Advice to Republicans: Don't even try to govern (National Review)
November 5, 2014 10:30 AM
The Governing Trap
By The Editors
Around 9:00 last night, the TV pundits realized that it would no longer do to say that it was an anti-incumbent year: The vast majority of the incumbents losing — all of them in the Senate — were Democrats. Nor could the election be chalked up to red-state reaction. Republicans took Senate seats in Iowa and Colorado, which voted for Obama twice apiece, and governorships in Maryland and Illinois, which last voted Republican in 1988.
The wave gave Republicans a larger Senate majority than all but the most confident among them had expected, and added to the ranks of their governorships when they were expected to decline. That Senate majority should be expanded further if Republicans do not get complacent about the Louisiana run-off in December.
Already a conventional wisdom about what Republicans should do next has congealed. Supposedly it is up to Republicans to “prove they can govern” even though they do not have the White House. Senator Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.) told NPR listeners that Republicans could do this by moving on trade-promotion authority, the immigration bill the Senate passed in 2013, and corporate tax reform.
With all due respect to the senator and like-minded Republicans, this course of action makes no sense as a political strategy. First: While trade-promotion authority and a tax reform that includes (but is not limited to) corporations are good ideas, voters are not, in fact, waiting anxiously for any of this. Business lobbies are. The Republican party should not pursue an agenda that is identical to theirs.
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Which brings us to the alternative course: building the case for Republican governance after 2016. That means being a responsible party, to be sure, just as the conventional wisdom has it. But part of that responsibility involves explaining what Republicans stand for — what, that is, they would do if they had the White House. And outlining a governing agenda for the future is a different matter from trying to govern in 2015. (For one thing, it is not doomed to failure.)
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more: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/392082/governing-trap-editors
OOOOOOOOOOOkay ... so the country should just tread water until a Republican POTUS saves us in 2016 ... which we just know he'll do because governing well is what you expect from a Republican, as the previous two years will attest ? ... Sounds like a plan. A boneheaded plan based on spite and vindictiveness, but a plan for all that.
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