Memo to the GOP. You had a great night on Tuesday. But remember: You didn’t win it. The Democrats lost it.
This is not to say that you didn’t show discipline in making the election a referendum on six years of Barack Obama. You exercised adult supervision over the choice of candidates. You didn’t allow yourself to go down the byways of gender and other identity politics.
It showed: a gain of probably nine Senate seats, the largest Republican House majority in more than 80 years, and astonishing gubernatorial victories, including Massachusetts, Maryland and Illinois, the bluest of the blue, giving lie to the Democrats’ excuse that they lost because the game was played on Republican turf.
The defeat — “a massacre,” the Economist called it — marks the final collapse of Obamaism, a species of left liberalism so intrusive, so incompetently executed and ultimately so unpopular that it will be seen as a parenthesis in American political history. Notwithstanding Obama’s awkward denials at his next-day news conference, he himself defined the election when he insisted just last monththat “these [i.e. his] policies are on the ballot — every single one of them.”
They were, and America spoke. But it was a negative judgment, not an endorsement of the GOP. The prize for winning is nothing but the opportunity for Republicans to show that they can govern — the opportunity to seize the national agenda.
Five weeks ago, I suggested a series of initiatives that would be like the 1994 “Contract with America” but this time post facto. It’s not rocket science. Mitch McConnell, the incoming Senate majority leader, and Speaker John Boehner are already at work producing such an agenda.
It needs to be urgent, determined and relentless. Say, a bill a week for the first 10 weeks. Start with obvious measures with significant Democratic support, like the Keystone XL pipeline.
Like fast-track trade negotiation authority that Harry Reid killed and that Obama, like all presidents, wants. Republicans should propose and pass it, thereby giving Obama a victory and demonstrating both bipartisanship and magnanimity (as well as economic good sense).
Then a simple, targeted bill to repatriate the $2 trillion of assets being held by U.S. corporations overseas, a bill to authorize and expedite the export of liquid natural gas and crude oil (the latter banned by an obsolete 1975 law) and a strong border security bill.
