Friday Interview: Kristol Critiques 2014 Election Results | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The authors of this post are the staff of the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

Weekly Standard editor assesses impact of latest GOP 'wave'

    RALEIGH     Conservatives have plenty of reasons to be happy about the outcomes of elections across the United States in 2014. William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, recently helped a John Locke Foundation Headliner audience assess the elections' significance. Kristol also discussed implications of the latest national election trends with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)

    Kokai: First of all, in your opinion, was this a wave?

William Kristol
    Kristol: Oh, it absolutely was a wave. It was top to bottom. Now it looks like there will be nine Senate seats, a dozen-plus House seats, several governorships, state legislative chambers. Republicans are now the majority party at every level: federal, legislature, governors' mansions, state legislative chambers.

    They don't hold the White House, but they couldn't do anything about that in this election. So it was as big of a result as anyone could have hoped for, honestly, on the Republican side.

    Kokai: What's the long-term significance of this wave election?

    Kristol: Republicans need to remember that they still haven't shown they can win the presidential elections the way they can win congressional or statewide elections. So that's the sort of negative side of it; they can't overstate the significance. But it wasn't just some one-off, you know, [because] Obama is unpopular.

    I mean, if you control 69 of 99 state legislative chambers, you've got a lot of Republican elected officials and a lot of people in the country voting for Republican elected officials at the local level ... 31 governors and so forth. So I think it's quite significant. It lays the groundwork for a real chance to win in 2016.

    Kokai: How about the race here in North Carolina? Just how important for Republicans and conservatives was Thom Tillis' win over [incumbent Democrat] Kay Hagan in the U.S. Senate race here?

    Kristol: Well, obviously, it was important. It was one of the key Senate pickups, and I think it also came to symbolize, in a way - I mean, she probably ran the best of the incumbent campaigns. There was a huge amount of money thrown against Tillis. They tried to demagogue his record as the Assembly speaker. They hit him on the education issue, everything else.

    The fact that he could overcome that, ultimately, was impressive and I think heartening to Republicans. You sort of feel like if he could make it through, a lot of these attacks don't work quite as well as they used to.

    It was a close race, and, you know, there's a lesson there also of not being overconfident. I think maybe early on, the Tillis campaign thought they could just dismiss these attacks. Some of them were just ridiculous. But it turns out they were having some effect. They really needed to answer them.

    Kokai: So Republicans get to celebrate a big win. Now what do they do when they go back to Washington and have to translate that election victory into a program for government?

    Kristol: Yeah, now it's the morning after, and they have to do a couple things. They control Congress. That's a tricky thing. The president usually has an advantage in showdowns with Congress; he's the president. There are all these different congressmen with different ideas and senators. [U.S. Senate Republican leader] Mitch McConnell and [U.S. House Speaker] John Boehner will have a tough job figuring out when to confront the president, when to cooperate a little bit, how to get Democratic votes for some pieces of legislation. And, of course, not all their members will agree with them, so it is a little bit like herding cats.

    So I think conservatives need to have their hopes realistic for the next two years. A Republican Congress isn't going to transform America. President Obama is still president. [They] can't get rid of Obamacare, can't force him to fight the war against ISIS more effectively. Maybe you can do some things: increase the defense budget, get rid of some of the worst parts of Obamacare, fix some parts of the tax code. But I think it will be kind of a messy two years. I think Republicans have a pretty good chance of making it a pretty good two years.

    And the one thing that heartens me the most is the quality of some of the new Republican senators and congressmen. And I think when voters look up, and citizens look up, and see some of these young Tom Cottons and Joni Ernsts and Elise Stefaniks, along with [Marco] Rubio and [Ted] Cruz and some of the ones who came in the last couple of cycles, they'll think, "Gee, that's a pretty impressive group."

    Kokai: We've talked about the politics. Now on the policy side, what sorts of things should conservatives and Republicans focus on during the next couple of years?

    Kristol: I would say on foreign policy, at least beginning to arrest the collapse of the defense budget and beginning to rebuild it, so the next president has a chance to really restore our strength. Preventing a bad deal with Iran, so that would be the foreign policy, I think, key things.

