A Disruptive Yet Ruinous Triumph for the GOP: Will the Republican Party Learn the Wrong Lessons from its Election Victory?

[EasyAce]

By George F. Will
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/442034/print

At dawn Tuesday in West Quoddy Head, Maine, America’s easternmost point, it was certain that by midnight in Cape
Wrangell, Alaska, America’s westernmost fringe, there would be a loser who deserved to lose and a winner who did not deserve
to win. The surprise is that Barack Obama must have immediately seen his legacy, a compound of stylistic and substantive
arrogance, disappearing, as though written on water in ink of vapor.

His health-care reform has contributed to three Democratic drubbings. The 2010 and 2014 wave elections, like scythes in a
wheat field, decapitated a rising generation of potential party leaders. Then came Tuesday’s earthquake, which followed
shocking increases of Obamacare’s prices. This law has been as historic as Obama thinks, but not as he thinks: It might be
the last gasp of progressivism’s hubris expressed in continentwide social engineering imposed from the continent’s eastern
edge. Hillary Clinton’s proposed solution to Obamacare’s accelerating unraveling was a “public option”: intensified government
manipulation to correct the consequences of government manipulation of health care’s 18 percent of the economy. Her
campaign’s other defining proposal, “free” tuition in public higher education, insulted the intelligence of voters aware that
“free” means “paid for by others, including you.”

Obama’s foreign-policy legacy, aside from mounting chaos worldwide, was the Iran nuclear agreement. By precedent and
constitutional norms, this should have been a treaty submitted to the Senate. Instead, disdainfully and characteristically, he
produced it as an executive agreement. Because the agreement lacks legitimizing ratification by senators, the president-elect
will feel uninhibited concerning his promise to repudiate it.

The simultaneous sickness of both parties surely reveals a crisis of the American regime. The GOP was easily captured, and
then quickly normalized, by history’s most unpleasant and unprepared candidate, whose campaign was a Niagara of mendacities.
And the world’s oldest party contrived to nominate someone who lost to him.

To an electorate clamoring for disruptive change, Democrats offered a candidate as familiar as faded wallpaper. The party
produced no plausible alternative to her joyless, stained embodiment of arrogant entitlement. And she promised to intensify
the progressive mentality. “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it”? Actually, you can’t even keep your light bulbs.

Americans perennially complain about Washington gridlock, but for seven decades they have regularly produced gridlock’s
prerequisite — divided government. From 1944 through 2016, 22 of 37 elections gave at least one house of Congress to the
party not holding the presidency; since 1954, 21 of 32 did; since 1994, eight of twelve. Republicans now lack excuses: If
40 Democratic senators block repeal of Obamacare (or Supreme Court nominees), the Republicans’ populist base will demand
 Democratic behavior — revision of Senate rules to make this body more majoritarian.

For constitutional conservatives, the challenge is exactly what it would have been had Clinton won: to strengthen the rule of
law by restoring institutional equilibrium. This requires a Republican Congress to claw back from a Republican executive the
legislative powers that Congress has ceded to the administrative state, and to overreaching executives like Obama, whose
executive unilateralism the president-elect admires.

From Clinton’s nastiest aspiration, we are now safe. She promised Supreme Court justices who would reverse Citizens United,
thereby eviscerating the First Amendment by empowering the political class to regulate the quantity, content, and timing of
campaign speech about itself. This will never happen.

Demography need not dictate for Republicans a grim destiny but it soon will, unless they act to counter adverse trends.
Republicans should absorb Tim Alberta’s data in National Review: Arizona whites have gone from 74 percent to 54 percent
of the population in 25 years; minorities will be a majority there by 2022. Texas minorities became a majority in 2004;
whites are now 43 percent of the population. Nevada is 52 percent white and projected to be majority-minority in 2020.
Georgia is 54 percent white, heading for majority-minority in 2026. Because of inexorably rising minorities, Clinton, an
epically untalented candidate, did better than Obama did in 2012 in Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and where one in eight
Americans lives — California.

The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on, perhaps soon to inscribe this: In 2016, Republicans won a ruinous
triumph that convinced them that they can forever prosper by capturing an ever-larger portion of an ever-smaller portion
of the electorate.

