An Elephant Only Forgets Mistakes

I opened the Washington Post this afternoon to find that Newt Gingrich had been forced to respond to my recent post, ridiculing his mid-90s reign as Speaker.

Okay, he wasn't actually responding to me.

But he did write an article which outlined a plan for building upon the recent Republican electoral windfall. He stated that a focus on health care, stronger relationships with minority voters, and an honest appraisal of the party's failures combined with efforts to improve in the future, would secure fifty years of Republican rule.

I had to take a break from the article because I was laughing so hard, since Newt Gingrich lecturing the Republicans on building a stable majority sounds a lot like Alex Rodriguez lecturing the 2004 Yankees on how to win a playoff series.

I gave it another look, because, after I'd finished laughing, I reminded myself that hindsight is 20/20. The guy who turned the Republican Party into a horrendous joke might have a pretty good idea of how not to repeat his mistakes.

Most of the article was crap- he seemed convinced that Republicans could come up with a health care system that worked for free, AND cure cancer while they were at it. This gave me a fantastic image of Majority Leader/Dr. Bill Frist working hard in a Capitol Hill laboratory, until Tom DeLay, accompanied by Karl Rove and the Rev. Fred Phelps, kicked in the door and broke all Frist's equipment, insisting that his medical research "conflicted with our moral values."

However, Newt actually did make a legitimate point, which was that if the Republican Party did a better job of acknowledging their failures, they would have won by an even wider margin. I think that, had George W. Bush gone out and said, "Yeah, Iraq's a mess. We didn't expect that. But we're gonna fix it. Same thing with that ," John Kerry would have packed up and been back in Boston before August.

Maybe it wouldn't have been that extreme, but the 2004 Presidential campaign was marked (in my mind) by each candidate refusing to acknowledge they'd ever done anything wrong. Any criticism was simply dismissed as a "partisan attack," and was either ignored or redirected back to the attacker. Nobody- especially Bush- would ever acknowledge that, maybe once, back in the day, they might have made a mistake. Bush was "steadfast, resolute, determined," but never thoughtful, and never had any regrets.

All people, especially those in highly-visible positions, want to seem strong and determined. But at this point in American politics, admitting you're wrong- or even admitting you were wrong and are trying to amend that- is perceived as opening the door to unlimited liability. One admitted mistake, it seems, sacrifices the credibility of the person and their entire party.

This is a problem for both parties, but especially the Republicans. Their failures are visible to anyone who can read. We went into Iraq with the stated goal of eliminating a WMD threat- and now, anyone who asks about the WMDs is asked why they wanted Saddam Hussein in power. I would dearly love to hear any Republican say, "Yeah, we f---ed up with the weapons thing. But at least that jerk is out of power. And I know it's a big mess right now, but we gotta do the right thing and clean up after ourselves before we bail out, you know?"

Wait. Hang on. I was wrong.

I don't ever want to hear a Republican say that.

Right now, admitting your political failures is an act of remarkable maturity, and since they kept both houses of Congress and the Presidency, the Republicans have absolutely no need for soul-searching. They have to be doing something right, and admitting they've been less than perfect (by compromising with those godless Bolsheviks on the other side of the aisle, for example) would probably open themselves up to a new hail of criticism- much of it coming from within their own party.

It's the Democrats who have to be doing the public soul-searching right now, and that means admitting your failures. This is doing two things simultaneously; opening up the party to new ideas and new tactics, and allowing the Republicans to feel even more secure, self-assured. No one is going to be asking them to examine their own failings. They don't have any. By 2006, we may have an opposition so deeply entrenched within the fortifications of its own arrogance, that no reasonable voter could possibly stomach voting for them.

(The problem here being that this country is choked with voters who are not only unreasonable, I highly doubt that they're even from this friggin' planet. Specifically, fundamentalist Christians. I'm going to reserve commentary on these guys for another article.)

I'm not in the business of throwing out false hope, and the reason I started writing this was mainly because I'd relied too much on it in the past, and I woke up in a very unpleasant, very unexpected world on November 3rd. But if the painful and overwhelming Republican victory convinces them of their own immortal majority (as we can only pray,) we can capitalize on this by talking about our values.

We can go out into the blue states and talk about real values, the kind of values that make you put health care, education and socially conscious tax breaks first. And go after the people who claim to protect family values by promoting hate. By aligning themselves with the evil, ultra-Christian right and putting anti-gay referendums on the ballot, the Republican Party will pay among moderate voters if we make them.

If we go out there without fear, to talk about our values- and move past the smokescreens of abortion and gay rights, to the commitments that motivate the Democratic social consciousness- we'll be in the right place. Many moderate and conservative voters will already be drifting left, away from the firm Republican refusal to acknowledge the obvious.

You might have noticed I'm shooting for 2006, not 2008. I don't believe that a ruling party needs to have their man in the White House. I think that, if we can mobilize the Democratic base in 2006, we can halt the neoconservative Bush agenda in its tracks, stop the hemhorraging of international faith in America, and begin to bring the country back into the 21st century. And an arrogant Republican majority might do a lot of the work for us.

So Newt's right- an honest assessment of the Republican Party, by Republicans, would make them significantly tougher to beat. (Even if they pretended to apologize for the disasters they've caused, it would be bad.) But that probably won't happen. They won. Why admit weakness? In the meantime, we need to exploit this by taking our values on the road, into Red America.

We can take back the halls of Congress, but more importantly, we can demonstrate that the Democratic Party is fighting for the future of this country- and renew our own faith in that future.