The Stupid Party

The economy is nowhere near recovery. The banks remain plagued with toxic assets. The markets are engaged in a limbo contest. Congress is about to take up a budget that will increase the national debt and decrease the chances for long-term growth. But don't worry! Lucky for us, the Obama administration, its allies in the Democratic party, and the media have decided to lead the country in a debate over who the leader of the Republican party is. And some conservatives and Republicans are falling for it. No wonder they're called the stupid party.

How did we get here? The White House scoured the poll numbers and discovered that radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has a) high name recognition and b) high negative ratings among independents. It was only a matter of time before Limbaugh became the White House's punching bag. You can see the political logic: link Limbaugh and the GOP, the White House believes, and independents will continue to flock to the Democrats and President Obama. So, like clockwork, administration mouthpieces began referring to Limbaugh as the "leader" of the GOP.

That this is obviously false doesn't seem to bother anybody. Limbaugh is not an elected official. He is a commentator. A communicator. A trafficker in conservative ideas. At the moment, the Republican party has no single leader. It has a set of leaders who manage the GOP Republican minority, some governors, and a chairman of the Republican National Committee.

It is well established that a party's leader is its presidential nominee and, if that nominee wins election, the president. An exception to this rule would be when one party controls Congress but not the presidency. In that case, the provisional leader of the congressional party would be the speaker of the House. Think Newt Gingrich from 1995 to 1998 and Nancy Pelosi in 2007 and 2008. This isn't rocket science.

The GOP's presidential nominee lost in 2008. It holds no power in Congress. Hence the party will have to muddle through without a "leader" until the 2012 Republican primaries. Big deal. Such has been the case with all out-parties in American history. Who was the Democratic party's "leader" during the years 2005 to 2007? Was it Howard Dean? Al Franken? Keith Olbermann? Triumph the Insult Comic Dog?

Doesn't matter. Things sorted themselves out. The Democrats didn't reclaim power because they finally decided on a "leader." They reclaimed power because they represented the opposition to an unpopular president. This is the natural evolution of partisan politics in a democratic republic. It's as simple as that.

One can see why the White House is trying to foment controversy. It provides a convenient distraction from the ongoing failure of the administration's economic policies. This failure is well established, despite however popular those policies seem to be at the moment. The president's stimulus package, housing plan, and bank rescue have been met with shudders from the markets. Obama dismisses the decline in equities as a "tracking poll." Sorry. A tracking poll measures a candidate's popularity. It does not determine the value of millions of people's retirement accounts.

Meanwhile, Obama's Treasury secretary inspires no one's confidence. The stimulus spending will take weeks to come on line. It won't fix the economy's structural problems in housing and banking. And the administration continues to shovel money into unproductive entities like AIG and Citigroup, creating its own army of zombie financial institutions. Given this set of facts, who wouldn't want to talk about the highly entertaining Limbaugh?

Too many Republicans and conservatives are stepping into the Democrats' trap. It simply does not matter whether or not RNC chairman Michael Steele is the "de facto" head of the GOP. It does not make one iota of difference whether or not a particular Republican pol or conservative opinion leader wants the president to "fail."

No one, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, wants the country to fail. Everyone has a vision of the good society. That is why we have politics. One group of people generally shares one set of views about how to achieve their desired ends. Another group disagrees with them. Each side believes the other's ideas won't work, or will foster injustice, or will produce unanticipated and undesirable outcomes.

Thus the entire question of whether one side "wants" the other to fail is irrelevant. If one side did not believe that the other is going to fail, or did not think that the other side's desired ends were deleterious and therefore worthy of opposition, there would be no reason for disagreement. This is a truth so simple that even an MSNBC anchor should be able to grasp it.

The reality is that, right now, America is failing to restore solvency to the financial system and promote global economic recovery. And one man, more than any other, is responsible. President Obama has yet to implement a serious plan to let bad banks go under and remove the toxic assets from the market. His tax and spending plans will hamper economic growth. Everything else is trivial. Would it be too much for Republicans to point this out?

Matthew Continetti is associate editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD and author of The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine ( Doubleday, 2006).