Voters Didn't Ask for a Shutdown

Written by Les Francis on Sunday February 20, 2011

The GOP's anti-government zeal and threats to shutdown government are the latest sign Washington misread the message from the midterm elections.

One would do well to ignore most political slogans and taglines, as they are seldom meant to inform. I know, because over the years I have come up with more than my share of them. Yet, every once in awhile a slogan is crafted that should cause us to think---although perhaps not in the way a particular media consultant or candidate might have intended.

This past spring, as my wife and I drove through Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina on our way to a Memorial Day weekend with friends in Charleston, we were struck and dismayed by the number of candidates (all of them Republican) who were running on a promise “to take America back,” or sometimes “Take our country back.”

“Back from whom?” I wondered. Might it be from the majority of American voters, people such as ourselves, who voted for the Democratic presidential ticket in 2008? Or maybe just from the black guy, Barack Obama, who happened to be our preferred and ultimately successful candidate?

Or maybe the question was not so much about “who” as it was about “when”.  As in when blacks couldn’t vote, or gays were forced to stay closeted, or women had no choice but to seek out back alley abortions. Or perhaps to when companies need not bother themselves with nettlesome questions about worker safety or environmental protection. Or even to when older Americans did not have the protection against poverty accorded them by Social Security and Medicare.

My guess---based on experience, close observation and analysis--- is that the 2010 campaign plea to “take our country [America] back” was and is about both who and when. And after about six weeks of the 112th Congress, we know of one period to which the Republican majority in the House is committed, so it seems, to return: November, 1995 to early January, 1996.

That is when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his allies forced the Federal government to shut down. Today, probably against his better political instincts, House Speaker John Boehner is treading down the same irresponsible and fateful path. Whereas in 1995 Gingrich was the leader of the nihilist element of the GOP, in 2011  Boehner is its enabler.

Today, Republicans’ anti-government zeal is being fueled by the mistaken belief that they were given a popular mandate to actualize both the troubling 2010 slogan and many of its more alarming implications (last week’s debate over funding for Planned Parenthood was, if nothing else, enlightening---in a fearsome way). Their “pep band” boosters on Fox, talk radio, and on the internet rally  activists in support of the myth that, in November 2010, Americans voted for the specific changes now being promulgated by the GOP.

Not so. The verdict on November 2 was a message that the Democrats had: a) overreached on a couple of major policy matters;  b) had done a poor job of explaining what they were doing and why; and, c) failed to change the way our civic institutions were working and the way issues were being debated. Whether or not one is persuaded by that argument, it is worth remembering that 68 million people voted for Barack Obama in 2008, while 44.6 million voted for Republican Congressional candidates this past November.

Who, if anyone, has the mandate needed to govern? The answer could be “neither”, but I prefer “both”.

One of the most enduring strengths of America’s representative democracy has been its capacity for self-correction. Traditionally, our political institutions and processes have forced debates and decisions to occur between the forty yard lines. Victorious parties have routinely overplayed their hands, and the voters have just as routinely slapped them down at a subsequent election. The GOP is about to re-learn that lesson. Too bad the rest of us may be forced to pay for it.

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