The political price of failure

Steve Chapman:

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ust about everyone agrees that Republicans had better make some big changes: move to the right, move to the center, emphasize social issues, de-emphasize social issues, focus on trying to cut spending, give up trying to cut spending, embrace Sarah Palin or forget Sarah Palin.

But all this amounts to gross overanalysis. The best advice for the GOP is simple: Don't be at the helm when the economy hits the rocks. There is no better way for an incumbent party to assure its defeat than a recession. Richard Nixon proved that in 1960, Jimmy Carter confirmed it in 1980 and George H.W. Bush removed all doubt in 1992.

A corollary and equally obvious piece of wisdom is one the party learned in 2006 when Democrats swept the congressional elections: Don't preside over unsuccessful wars. The progress that followed the surge in Iraq largely solved that problem. But instead of becoming a Republican asset, Iraq became a political irrelevancy.

The difference between 2004 and 2008 is not that Americans became more liberal. It's that the issue of greatest urgency changed. Four years ago, the top concerns were moral values and Iraq. Only 21 percent of Americans ranked the economy as their biggest worry. This year, 63 percent put the economy first.

It also doesn't help to have an incumbent president who is widely reviled. Before the 2004 election, half of Americans approved of his performance. This time, three out of four didn't.

The good news for Republicans? Despite the powerful undertow of the economy and George W. Bush, the Republican presidential candidate got more than 46 percent of the vote. That doesn't look like a party that has no fundamental appeal. It looks like a party whose fundamental appeal was overwhelmed by transient calamities.

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... Substitute a terrorist attack for the September financial meltdown and Obama would have gone down in history as the black Michael Dukakis.

How can Republicans come back? Easy. All they need is for the incoming president to fail at reviving the economy, make a mess of Iraq or suffer some other major setback in the next four years....

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I think he is right on target. Before the economy collapse McCain was leading in the polls by about the amount Obama wound up winning by.

What the Democrats have been good at over the last four years is avoiding responsibility. They have run a dishonest campaign against President Bush on the issue of Iraq, and they have avoided responsibility for the debacle their polices caused in the housing market.

Republicans have been far too stoic in responding to this political fraud. That has been their major mistake of the last four years. The Democrats should have been made to pay a political price for being so wrong about Iraq.