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The interesting political question as we look toward 1988 is whether the Republicans will be awakened by Reagan’s failure.
From their posture on Nov. 4, it appears they will continue down the primrose path. Even Ja?k Kemp pronounced the “Reagan revolution” a success, and Republican realignment a fait accompli, at the very instant when liberal Democrats were tightening a grip on the Washington establishment which Reagan, in his failure to attack the Democratic Party as a whole, never seriously threatened to break.
This is neither 1968 nor 1988. The nation is not united; nor will it be without a very partisan battle which results in a Congress not at loggerheads with the Chief of State. But those who must lead the Republican charge appear lost in a dream: it’s as if Paul Revere had ignored the distant lanterns as the British advanced, trusting in King George’s whimperless compliance with the wishes of padfistic Bostonians.
No surprise, then, that Democratic congressmen and senators campaigned as if there were “no great national issues.” Doing so has served them well. But they have found strange bedfellows in Republican politicians, who approach recent elections like inter-conference football games — not as serious partisan contests upon which depend the happiness of our children and the survival of our democracy.
It was not on ABC election night — where Maddie Hayes continued her vacuous pretense of eternal girlhood — but on CBS, and across the nation in the fall, that we saw — in the GOP — the most frivolous moonlighter of them all.
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Douglas Jeffrey is Director of Scholarship at the Claremont Institute.
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