This kamikaze arithmetic of white nationalism should prompt the president-elect to test his followers’ devotion to him by
asking their permission to see the national tapestry as it is and should be.

— George Will is a Pulitzer Prize–winning syndicated columnist. His e-mail address is georgewill@washpost.com. © 2016 Washington Post Writers Group

[INVAR]

The GOP is already a dead party for Conservatives.  I've moved on.

They will become Trump's Nationalist Populist Statism party. Democrats themselves will just go further Marx into Maoism and the Northeastern Left will actually control both major parties and institutions of greater and lesser Liberal Statism.

It was a Pyrric victory at best.

[EasyAce]

I'm thinking of forming a new party---the Surprise Party. Any takers?

[geronl]

The GOP always learns the wrong lessons

[dfwgator]

I do think the ObamaCare "sticker shock" played a significant role in Hillary's defeat.

[EasyAce]

I do think the ObamaCare "sticker shock" played a significant role in Hillary's defeat.

I think it was that plus Hilarious's credibility issues stemming from her actual time holding public
office, added to the facts that a) even Democrats found her a limpen campaigner, and b) say
what you will about Bernie Sanders and whether he'd have put up a strong showing in the general,
but knowing the DNC went out and actively tried to rig the nomination for her couldn't possibly
have pleased rank-and-file Democrats who buy that they're, of course, the truly moral party, did her in.
(It would be intriguing to know, if and when such information is finalised, how many votes Donaldus
Minimus got from disillusioned Democrats . . . )

[GAJohnnie]

Got it. The 30 years of limp wrist-ed poltical incompetence that made the GOP completely ineffective in, or out of power, to resist the Democrat Leftist agenda is the "correct" tactics for the GOP. Winning and being effective is a "ruinous triumph"

Face it, the GOP_E all are more comfortable playing Democrat lite and have NO interest at all in doing the hard work to actually LEAD the USA to a better place. Just go join the Democrat party GOP-E bots. None of you have the morals nor the courage to be leaders, You are born sheep, will live as sheep and will die sheep.

[GAJohnnie]

It was a Pyrric victory at best.

Dead wrong. The last 30 years of your sort of pay lip serve to Conservative dogmas while doing NOTHING to advance them has been the Pyrrhic Victory. Typical keyboard warrior, sit and bitch endlessly because you have no courage to lead or fight. Instead you sit and whine in your little bubble world of ideological purity while better men do the heavy work

[INVAR]

Dead wrong. The last 30 years of your sort of pay lip serve to Conservative dogmas while doing NOTHING to advance them has been the Pyrrhic Victory. Typical keyboard warrior, sit and bitch endlessly because you have no courage to lead or fight. Instead you sit and whine in your little bubble world of ideological purity while better men do the heavy work

HEY FARGIN ICEHOLE, you don't know jack shiitte about me, what I have done for the GOP for DECADES BEHIND ENEMY LINES or the candidates or people I worked to get into leadership positions.  All you ever had was insults and threats pal.

You're just a stupid party hack, where politics is just another sport you got money on.

Your understanding of the Constitution and liberty is as thin as your hair, if you have any at all.

[TomSea]

George Will talked down Talk Radio recently, he's a good fellow but Talk Radio probably made journalists columnists like him less relevant. Maybe the internet did too. Various factors have changed the political landscape but a good ol' simple message seemed to win the day.

[jmyrlefuller]

I do think the ObamaCare "sticker shock" played a significant role in Hillary's defeat.

It would not surprise me in the least.

Obamacare remains one of the least popular parts of Obama's legacy, and to see a deeply personal reminder of how it is failing right before the election was the best gift Trump could have received. Premiums are skyrocketing and the Obama/Clinton solutions are only "public option" and "more penalties for opting out." So, naturally, they went with the guy in the other party.

[TomSea]

The Democratic party suffered being called dead back in '06 I believe and perhaps way back when Dukakis lost.

There is not much merit in that kinds of analysis.

Goldwater got stomped, end of that sector of the GOP, out came Rockerfeller Republicans and George Romney, the story we all know is that washed up Nixon and Ronald Reagan both campaigned for Goldwater in 1964. It sure worked out for both of them.

[Fishrrman]

As of yesterday, George Will has about as much credibility as do many pollsters and the liberal media.

Go away, George!