Talking Tracks

J-Ger on the "right track/wrong track" numbers in the latest Washington Post poll:

I'm looking over the Washington Post's latest poll, and I notice:

Right-track, wrong-track:

Right 25%
Wrong 73%

For comparison, right before the 2006 election, among registered voters, 32% were saying "right direction" and 66% were saying "wrong direction." The country's even grumpier than they were before the Democrats took control of Congress.

And the numbers are even worse than before the 1994 electoral tsunami, when 27% were saying "right direction" and 69% were saying "wrong track."

It won't happen this year, but if the GOP acted like they had learned their lesson, and campaigned hard on "cleaning up Washington" - banning earmarks, targeting pork, lobbying reform, tough new ethics and gift laws, demanding disclosure left, right, and center - then they might have a chance of winning back Congress in 2008. Clearly, the country isn't much happier with Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid than with their predecessors.

If I may inject a reality check here....

"Banning earmarks, targeting pork, lobbying reform, tough new ethics and gift laws, demanding disclosure left, right, and center" are irrelevant. "Cutting waste, fraud, and abuse" is a good government cliche. It's meaningless. Why? Because earmarks and pork and all that other fiddle-faddle are the inevitable, intractable symptoms of Big Government. Not to lapse into a Ron Paul impression, but until the federal government is shrunk back within its stipulated constitutional restraints, we'll NEVER, EVER get rid of earmarks, pork, and the "culture of corruption" therein. It'll remain just where it is, bigger than ever, no matter which or what party controls Congress. You'd do better to shoe flies away from a compost heap.

I don't think it's possible for the Republicans to win back Congress next year no matter what they do. But if it is, replicating the Dems' 2006 template wouldn't do it, because (1) their own recent twelve-year tenure in power is too fresh for them to have any credibility as born-again "reformers"; (2) it's an itch that the electorate only occasionally gets motivated enough to scratch; (3) pork and earmarks were far less of a factor in last November's result than the passage of the Iraq campaign's expiration date; and (4) nobody would believe that flipping power right back to the GOP would make a dime's worth of difference on reining in "corruption." Which it wouldn't, though for systemic rather than partisan reasons.

Of course, the last two of those reasons were applicable to the Dems last cycle. And to be successful in politics, a certain amount of audacity is a prerequisite. AND there won't be any center-right stances that will be saleable next year since the Donks haven't been back in charge long enough to really bleep anything up yet.

But I'd still rather see Repubicans run on a platform of substance rather than empty cliches - no matter how sincere they might be.