The GOP needs to run against the last 16 years

Thus, in 1920, did Warren Harding’s ascetic, non-interventionist, and explicitly anti-Progressive conservatism represent a welcome shift from the all-encompassing disaster that was Woodrow Wilson’s untrammeled ambition. Thus, in 1976, did Jimmy Carter’s preposterous God-has-heard-my-heart-sinningpseudo-shtick help to convince the electorate that his election was what it would take to move on from the cynicism and the ugliness of Watergate. And thus, in 2008 did the aloof, calm, and at least ostensibly professorial Barack Obama ride a wave of vague hope-and-change sentiment all the way to the White House. Want to know who will be the next president? Start by looking at the last guy.

Look at the political climate, too. For as long as the party system remains intact, we will hear absolutist rhetoric come election time. “Vote for me,” one side will say, “and everything will be perfect.” “Vote for the other guy,” it will add, “and you’ll be pushed screaming into a volcano.” Occasionally, this tack can be an effective one — certainly, in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt did not need a great deal of help painting the Republican party as a failure. Most of the time, however, it is not. That being so, if Republicans hope to take advantage of the sour public mood in 2016, they will have to do more than merely hit the other side for having been imperfect while in power; they will have to recognize that they too bear some responsibility for the national mood.

There is no doubt that the manner in which Obama has behaved as president has contributed significantly to our present anxieties. Indeed, one can only imagine that students of political language will one day be fascinated by the gaping hole that has opened up between his campaign rhetoric and his governing prose. And yet, for all of the incumbent’s failures, it seems clear that America’s present funk did not begin in earnest on January 20, 2009. Rather, it can be dated back to the attacks of September 11, and to their various consequences. In a similar vein, it should by now be obvious to conservatives that the last American Golden Age obtained not during George W. Bush’s rather disappointing tenure, but in the mid- to late- 1990s, when the Republican party ran both houses of Congress and Democrat Bill Clinton ran the executive branch. If they are to run a successful campaign — and, crucially, if they are to capitalize upon the electorate’s present dissatisfactions — Republicans will need to acknowledge that they are not only running against the Obama administration, but against a broader national melancholia to which they themselves have contributed.