The Nation's Pulse
Antie, W. James III
THe NaTIoN’s Pulse Republicans Spent Is the GOP finally an antispending party? by W. James Antle III I n the waning days of the Republican congressional majority, there...
...25 or pylesp@spectator.org...
...By 2006, thesebudgetproposalscouldn’tevenmusteramajority among members of the Republican Study Committee...
...This small snapshot reveals the divide among congressional Republicans...
...So when the Republican majority finally slipped away, principled conservatives were among the least surprised...
...And so they might have: Stevens won his primary with 63 percent of the vote...
...THe NaTIoN’s Pulse Republicans Spent Is the GOP finally an antispending party...
...McClintock McClintock is a conservative well known for his service in the legislature, several painfully close statewide races, and his third-place finish in the 2003 recall election for governor...
...Even then, he faced an uphill battle against the longest-serving Republican senator...
...When Mike Pence and Congressman John Shadegg of Arizona, both fiscally conservative reformers, sought leadership positions after the 2006 elections, they were shellacked by the John Boehner/Roy Blunt team that was already in place...
...Let Your Legacy Be One of Freedom...
...Alaska’s other prince of pork, Don “Kiss My Ear” Young, faced a tougher challenge...
...Within a decade, talking about a revolution really did sound like a whisper...
...I believe we have a good shot,” Parnell told TAS in June...
...Palin climbed the ladder by standing up to her own party’s corrupt, big-spending old-boy network...
...I have fought the big spenders in both parties who waste your money on things you may not need or want,” the Arizona senator said during his acceptance speech at the GOP convention, among many other places...
...Liberals, inexplicably to most conservatives, saw the Republican losses as evidence that anti-government ideology had failed...
...Many House Republicans spoke out against the unrelated domestic spending Democrats inserted in Many, if not most, congressional Republicans claim to believe that overspending contributed to their 2006 losses or at least helped the GOP’s brand of dog food expire on the shelves...
...McClintock’s conservatism—earmarks are the least of the spending he would cut—trumped charges that he was a carpetbagger...
...McCain has even gone a step further than most of his congressional colleagues, embracing earmark W. James aNTle III reform as one of his few domestic-policy crusades during the presidential campaign...
...mom implied that she would remove her lipstick and become a pit bull at the sight of an earmark...
...But instead he doubled down on the anti-pork, anti-Republican establishment message by opting for Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and emerging conservative rock star...
...In her speech at the Republican convention, the hockey Congressional Republicans have been slower to get on the antiearmarks bandwagon, because many of them are porkbeggers rather than porkbusters...
...And the GOP had caved during the budget stalemate with Clinton all the way back in 1996...
...In California’s Fourth Congressional District, state Senator Tom McClintock vied with former Congressman Doug Ose to succeed retiring Congressman John Doolittle...
...Whatever her initial inclinations, she eventually broke with her state’s mostly geriatric GOP congres sional delegation on the Bridge to Nowhere...
...But two years later, they still rush to vote for big-spending bills, sensing that the electorate—even in the Republican primary—is unlikely to punish them...
...Doolittle was a poster child for the GOP’s 2006 image problems...
...W. James antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator...
...I’m hearing people say they will vote for [Stevens] even if he is in jail,” Cuddy told TAS at the time...
...His best—indeed, only memorable—debate line in the primaries contrasted his POW status in Vietnam with Hillary Clinton’s support for a Woodstock-related earmark...
...It will take at least another two years to know if they are right—and if the Grand Old Spending Party is truly over...
...I will make them famous and you will know their names...
...It’s the spending...
...Analysts of all stripes protested that it conveniently ignored Iraq’s role in the Republican “thumping...
...Doolittle maintains that he and his wife are innocent, but he has never denied seeking earmarks to do favors for his constituents...
...Republicans did...
...an exasperated conservative activist fumed at the time...
...Not for nothing did Eric Pfeiffer, writing in Reason magazine, call the less tightfisted members of the RSC “the budget-cutters who couldn’t stop spending...
...supplementals intended to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but half of them also voted for the $300 billion farm bill that was as loaded with earmarks as the infamous 2005 highway bill...
...There was the budget agreement of 1998, when the Republican Congress first tried to outspend Bill Clinton...
...In the end, the June primary wasn’t even close...
...And the first big spending, pork barrel earmarked bill that comes across my desk, I will veto it...
