POINT: Republicans are now in control — lessons learned
Well the votes are in, America, and it looks like the Republicans will maintain control of the U.S. House of Representatives and take control of the Senate. This means that Congress and the White House will be controlled by members of the same party, something that has not happened to the Republican Party in a century.
The Democratic Party, reeling from the losses, will now begin the process of trying to determine how this could have happened. As the true reasons for the Republican sweep will not be made public by the Democratic Party, I thought that it would be fun to discuss some of those reasons right here in this column.
First, there are the issues. The Democratic Party has been doing its best to avoid talking about the single most important issue that weighs on the minds of the American people today: National security. The way Democratic candidates have behaved toward this issue strikes me as very ostrich-like: Bury your head in the sand, and maybe if you close your eyes tight enough, it will go away on its own.
Democrats tried instead to shift focus to the economy, and that seemed to be good enough for the liberal news media, but not for voters. And how could this be? Well, I’ll let you all in on a little secret no one wants to talk about. The economy is fine! We’ve been in economic recovery for several months now. Several major economic indicators have shown this, and there’s nothing that the Democratic Party can do about that. A second point worthy of note: The stock market is not the economy.
Liberals have been whining about the stock market even before the dust settled at Ground Zero. They hoped Americans would ignore their blatant indifference to the safety of this nation if they could just make them think about the stock market. This is pathetic. The stock market fluctuates greatly all the time. These fluctuations are natural and necessary market adjustments that keep the economy functioning efficiently. They are not indications of the decline and fall of western civilization. The recent declines in the market may actually have been worsened by Democratic machinations that adversely and abnormally affected consumer confidence.
The second reason I believe Democrats have been less successful this year is the tone they have set for their campaign. Whether it was shouting doom and gloom about a recovering economy, or deriding President Bush’s national security efforts, they came off very un-American. This was deadly in a time when most Americans are feeling a renewed sense of unity and national pride. Running uphill against a river of patriotism, many Democrats were swept away.
Now maybe Congress can be a body of action, casting off the deadlock of the last two years. A dark cloud has been lifted off of the Capitol Building as the king of conflict loses power there. In fact, with do-nothing-Daschle out of the way, maybe we can get some bills passed. It will be amazing to see judicial nominations that don’t take a full year to get a hearing. Speaking of the Judiciary, it looks like Sen. Orrin Hatch will get his chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee back, and Utah will have some swing in national politics once again. What a wonderful election day!
Gabriel White is a senior majoring in political science. Comments can be sent to him at gkw@cc.usu.edu.