Friday Interview: Fred Barnes Dissects the Election’s Impact for 2013 Politics | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is the CJ Staff, who is a contributor to the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

    RALEIGH       The 2012 election did little to change the political landscape in Washington, D.C. In the early-morning hours after the election, Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes wrote a column describing "a status quo election with Democrats entrenched in the White House and Senate, and Republicans firmly in control of the House." Barnes discussed the likely impact of that election on this year's political developments during a conversation 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: After all of that time and expense, we ended up about where we were before the election.

    Barnes: Well, we did. And with the same cast of characters: President Obama, and Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell in the Senate. In the House, you have John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi. We know those people. They've been around for a while. So it was a status quo election. The balance of power in Washington didn't change. But it was a bad status quo for conservatives and Republicans. That's the problem. In other words, under Obama in his first term, the role of government grew mightily, in American life, as a result of the Obama presidency. We saw just the [government] share of the gross domestic product in America grow from a normal 19 or 20 percent to 25 percent under Obama -- huge enlargement of the role for government.

    Kokai: Now, some people might say, well, if the results are about the same, we should expect to see the government operate about the same over the next couple of years. Do you think that's likely, or does this election change the calculus for the president and the members of Congress?

    Barnes: I do think it changes the calculus for the president. His views are really strongly left-wing. He's very ideological. But he was somewhat curbed in following his natural inclinations, politically, by having to win elections. This happened when he was in the Senate, when he had to win, even though he had a very liberal voting record. And of course as president, he's not going to be running again. He can't serve another term. So in a sense he's freed to follow his left-wing inclinations, and I think he's going to be in his second term more ideological than he was in his first term, if you can believe that that's possible, and I think it is.

    And we see it at the beginning of his second term, after re-election. What has he spent most of this time talking about in the White House? ... He's talking about raising taxes, particularly raising taxes on the wealthy. President Obama, of course, doesn't ... seem to care whether that will have an adverse effect on the economy, which it certainly would, or whether that it will mean that by raising taxes, the tax rates for wealthy people, that you'll actually bring in less income than you would have otherwise, less revenue. This is just something he wants to do -- a highly ideological step.

    Kokai: In fact, do you think that the results of the election, President Obama winning comfortably in the Electoral College, says to him that, "Hey, the economy doesn't matter -- the economy has tanked under my administration, but people don't care, they like what I'm doing"?

    Barnes: I really hadn't thought of it that way, but there is something to that. In other words, he doesn't seem to be bent on creating faster economic growth, and we know in 2012 we'll probably have growth of less than 2 percent. Remember, there was about 3 percent economic growth in 2010. It went down in 2011, down in 2012, and at the rate we're going, 2013 -- particualrly if there are all these tax increases. It isn't going to look any better, and that doesn't seem to upset the president the way it has upset other presidents.

    Kokai: We've talked about the president and his calculus.

    Barnes: Right.

    Kokai: For conservatives who are in Congress and the conservatives outside Congress who are pulling their hair at this point, what does this election mean?

    Barnes: It means that they face -- that they, in a sense, lost the election. They may have held office, and most of them did, but they didn't get what they wanted, and that was an opportunity, with a Republican Senate and a Republican president, to actually turn back this enlarged role for government that was created by President Obama and Democrats during Obama's first term. I mean that was the whole idea of the Republican campaign in 2012, was to reverse Obamacare, the president's health care plan, and to really reduce the size of government as a part of ... American life -- the federal government and state governments ultimately, but of course this was aimed at the federal government.

    That's hard to do. And you obviously can't do it by just holding the House of Representatives. So, really now, my view is that Republicans in Washington have to push back. They shouldn't get their hopes so high that they can actually reverse what happened in Obama's first term, but you can resist strongly. And there's one area where you can really have some impact, and that's Obamacare.

    Obamacare hasn't been implemented. It's been approved by the Supreme Court. It's not going to be overturned by Congress because the president would certainly veto that. [Repeal] wouldn't pass the Senate anyway. But it hasn't been implemented yet. The governors have not been rushing to establish these exchanges through which insurance would be particularly a subsidy for people who didn't have health insurance from the companies they work for. ... And then there's the whole Medicaid expansion, which can be resisted. Some governors have not accepted that because they know ultimately it's going to cost their state budgets an awful lot.

    So there, the fate of Obamacare is in the hands of America's governors. And one of the nice things is that there are 30 of them [who are Republicans]. And one of the nice things is that North Carolina has a Republican governor now. So governors can have a huge role here in preventing America from having a horrible nationalized health care system, and [reversing] it somewhat. Scale back Obamacare and then reform it, or compromise on a health care system that most Americans want.

    Kokai: When you look ahead to 2014, 2016, some people have said, "Oh, the Republican Party is done. They're a shrinking party. We're losing the chance to win elections." Are they right? Or is there just some change that Republicans need to make to get back in the winning column?

    Barnes: There are a couple of things they need, and that is to do better among Hispanic voters. I mean you don't want to have a shrinking percentage of a voting bloc that is increasing rapidly, and that's true with Hispanics, and Republicans are going to have to work on that. Younger voters actually turned out in 2012 as strongly as they did in 2008, which surprised me. And yet, they voted not quite as strongly for Obama as they did in 2008, but pretty strongly -- 60 percent for him.

    And then, one of the things that not many people have talked about is that Republicans just need to get better candidates. In so many of the Senate races, in 2010 and 2012, they just fielded poor candidates: ones who won primaries but were not candidate who could win a general election. And it kept them from their goal in both 2010 and 2012, of capturing control of the Senate. Now they'll have another opportunity in 2014, but they're going to have to have a much better group of candidates than they've been fielding in recent years, in order to come close to recapturing the Senate.