http://www.slate.com/id/2274015/
Spin the Tale on the Donkey
When you lose an election, change course—but only if you're a Democrat.
By William Saletan
Posted Monday, Nov. 8, 2010, at 7:32 AM ET
The election returns are in, and Republican leaders have discerned the people's will. "We are witnessing a repudiation of Washington, a repudiation of big government," incoming House speaker John Boehner declared on election night. "The American people have sent an unmistakable message to tonight, and that message is: Change course."
Two days later, in a speech at the Heritage Foundation, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell called the election "a report card on the administration and anyone who supported its agenda." He offered Democrats "a choice: they can change course, or they can double down on a vision of government that the American people have roundly rejected."
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Maybe Boehner, Cantor, and McConnell are right. When voters strip you of your majority and seem to reject your philosophy in exit polls, maybe you should change course. But before taking the advice of these Republicans, let's check whether they've taken that advice themselves. Let's go back and see what they did two years ago, when the election and the exit polls went the other way.
In November 2006, the GOP lost 30 House seats and six Senate seats, forfeiting its majorities in both chambers. Two years later, voters handed another 21 House seats and seven Senate seats to the Democrats. In the presidential race, voters chose Barack Obama over John McCain, 53 percent to 46 percent. In the 2008 exit poll, 75 percent of voters said the country was seriously on the wrong track, and 51 percent agreed that "government should do more to solve problems," while only 43 percent said "government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals." That was a shift from the 2004 exit poll, in which voters had preferred less government by a margin of 49 percent to 46 percent. Self-identified moderates, who had split evenly on more vs. less government in 2004, favored more government in the 2008 exit poll by a margin of 55 percent to 39 percent.
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So Boehner, Cantor, and McConnell took those results to heart, right? They listened to the voters and changed course?
Don't be silly. They did just the opposite. They stuck to their principles and rejected partisan interpretations of the election. On Nov. 9, 2008, Cantor went on Fox News Sunday to declare:
This was not some kind of realignment of the electorate, not some kind of shift of the American people toward some style of European social big government type of philosophy. ... You can look at some of the things that people are upset about, whether it was the latest in the financial crisis, whether it was the handling of the response to Hurricane Katrina, or whether it was the continued ratcheting up of federal spending in Washington. … It really is not about left versus right. It's not about conservative versus liberal. … want to see a government that works for them. And we still believe very strongly that it is our commonsense conservative principles of a limited government, of lower taxes, of reining in federal spending that will provide the type of solutions to the challenges that face American people.
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So there's your choice, Democrats. You can listen to the Republicans or learn from them. You can do as they say or do as they did. It's pretty clear from McConnell's speech what's going on. Republicans think they beat you in 2010 by refusing to bend after 2008. Now they're trying to con you into doing the opposite. It's a clever sales job. But I wouldn't buy the product.
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