...Yet it was those keepers of the ’94 flame in the Republican Study Committee who helped their colleagues most depressingly illustrate the GOP’s decline.Thedeterminedconservativecaucusoffered annual spending blueprints based on the budget that actually passed the full House in 1995...
...His home was raided by the FBI as part of an investigation into whether his wife accepted money from Jack Abramoff in exchange for favors for the convicted felon’s clients...
...But Young squeaked through by just 304 votes...
...Conservatives complained that the GOP frittered away its majority by growing government, engaging in wasteful spending, tolerating ethical lapses, and otherwise compromising the party’s image for fiscal rectitude and Pence 44 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor November 2008 basic competence...
...Don Young can compete with West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd in bringing home the bacon...
...Congressional Republicans have been slower to get on the anti-earmarks bandwagon, because many of them are pork-beggers rather than pork-busters...
...I don’t know what it will take for them to get it...
...Stevens has been indicted and is currently on trial...
...For further information please contact Patrick Pyles, Director of Development at 703-807-2011 ext...
...When it came time to pick a running mate, McCain was reportedly tempted to emphasize his hawkishness by choosing pro-war Democrat Joe Lieberman or his appeal to swing voters by tapping by pro-choice Republican Tom Ridge...
...Stevens’s main challenger, businessman and former state legislator Dave Cuddy, didn’t start campaigning in earnest until the indictments against the incumbent were handed down...
...This point of view was not without critics...
...Where “pork versus principle” emerged as a major theme in intraparty contests this year, the results were mixed...
...George Packer contended in the New Yorker that it “had the appeal of asking relatively little of conservatives...
...But two years later, the “lost our way” narrative is close to being the consensus view among Republicans as to why the Democrats retook Congress...
...McClintock countered that he wouldn’t “fight for scraps” from Washington’s table...
...Ted Stevens and Rep...
...by W. James Antle III I n the waning days of the Republican congressional majority, there were countless signs that it wasn’t 1994 anymore...
...And some Republicans continued to believe that pork and incumbency was the path to power...
...Neither is favored to win reelection, yet in August they both dispatched conservative primary challengers...
...McClintock beat Ose by 54 percent to 39 percent, carrying all nine of the district’s counties even though he currently represents a state senate district that is some 400 miles away...
...Support The American Spectator in Your Will One of the best ways to ensure future generations have access to a powerful voice in conservative journalism is by including The American Spectator Foundation in your will...
...We went to Washington to change government,” John McCain likes to say on the stump, “but instead government changed us...
...Of course, in retrospect, that had been evident for some time...
...He is now trying to pull the football away from Democratic opponent Charlie Brown, who came within three points of Doolittle in 2006...
...It is certainly the explanation embraced by the GOP presidential nominee, who for the better part of the last decade hasn’t exactly been a conservative ideologue...
...Part of the problem was President Bush, whose agenda included the Medicare prescriptiondrugbenefit,NoChildLeftBehind,andamnesty for illegal immigrants...
...The American Spectator Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and our federal tax identification number is 23-7002632...
...Campaigning on the deck of the USS Yorktown before the South Carolina primary, McCain kept exclaiming, “Spending...
...We lost our way,” Congressman Mike Pence of Indiana, a former chairman of the RSC, frequently lamented...
...Conservatives didn’t lose the 2006 elections, the argument went...
...The American Spectator Foundation, 1611 North Kent Street, Suite 901 Arlington, VA 22209 November 2008 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor 45 THe NaTIoN’s Pulse While House Minority Leader Boehner made some gestures toward members frustrated with earmarks, his caucus remains too divided over the issue to deliver the same unambiguous message as McCain...
...Some conservatives worried that the right was still singing from the same song sheet as when Ronald Reagan was elected nearly three decades ago...
...Many, if not most, of them claim to believe that overspending contributed to their 2006 losses or at least helped the GOP’s brand of dog food expire on the shelves...
...They just lost, what, 30 seats...
...But any honest assessment would have to conclude that the troubles began long before Bush came to town...
...Young received an improbable last-minute endorsement from Ron Young Paul, who finished ahead of McCain in the Frontier State’s caucuses...
...Young is under federal investigation...
...Things did not work nearly as well for anti-pork Republicans in Sarah Palin’s home state of Alaska, where GOP Sen...
...Sean Parnell was backed by Palin and the Club for Growth...
...Ose is a moderate who pledged to continue Doolittle’s earmarking ways and spent $3 million of his own money attacking McClintock for, among other things, his anti-pork stand...
...46 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor November 2008...
Vol. 41 • November 2008 • No. 9
