ECONOMY TRUMPS POLITICAL IDEOLOGY

By H. N. Burdett

The Republican spin on the 2010 U.S. Congressional elections -- from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to columnist George Will -- attributes the Democratic Party drubbing to a repudiation of liberalism. But framing the GOP victories as American voters' reaction to the Obama administration's health care and economic stimulus initiatives is right out of Republican strategist Frank Luntz's playbook: Repeat an hypothesis often enough and loud enough and it eventually becomes conventional wisdom. Or, in Dr. Luntz's own words: "A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth."

The "dry recitation of the truth" of the election day turnaround that gives the GOP control of the U.S. House of Representatives and a virtual even split in the Senate is that the economic recession trumped ideology. People voted their pocketbooks, as surely as they did in 1932 during the Great Depression; then, Herbert Hoover and the Republican Party were voted out, Franklin D. Roosevelt and New Deal liberalism swept in and the Democratic Party reigned over Washington for a generation.

This year was somewhat different, mainly because when Barack Obama was elected two years ago, the theme of his campaign was his promise of Change. The economy was only dragging at the time he launched his drive for the presidency, but had not yet imploded. The average American voter probably doesn't place all that much stock in campaign rhetoric, but in 2008 George W. Bush's popularity had sunk as low as it ever had for any U.S. president. The idea of Change to a majority of Americans spelled Relief. As the economy worsened, our troops were (and are) fighting in two West Asian countries, with still no sign of weapons of mass destruction, it wasn't hard to read the doomsday handwriting on the wall for the Republican Party.

Two years later, the mess left by the Bush-Cheney misadventure has yet to be cleaned up and the multitude of Americans who have lost their jobs and their homes, and those still hanging on by a thread, simply ran out of patience. The Republican Party had nothing to lose by turning to a Frank Luntz "compelling story." Actually it was an old story. The same one the GOP used once upon a time in its unsuccessful attempts to defeat Medicare and Medicaid: the Democrats were leading the country down the dreaded path to socialized medicine. When you've lost your job and you can no longer make the mortgage or your kids' school tuition payments, does the slippery slope to 'socialized medicine' really top your list of concerns?

Obama's campaign promise of Change had been at first perceived as just another presidential candidate's fancy sounding stump speech. Still the notion of switching horses in the nation's capital sounded better and better to an electorate no longer comfortable with being led by an administration neck-deep in its commitment to foreign oil, fighting unwinnable wars for reasons that seemed to change weekly if not daily and financed by a program of borrow, spend and stick the grandchildren with the bill.

But after Obama was elected and the economy kept plunging deeper and deeper toward catastrophe, Americans soon realized that he didn't have an immediate solution to restoring economic stability. Frustration and anger mounted and had to be unleashed. The national consensus was that someone had to pay and in hard times the party in power traditionally must shoulder the blame, regardless of the degree of actual culpability. Consequently, the comfortable Democratic majority in the House was transformed into an equally comfortable, though not veto-proof, GOP majority.

Republican congressional leaders now sound the clarion that they are training their sights on undoing what they couldn't stop from happening during the previous two years when the Democrats had majorities in both houses, as well as their man in the White House. The apparent first order of business is to overturn so-called Obamacare.

Neither conservatives nor liberals are completely satisfied with either the health insurance or economic stimulus initiatives -- the two most stunning successes of Obama's first two years at the helm. But if the President succeeds in rigidly defending these achievements and the economy vastly improves over the next two years, both plausible possibilities, offensive rather than cooperative politics could backfire on the Republicans.

Flawed as the health insurance law may be, it still opens the door for providing coverage for up to 32 million Americans who were uninsured; that combined with the elimination of pre-existing health conditions as a rationale for denying insurance provides a strong rationale for not trashing the Obama initiative.

The Democratic Party argument for retaining Obamacare is further bolstered by the President's stated willingness to tweak it so that small businesses will not be saddled with an unfair burden of providing health care for employees. Senate Minority Leader McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner might be better advised to cobble a compromise, then loudly and frequently claim credit for improving the health care act, rather than torching it.

As for the economic stimulus plan, General Motors recently announced a $20 billion profit -- an indicator that the American automobile industry may be making a comeback that seemed only a few months ago to be highly improbable if not impossible. There were few Americans who did not deeply resent the bailout of the auto industry as well as selected financial institutions, but should the U.S. economy get its head above water before November of 2012 and the troops are back home, as Obama has pledged, the political landscape will look far different than it does today. In politics, a year can be a lifetime, two years an era. For better or worse, the electorate has an incredibly short memory.