Collapse of the Loyal Opposition
by James Kilbourne
We may be witnessing a reasonably rare event in American political history—the collapse of one of the two major political parties. The odds still favor the Democrats being able to pull together and returning to power sometime within the next two presidential elections, perhaps beginning that process as early as the next congressional elections in 2006. But certainly, something has been happening in the elections since year 2000, and the Democrats are now following a more drastic, some would say desperate, course to gain favor with the public.
Everyone knows that the 2000 presidential election was the closest in American history. And in 2004, George W. Bush won 51% to John Kerry’s 48%, hardly an overwhelming landslide. This would seem to indicate that both parties are about equal, as it would have only taken a minor shift of the political winds for the election to go the other way. However, by any historical perspective, Al Gore should have won a comfortable victory in 2000. The party in power almost always wins an election when the economy is perceived to be healthy. In 2000, a recession was occurring by the time Clinton left office, but the perception in the autumn of that year was that we were in the middle of the greatest boom period in our history. And the conditions in the American economy and the Iraqi war arguably were at their lowest point at the time of the 2004 election.
Certainly, the elections since 2000 have shown a decidedly pro-Republican bias, and the Electoral College alignment, the only votes that really matter in America’s presidential election process, seem to be swinging Republican. The Democratic "red" states are losing population and electoral votes for the most part to the Republican "blue" states. It is highly unusual for the party in power to gain seats in the congressional elections held two years into a president’s first term, yet that is precisely what the Republicans did in 2002. In 2004, they added a handful more house members and five more senators.
The current strategy of the Democratic Party is, to say the least, a very risky one. They have united in the congress to block almost the entire Bush second-term agenda, and have offered absolutely no alternative vision on any of the major issues of the day. To some degree, the party out of power always has an interest in the failure of the policies of the current administration. However, the Democrats are further out on the limb in this respect than I have ever seen a major political party climb. Although no one can predict the future, I think there is good reason to believe that American’s perceptions of the economy and the war in Iraq will turn decidedly towards the Republicans over the next four years, and the Democrats will have painted themselves into an ugly corner of pessimism and defeat.
Even if the Democrats manage to block any changes to the Social Security system, major tax reform that spurs further improvements to capital formation, and advances in free trade agreements, I believe that the US economy is still poised to have a stronger recovery than currently predicted. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and, particularly of 2003, are strongly supply-side in nature, and since many Republicans, most Democrats and about 98% of the media have no understanding of why supply-side tax policies create strong economic growth, most people will underestimate the strength of this continuing recovery, just as they underestimated the growth of the economy in the Coolidge, Kennedy, and Reagan years. This will lead to continuing upside growth and lower public debt predictions over the next several years. I expect that supply-side economics will be accepted after I have entirely given up on it ever happening, something akin to the Berlin Wall falling after I finally gave up hope of communism collapsing from its own stupidity. The largest thing besides a successful terrorist attack that could derail this recovery is the price of oil, and although it will certainly lower the growth rate of this economy, I think there is room for a surprising recovery even after taking this added factor into account.
But the most unbelievable Democratic strategy to witness is the ever-increasing crescendo of cacophony spewing forth from the one-note Democratic chorus on the Iraqi war. The administration’s conduct of this war is, to almost every Democrat, inept—even criminal, and consciously deceptive. Our efforts have been a colossal failure. We now find ourselves in a quagmire, with no hope of success and no choice but to pull out our troops. There is, of course, only one problem with this view; it is wrong. In fact, it is historically ignorant and consciously deceptive at its core, and once it is seen to be so by Americans, they will abandon in droves those who promote this self-serving and defeatist argument.
I won’t repeat my arguments stated in other articles concerning the competency and honesty of this administration other than to say that it is the most competent and honest in my lifetime. All war is horrible and is always filled with mistakes and confusion, and no one can deny that the Iraqi war turned out to be much more difficult and costly in lives and money than we thought after the amazingly fast collapse of Saddam’s forces in the spring of 2003. But if anyone had suggested on September 12, 2001, that the United States would have had the remarkable string of successes in Afghanistan and Iraq and would have a thrown the terrorists so off balance that there hadn’t been a successful terrorist attack since 9/11, he would have been accused of wearing those rose-colored glasses Democrats always claim Republican economists wear. In the day-to-day headlines, it appears that we the war is going badly. However, when we look back at it in history, barring a complete unforeseen calamity, it could easily be considered America’s most successfully waged war in its history.
If Bush’s policies are seen to be even moderately successful come future elections by the general public, the Democrats will have a hard time convincing anyone but their core left wing that they are capable of running this country. The Bush administration has one major shortcoming; they aren’t very good at selling themselves and their policies. This gives the opposition a temporary advantage. But in the long run, what matters is what is true. If most Americans see that their economic fortunes are improving, and that Bush’s visionary agenda promoting worldwide democracy and confronting terrorists overseas rather than here, the Republicans stand a chance of even making gains in the sixth year of a two-term presidential period, something which I believe has never been done before in the history of the republic.
The Democratic Party haven't been a loyal opposition in some time. Since the Vietnam War, they have broken the tradition of a bipartisan international agenda, and have moved further away from the political mainstream with each decade. They have become a motley band of mostly self-serving special interests. They consistently put their own political survival over the wellbeing of their country. If the Democrats lose in 2006 and then panic and move left to secure their base in 2008, we may find their brittle bones on the ash heap of history with the Federalists, the Whigs and the Know-Nothings.
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