I was struck by an item in the recent Washington Post/Kaiser/Harvard Survey on The Role of Government: The fact that in 2000, 28 percent of Republicans said they would give the overall performance of the federal government a grade of “A” or “B”. (And that was with Bill Clinton as President.)
That number today is 8 percent, which is about what you would expect, given the ubiquitous anti-government rhetoric. It’s a remarkable loss of any faith in government by one of the two major political parties. (By contrast, 42 of Democrats now rate government “A” or “B” – slightly less than the 47 percent in 2000, but not as significant a decline.)
But here’s the question that sticks with me: What happens if the Republicans take back the House or at least make significant enough gains to have ownership over the government again? Will the anti-government rhetoric explode in their face?
Having spent so much energy disparaging Washington, can Republicans maintain popular support if they take back some share of the federal government and are forced to make hard choices of actually governing? It’s easy for Republican voters to have no faith in Washington when it’s controlled by Democrats, but what happens if Republicans again have a share of governing responsibility?
Consider another telling item in the same poll highlights a problem that Republicans are going to face: Half of the country thinks that the budget can be balanced with only cuts to “wasteful spending.” But as Jon Cohen and Dan Balz note: “Eliminating waste in the budget would do very little to bring down the size of the deficit.” Republicans have, as many opposition parties are wont to do, peddled excessively simple solutions to excessively difficult problems.
In today’s Times, Kate Zernicke notes that “33 Tea Party-backed candidates are in tossup races or running in House districts that are solidly or leaning Republican, and 8 stand a good or better chance of winning Senate seats” – In other words, a there will be a sizeable caucus of firethrowers who will continue to amp up the anti-government rhetoric within the party.
But how long before the Tea Party faithful loses faith in the Republicans who they’ve elected on the bold revolutionary promises to tear down government when those promises go unfulfilled – as they inevitably must, given the dramatic mismatch between their platforms and what is actually possible to accomplish in Washington?
Republicans are essentially saying: Elect us to do things that we are incapable of doing. Elect us to run an institution that we have encouraged you to be thoroughly frustrated with, so that we can ultimately be in charge and be accountable for your frustration.
Of course, that’s not to say that Republicans can’t continue the Janus-like pose of both being responsible for governing and bashing the very idea of government. Reagan did it successfully. And even if Republicans take back the House, they will still have Obama and the Democratic-controlled Senate to bash.
But ultimately, it’s a self-negating electoral strategy. Republicans are never going to succeed in drastically shrinking the size of government or even repealing healthcare reform for the simple reason that when it comes down to it, there’s much less fat to trim than most people think, and certainly no fat to trim painlessly.
So I do not envy the new crop of Republicans who will be picking up seats this November. They’ll have been elected as part of an anti-incumbency, anti-government mood that they’ve done much to foment. But that mood takes on a life of its own. It may not be so useful when they become the incumbents and are part of the government.
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