    Thinking about how to deal with President Obama when he tries to change immigration law unilaterally on his own. Going after the worst parts of Obamacare, but also laying the groundwork for a more thorough repeal and replacement of Obamacare. There might be some things you could do in tax reform. I don't think you can do a big tax reform, but there may be particular things that could be fixed in the short term.

    But I'd say generally, thematically, conservatives need to look at the problems of middle America, the problems of Main Street, the problems of working middle-class Americans, and really think about tax policies, education policies, student loan policies, health care policies that really do try to help those people.

    They've had a rough six years in ways - rough 20 years or so, actually. If you have a lot of stocks, you've done OK. You came back. The stock market came back. If you don't, if you're working for a living, your paycheck might've been stagnant, your costs are going up, and you're feeling like, "Gee, does anyone kind of care about me?" So Republicans do need to be more, explicitly, I think, the party of middle America.

    Kokai: Sticking with that theme, a number of conservatives are thinking about running for president in 2016. As these prospective candidates are laying the groundwork for their campaigns, what sorts of things do you want to hear them talking about?

    Kristol: First, they should be serious about policy. I think Ed Gillespie ran a very good [Senate] race in Virginia and almost won, and a real uphill fight. He ran a very policy-heavy campaign. He had a big health care alternative to Obamacare. He had education policies. He had energy policies. And I think voters respected that, and that helped him some.

    So I think they can't get away with sound bites. They really need to work on policies, whether it's replacing Dodd-Frank [financial regulations] or replacing Obamacare or tax policies. And there'll be some debate about that. Not every Republican is going to agree with everything, but that's fine. I'd prefer to have two or three alternatives to replace Obamacare than zero.

    And I think that's the key for the Republicans over the next year and a half. They can't get most of those legislated into law with Obama as president, but they can be a party of ideas and a party of constructive change, and a party of middle America, I think.

    Kokai: In your biased opinion, as a conservative, are Americans ready for a conservative or market-based approach to some of these major issues of the day?

    Kristol: Yeah, I think so. I mean, if you look at what's happening at the state level, we've had tests to that, whether it's in Wisconsin or Michigan, in states that are not that conservative. There are obviously also states that are more conservative, like Texas. We've had pretty good test cases of governors who pursued a more market-based, limiting-government-type agenda, and they did pretty well.

    Kokai: We know the 2014 election turned out well for Republicans and for conservatives. As a conservative, does this put you in a good frame of mind for the long-term outlook for conservative ideas?

    Kristol: That's hard to - you know, the world is such a mess, and events are so fluid that I think it would be foolish to pretend we know where things are going next, and therefore, we don't know what party is going to do what in two years or even in two months, probably. But, yeah, I feel like if you had told me six years ago, the conservative movement would have this degree of a comeback, both intellectually and politically, I would've been pleased. I mean, I'm not sure this was inevitable, and I think there it looked like things could be much worse.

    I really do think Obama's election turns out to have been something of a fluke or something of a personal achievement by him, and a failure, obviously, by [George W.] Bush and [John] McCain and the financial crash. I don't think it meant the country had fundamentally gone left.

    Kokai: Politicians are interested in winning elections - for incumbents, winning re-election. Are enough of them also interested in making these constructive policy reforms?

    Kristol: I think a higher percentage of the senators and congressmen elected this year are interested in policy - are interested in the substance - than typically is the case. There weren't that many politicians who just - career politicians, [who said] this is the next step up. "I'm just going to run for office, say what I have to say to get 51 percent of the votes." A lot of these people got into politics for the right reasons: businessmen, veterans, local activists who got into politics to make a difference, not just to, you know, move up the ladder.
Go Back


Leave a Guest Comment

Your Name or Alias
Your Email Address ( your email address will not be published)
Enter Your Comment ( no code or urls allowed, text only please )




Minimum Wage Increase + Payroll Taxes + Obamacare = A One-Two-Three Punch For Low Skilled Workers Related to Federal, Carolina Journal, Editorials, Op-Ed & Politics Picking Health Care Winners and Losers

HbAD0

 
Back to Top