Mid-Michigan readers can hear Rick Cole every Tuesday at approximately 6:30 a.m. on Lansing radio station WILS 1320’s “am Lansing” program hosted by Walt Sorg.

by Richard Cole
December 16, 2008

“If the Obama administration does well, things obviously won’t look so good” for our side — or at least that’s the opinion of Osama Bin Laden. What could we expect from a man who has pledged himself to the death of the democracy we cherish? Why should anyone be surprised that someone so committed to our destruction would wish ill of our new president? President Obama’s failure would make Bin Laden’s job easier, after all.

Imagine how much more difficult it will be to muster a robust national defense strategy if our president is weakened by an economic infrastructure that continues to rupture and bleed. How happy the terrorists would be with a president weakened by massive layoffs from a bankrupt auto industry, or the tragedy of a few million more homeless Americans. Who could possibly be surprised that a lunatic who would have his zealots fly airplanes into buildings would hope for a major failure in America’s front office. That would, after all, make his job so much easier.

But wait! That was not Bin Laden wishing ill for our new president. That was Charlie Cook in his National Journal column being passed around cyberspace telling his readers “How to Right the GOP.” Here is the complete quote:

“The single most important factor that determines where American politics will go over the next two years is how President-elect Barack Obama fares in office. If he makes more than a few strategic or tactical miscues, his honeymoon will be abbreviated and Republicans will have the opportunity to bounce back from two consecutive disastrous elections.”

I read these opening paragraphs and stopped. Why read any more? It’s always the same. Elect a leader from one party and somehow “the loyal opposition” feels it necessary to hope the person we entrust with the power to lead our nation, or our state, or our city or country club or church, will fail. Well, maybe not our country club or church, but you get the point.

I immediately flashed back to a lunch conversation I had recently with an old friend who served in the Milliken administration. I made an observation that made even more sense to me every time I replayed it in my mind. Sometime around the beginning of the Reagan Revolution, Republicans changed. Not the ones I knew, but the ones who took over sure changed.

The guys and gals I remember from the Milliken years, for the most part, seemed to act like they wanted to debate how to make government work. They thought their way was a better way than the Democrats’ way, and they wanted to talk about that, sometimes argue. But, even in their worst moments, they did seem to think as if they believed that the best government is a Republican government, and that made them vulnerable to the Reagan revolutionaries who, after all, thought the best people in government were the ones who were dedicated to tearing it down. They were the ones who brought schemes like trickle-down economics. My friend Bernie Klein describes trickle-down economics as feeding the cows so the flies can eat.

They quote George Will selectively. So do I. Here’s the George Will I like to quote. He was talking about a little speech Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Ernest Hollings used to give on the campaign trail.

“A veteran returning from Korea went to college on the GI Bill; bought his house with an FHA loan; saw his kids born in a VA hospital; started a business with an SBA loan; got electricity from the TVA and, later, water from an EPA project. His parents retired to a farm on Social Security, got electricity from the REA and soil testing from USDA. When the father became ill, the family was saved from financial ruin by Medicare, and his father’s life was saved with a drug developed through the NIH. His kids participated in the school lunch program, learned physics from teachers trained in an NSF program, and went through college with guaranteed student loans. He drove to work on the Interstate and moored his boat in a channel dredged by the Army Corps of Engineers. When the floods hit, he took Amtrak to Washington, D.C., to apply for disaster relief, and, while there, spent some time visiting the Smithsonian museums.

“Then one day, he wrote his congressman an angry letter asking the government to get off his back and complaining about paying taxes for all those programs created for ungrateful people.”

That was Will quoting Hollings. Here is what Will said (c. 1990): “This is a decade when Americans must do a lot of growing up, so someone must talk to them just like that. The government we have did not come about overnight, or by accident, or by conspiracy. Middle-class Americans who are the articulate complainers about it are the principle benefiters from it. They have no intention of dismantling it, so they had better pipe down and pay up.”

That was nearly 20 years ago. Here’s what Charlie Cook went on to say in his column quoting a Republican political consultant telling him “How to Right the GOP.” Speaking of the two consecutive electoral losses the GOP has experienced, the consultant said: “The temptation among Republicans will be to blame this on a variety of factors that are temporary in nature and will go away. By concluding this, it will not force them to rethink how Republicans are perceived, and as a result they will conclude they do not need to change…I really think this election was much more generically about change than it was specifically about the economy.

“The key conclusion is that the desire for change is driven much more by damage to the Republican brand than by anything else, including the president…Republicans are a whole lot better at being against things than at being for things. That’s a problem if you’re in the majority. On topics that the center really cares about, such as education and health care, we do one of two things. We either avoid them like the plague, and are scared to talk about them, or, if we say anything at all, it is to propose a tax cut or a tax credit.”

Now, I’m not about to be giving my Republican friends advice about how they, and their party, can “right themselves” and their brand. But I am, for sure, going to remind them to read Charlie Cook’s column all the way down to the bottom. Get past the Bin Laden part. If you read deep enough into the column, you might just find a little of that clear-headed thinking that caused Bill Milliken to be such a well-liked governor. It was that same thinking that caused his administration to spawn a school of guys and gals capable of wishing our new president the kind of good luck that will be needed to get us — all of us — through the tough times ahead.

In the words of the anonymous consultant quoted by Charlie Cook: “This should be our niche: find solutions to problems like education and health care that spend government funds more efficiently, without spending more. That sounds much more like a winning strategy to me.”

Maybe, President-Elect Obama will end up bringing as much change to the Republican Party as my Republican friends like to say Reagan brought to them. I think that’d be a change we can all believe in.

Richard Cole is professor and chairperson of the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing at Michigan State University. The opinions expressed reflect his individual viewpoint and not that of the university.