Dick Armey Misses The Point

"[Republicans] don't realize that Reaganomics is dead, that the Reagan philosophy is dead…The old Reagan theory which dominated – 'Government is bad, it's out of touch, chop off its hands as soon as it moves.' – is over."

-Chucky Schumer to the New York Daily News

Substantively, Schumer is wrong as he ever was. But the last election establishes that he and his party of left-wing extremists have convinced a majority of Americans otherwise.

According to former House Majority Leader Dick Armey in the FreedomWorks email I just received, the Democrats aren't talking about collectivizing America in their first hundred days; they want to do it in their first hundred hours:

Clearly, the Radical Left believes it has a mandate to enact all of their pet schemes to take away our freedom. In fact, their new coalition – they call themselves Change America Now – recently met at AFL-CIO headquarters to plan a 100 hour assault to start the New Year. Leaders from unions like the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Sierra Club, and the Association of Trial Lawyers of America plotted our nation’s future. They plan a massive grassroots effort to move vulnerable Republican votes, including a major Internet and phone campaign.

Will it work? After the way November 7th turned out, there's no reason to think it won't. Remember, as I've always said: for Democrats, the campaign never ends. They never stop pushing, never stop agitating, never stop attacking. And now that they've got their long-sought power back, they're going to get even more shrill, more intense, more obsessive, and more extreme.

Armey asks a series of rhetorical questions to which I don't think he's given quite enough thought:

- Do we need “soak the rich” tax hikes, or should we defend reforms that would permanently repeal the death tax and maintain lower tax rates?

- Do we want to expand the power of union leaders, or should we empower workers to keep more of their own hard-earned money?

- Do we need Social Security “reform” based on tax hikes and benefit cuts, or should we continue to push for individual ownership that protects retirement savings from congressional appropriators?

- Do we need Al Gore’s radical proposals to tax energy, or should we seek independence through exploration and production?

There's another dual question he left out: Do we need to endanger American national security interests by surrendering Iraq to al Qaeda and the Iranian mullahs, guaranteeing its collapse andIsrael's destruction? And do we need to imperil the lives of countless American civilians by dismantling the tools of homeland security like the NSA terrorist surveillance program (on ostensible "civil liberties" grounds), guaranteeing inevitable terrorist WMD attacks against our homeland?

The answer to all those questions, in the eyes of the American electorate, is "yes." This is the point that Mr. Armey misses. He thinks his organization and the center-right it partially represents can "stop this agenda in its tracks." In terms of numbers I suppose that's potentially true, since the Dems' majorities aren't big enough, particularly in the Senate, to get much done if the GOP puts up a fight.

But there's the rub: will a Republican party that got fat and lazy and complacent - and more than a little "nativized" - over its twelve years of majority control now suddenly rediscover its ideological roots and transform overnight into determined, heroic, courageous defenders of truth, justice, and the American way? I.e. will this be like the first Clinton biennium that produced the 1994 GOP landslide? Or are the 'Pubbies, acclimated to the trappings of the Beltway and wanting a vacation from the relentless scorched earth political combat from the other side that accompanies their every moment in power, settle in for a nice long stretch on the backbench, content to take crumbs from the ruling Donk table?

The Armey email was a fundraising pitch, so it necessarily put up a brave front. And that's not to say that conservatives should abandon the fight by any means.

But neither should we have any illusions about the political dynamic that emerged last month. Or that the two questions above are any less rhetorical than the ones that preceded them.