Wednesday, February 04, 2009

What's Tod Lindberg Talking About?   [Ramesh Ponnuru]

Lindberg is a shrewd political commentator, and a conservative. His article on the congressional Republicans' attempts to "triangulate" between Obama and congressional Democrats in the latest Standard is of course worth a read. But an aside of his seems to me thoroughly wrong-headed:

In 2001, George W. Bush ceded vast influence to Senator Ted Kennedy in crafting the "No Child Left Behind" education reform bill, to the consternation of many conservatives. Subsequently, he mainly gave the GOP congressional majority its way, especially on spending, but also on a long string of social-issues legislation that became the most salient element of the GOP congressional brand going into the majority-losing 2006 election.

Actually, there wasn't much social-issues legislating in 2005-6, compared to, say 2003-4, when there did not seem to be any backlash at all. Congress voted on the Federal Marriage Amendment before the 2004 election, for example, and Bush dropped the issue afterward. The Unborn Victims of Violence Act and the partial-birth abortion ban passed in that earlier Congress, too.

There were two major pieces of social-issues legislation before Congress in 2005-6. One was the bill to fund embryo-destructive stem-cell research—on which Bush was to the right of a lot of his party's congressmen. (They weren't pushing him to the right.) The other was the Terri Schiavo legislation. Now I readily admit that the Schiavo legislation hurt Republicans. But it did not figure in the 2006 campaigning all that much. The most salient elements of the party brand that fall were corruption and a head-in-the-sand attitude toward the then-quagmire in Iraq.

02/04 06:40 PMShare