Straight Man, Lightning Rod, Doofus, Dupe

OffHisMeds is frequently dismayed by the sundry self-inflicted wounds of the Republican Party, never more evident than in their pathological need to appear reasonable. Which is why he was so pleased to read a wonderful, full-throated, unapologetic and long-overdue celebration of Conservative values in Jeff Bergner's article “Can Republicans Govern?”, in the Feb. 8th issue of The Weekly Standard.

He expresses perfectly the frustrations of conservatives like OffHisMeds who look on in amazement as the Republican Party prepares for what will be – with the exception of the Reagan Years and the first 100 days of The Contract With America – its 6th decade as the Straight Man to the Democrat Party. The article ably describes how Republicans, by refusing to offer an alternative to the Democrats’ version of history – what he describes as “The Narrative” – put themselves at a perpetual disadvantage, are constantly on defense, and eventually betray their principles, their agenda and their constituents.

This pathology is hardly limited to Republican politicians, by the way. Even though The Weekly Standard published Bergner’s article repudiating the Democrat “Narrative”, I had to go back a mere two issues to find a perfect example of the embracement of it, Matthew Continetti’s article “Defusing The Debt Bomb”.

The article is shot through with The Narrative, and unconsciously legitimizes it at every turn. I’ll give you four examples:

1) The Moral Equivalency Default. In the article Continetti opines that “Thanks to …... profligate spending by both Republicans and Democrats, the deficit and debt are at postwar highs”. It’s bad enough that Democrats get away with constantly equating their Felonies to our Misdemeanors without Conservatives jumping on the bandwagon. If we can’t stick the Profligate Spender label on Democrats, we can’t stick them with anything.

2) The tendency of Conservatives to neuter their own Narrative. This quote illustrates my point: “There is new evidence that massive debt hampers economic vitality”. Yikes! As if the plundering of our 401Ks since 1999 didn’t make this painfully obvious, could we not agree that Milton Friedman settled this question decades ago? What purpose does this observation serve other than to provide cover to generations of Democrat Budget Busters?

3) The obsession with “bipartisanship”. Continetti writes approvingly that Republican Senator Judd Gregg has “coauthored with committee chairman Kent Conrad of North Dakota (a proposal) to establish a bipartisan task force to fix America’s finances”. With the possible exception of “Conservative Democrat”, is there any phrase in the English language more repugnant to actual Conservatives than “bipartisan task force to fix America’s finances”? Not only does it suggest that bipartisan task forces are good things, but that Democrats have anything to offer in fixing the problem.

4) Hedge-betting equivocation. Mr. Continetti writes: “….. no one knows when the next boom will start. And the Democratic playbook of tax, spend, and regulate may delay it”. “May” delay it? The fact that Republicans can't bring themselves to say that Tax-Spend-and-Regulate policies will delay economic recovery doesn't exactly put them in a strong position to argue that those policies actually damage the Economy.

Mr. Continetti is far from the only person susceptible to the notion that Conservative and Liberal arguments (or their proponents) deserve equal time, but as Bergner points out, if Republicans are to succeed in advancing a Conservative agenda, they must once and for all repudiate “The Narrative”. Mr. Bergner’s article ought to be required reading for all Weekly Standard writers. After a decade of subscribing to The Standard, only today did I read an article that so unashamedly defended Conservative thought, Conservative principles, and if I may, Conservative Exceptionalism.

If you tend to be a cynic, it's not hard to fathom why Republicans constantly play the game by Democrat rules. Even when they're in power, they're really not, considering that three of the six major branches of government are immune to the Electorate and thus dominated by Democrats, including the Bureaucracy, the Media and Academia. The story these three worthless institutions tell is consistent and coordinated. Soviet Russia could only dream of the lockstep conformity of our Educators, Reporters and Governmental Knob-Twiddlers.

The Russkis had a word for these folks. They called them Apparatchiks, people blindly devoted to the Cause, whatever the hell the Cause may be. It's ironic to think that they would create a word with such a pejorative tone, but the Soviets - even as they used such people to preserve their hold on power - had a sense of humor about their ability to manipulate them.

This is not to say that in America the Apparatchik's stranglehold on "The Narrative" cannot be broken, but it is to say that doing so requires some stones, a willingness to endure some verbal abuse, the withholding of governmental favors, no invitations to all the right parties, and even - if for so ever a short period of time - banishment to the political wilderness.

Rick Perry's campaign is running a commercial that gives us a perfect illustration of the Republican Straight Man - Kay Bailey Hutchison. The punch line is "she went to change Washington, but Washington changed her". How better to describe the untold legions of Republicans who sought political office to change Big Government, but ended up getting seduced by the power, the perks and the culture of Big Government.

Republican’s failure to defend Conservatism brought the Tea Parties into existence. Let’s hope the Obama Administration is that seminal event that causes them to not only reject the Democrat “Narrative”, but put forward one of their own.

Or, they can keep playing Straight Man to the Democrat Party, settling for a few scraps from their table, and very occasionally, a seat.