Commentary - Eve Fairbanks: Republicans’ behavior belies its desire to return to power

It’s a crucial question for them to answer, since knowing why is the only way to fix their mistakes and retake the government in 2008. The Republican netroots — did you know there was a blossoming Republican counterpart to Daily Kos, called RedState.com? — know why. Too bad their leaders won’t listen-and are likely to blow it all over again.

The Republican “thumping,” as Bush put it, doesn’t represent some existential shift in morals, some permanent loss of loyalty. Rather, Republicans lost for three distinct choices: Supporting the unpopular war in Iraq, straying from core conservative values like low spending, and — most damaging of all — presenting themselves as a nasty, debauched, Washington-insider party. Polls showed that corruption, which lagged all summer in voters’ apparent voting priorities, ended up being one of the biggest factors on which people based their votes on Nov. 7.

Every political party in American history, when in power for a long time, starts to become corrupt. But not only did the post-1994 Republicans become corrupt exceedingly quickly, they arrogantly refused to throw out the reeking bad apples among their own. Republican lawmakers tainted by connections to Abramoff, but unwilling to bow out of the running for another term, like Rep. Richard Pombo, Rep. JD Hayworth, and Sen. Conrad Burns? Republican leaders let them run again, sure voters would choose them again despite a pesky little whiff of graft. Unfortunately, they didn’t. And anybody could have known that Rep. Don Sherwood, representing a rural district of Pennsylvania with traditional values and saddled with the accusation that he choked his mistress, would have a major problem in his re-election bid. But nobody told him not to run or bothered to find a better candidate, and he went down in flames.

Given the contours of the Republican defeat, the question of how to return to power — outside of solving the Iraq problem — seems breathtakingly easy to answer: Throw over the corrupt ones, the DeLay cronies, and choose strongly conservative leaders with an eye for reform, which is just what the Republican netroots have been saying.

But, instead of this, the lesson Republican leaders seem to be learning from their defeat is that they simply weren’t nasty enough. Not that they put too much stock in the brutal, arm-twisting, rule-breaking style of Tom DeLay, but that they didn’t put enough. Hence NRCC chair Tom Reynolds’s ridiculous explanation for the Republican loss: We didn’t run enough negative ads! And hence the Republican choices for the minority leadership to steward them through the next two years: Not the upright and reform-minded Mike Pence, who ran hard for Minority Leader in the House against John Boehner, the sitting majority leader who presided over the Republican loss and whose friends — unbelievably — urged members to vote for him because Pence wasn’t sufficiently like DeLay. But on Friday, House Republicans chose Boehner over Pence for minority leader by a stunning 168-27 margin, and for whip picked the disastrous Roy Blunt, a DeLay lieutenant who’s constantly and comically denying, as DeLay once did, that he’s about to be indicted.

After once-disgraced Sen. Trent Lott beat reform-minded Sen. Lamar Alexander for Senate minority whip in a startling upset last Wednesday, Republican senators couldn’t stop heaping praise on Lott. “We all believe in redemption, thank God,” said Sen. John McCain. Even the defeated Alexander noted with awe, “One thing that this proves is that the United States Senate, like the American public, likes a comeback story.”

Really? Republican leaders are interested in comeback stories? For the party, too? By their behavior, I couldn’t tell it.

Eve Fairbanks is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.