Those victories will provide an unequivocal mandate for support of one proposition: widespread dislike of President Obama. That’s it. More than $4 billion will be spent on the 2014 campaign, and when it’s over, that will be the message on the little slip of paper that emerges from that huge machine of activity.
This year’s contest is a no-mandate election, in which the winning side will succeed with no great animating idea other than the fear (or avoidance) of the Obama nightmare. Republican debates, speeches, and advertisements have been so thoroughly concerned with the president and how much the Democrat on the ballot agrees with him, there is no other message that competes. That’s a smart political strategy, but it’s not a governing strategy. Republicans may take control of Congress, but it will have been by clobbering a president they’ll then have to work with at a time when a majority of Americans say they want leaders in Washington to compromise…
This is the difference between the GOP’s congressional wing and its governors. Among GOP governors, the mantra has been that you must run on ideas in order to build a mandate to implement them. That is the gospel promoted by Govs. Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana, popular Republicans held up as models of how to turn campaign successes into governing progress for conservative ideas. (That is why those governors were critical of Romney for running an anti-Obama campaign that didn’t emphasize much of a policy vision.) That’s also why GOP governors have been using their Washington counterparts as a foil. They offer themselves as the wing of the Republican Party that gets things done, implicitly (or not so implicitly) distancing themselves from the solution-free part of the party.
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