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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: GOP still sinks — and Dems will miss own boat Atlanta Journal-Constitution Wednesday, October 11, 2006 at 9:00 AM Watching the Republican leadership in the House scrambling around last week to douse the flames fanned by the scandal involving U.S. Rep. Mark Foley was — at least to me, a former Republican member of the House — not just painful. It was excruciating. And embarrassing. To witness a leadership so utterly devoid of any of the indices of, well, leadership reminded me just how far this majority had sunk since the halcyon days of the mid- and late-1990s. Love 'em or hate 'em, when the Republicans gained majority control of the House in the 1994 elections — a feat it had not been able to accomplish in the previous four decades — the party had a lot going for it. It had energy, vision and goals. The leadership articulated a real agenda, and it did so with enthusiasm. One can legitimately argue that the new majority lacked a necessary degree of discipline and realism, but it boldly posited a "Contract with America" by which the electorate could — indeed, was encouraged by the leadership to — measure its performance. Its sworn enemy was the status quo, and the party made no bones in articulating its mission to dismantle it. The Republicans chose as their leader a brash, fire-breathing intellectual from west Georgia who accurately painted the incumbent Democrat majority as ponderous, haughty and detached. To this day, a dozen years from that historic 1994 election, Newt Gingrich continues to evoke strong reactions from virtually all who know him (and from those who think they do). While eight years as a former member of Congress have mellowed Gingrich and appear to have taught him several valuable lessons — not the least important of which is to prioritize and focus his considerable intellectual powers — he still possesses attributes the current congressional leadership can only wish it had: vision, imagination, enthusiasm, leadership. The GOP's slide from its glory days defining the national agenda, when it led the nation to a balanced budget and enacted what many consider the most important legislation in a generation — welfare reform — has been neither sudden nor pretty. The party lost its cutting edge when Gingrich stepped down shortly after the 1998 mid-term elections. His apparent successor, the equally energetic U.S. Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.), was undone by a personal scandal that in earlier decades would have been but a footnote rather than a headline. The party then searched its ranks for someone about whom there was not and could not be a hint of scandal. Chosen for this reason alone was U.S. Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) who at the time was not even a committee chairman. With Gingrich's imperfect, but still considerable, leadership skills suddenly absent, the Republicans in the House bogged down. Over the next two years, they continued to espouse a generally conservative program, but lacking a strong and visionary leader, they were unable to keep their own ranks sufficiently focused to implement much of that agenda. Even though President Clinton, following his December 1998 impeachment by the House, entered 1999 severely weakened, for the next two years the Republican majority in the House was largely unable to do more than parry his feints and jabs. The Republicans were largely content to simply protect the hard-won gains achieved under Gingrich's leadership. Republican hopes between January 1999 when Gingrich stepped down, and the presidential election in 2000, hinged not on a robust sense of its own skills and powers, but on winning the White House that year. Thus, when George W. Bush won the cliffhanger of an election in November 2000, congressional Republicans celebrated his victory but had become largely an empty suit. There was no true congressional agenda to put forward in January 2001. The GOP leadership moved quietly, even comfortably, from a holding pattern to one of subservience; leaving it to the new Republican president and his team to set the congressional agenda. For a time, the arrangement seemed to work, with focused tax cuts and comprehensive education reform leading the way. Unfortunately, with the morass in Iraq following the U.S.-led invasion in April 2003, Bush's energies became focused more and more on Iraq, not on Congress. The GOP leadership, slowly having been bled with departures of charismatic leaders such as U.S. Rep. J.C. Watts (R-Okla.), and weakened by simmering scandals, was left completely adrift as the White House became fixated on Iraq. One can palpably sense the lack of enthusiasm motivating the current Republican leaders in the unsmiling, fatigued manner they approach their duties these days. Terrible poll numbers don't help, of course; but the malaise goes deeper. It is perhaps a realization that after 12 years in power, but lacking any vision, the GOP has become itself the status quo. As that sage, Pogo, observed in 1970, "we have met the enemy and he is us." Such a realization cannot help but make one feel depressed. What is ultimately most depressing, however, is that Democrat leaders possess no more vision than their Republican counterparts. •Former Congressman and U.S. Attorney Bob Barr practices law in Atlanta. Web site: http://www.bobbarr.org
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#1. To: Brian S (#0)
That was worth it just for all the long faces in academia, if nothing else. Smarted all the more for having come so soon after the election of Billary.
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