
Be worried. Be very, very worried!
Cole has it precisely backwards. Certainly all of those other elements played a roll. But the Republican base—which is dominated by fiscal conservatives—was outraged that there didn’t seem to be a borrowed dime’s worth of difference between the big-spending Democrats and the big-spending Republicans.
If Tom Cole doesn’t believe that, then he won’t necessarily be looking for candidates who want to turn the fiscal corner. Indeed, he may even discourage them from running for the House.
Ironically, all of the Republican presidential candidates are striving to be perceived as the heir of fiscal-conservative Ronald Reagan. That’s good.
It took a limited-government, fiscal conservative like Ronald Reagan to pull Republicans back to their conservative principles in the 1980s. And it may take a new Ronald Reagan to point out to the next batch of Republicans the long road home—beginning with Rep. Tom Cole.