Redstate
This is “Read My Lips” All Over
Again
By:
Erick Erickson
August
30th, 2013
During
the 1988 Republican Convention, then Vice President George
H. W. Bush uttered a phrase that would destroy his Presidency — “Read
my lips, no
new taxes.”
Just
two years later, voters realized they had read a lie on
President Bush’s lips. He negotiated a budget agreement with Democrats
in the
United States Congress that raised taxes. Republicans in the House of
Representatives rallied against their own President. Ed Rollins, then
Chairman
of the National Republican Congressional Committee, advised Republicans
to
campaign against the President in 1990. “Do not hesitate to distance
yourself
from the President,” Rollins wrote in a famous memo. President Bush
demanded
congressional Republicans fire Rollins, but the House Republicans held
on him.
The House GOP lost a net of 8 seats and the Senate GOP lost 1 seat.
President
Bush would ride a wave of popularity in 1991 due to
victory in the Gulf War and use a 91% approval rating to have Ed
Rollins fired
by refusing to campaign with Republican candidates until Rollins left.
A year
later, with a struggling economy, a conservative base that would
neither forget
nor forgive his lie, and a primary challenger named Pat Buchanan to
embarrass
him in New Hampshire with a stronger than expected showing, President
George H.
W. Bush would be defeated by Bill Clinton. Conservatives were willing
to throw
out President Bush because of his lie. Many of them rallied to a third
party,
H. Ross Perot, who garnered 18.9% of the vote.
Bush
got 63% of self-described moderate Republicans and 82% of
self-described conservative Republicans. Compare that to four years
later after
one full term of Bill Clinton. Bob Dole would get 72% of moderate
Republicans,
up 9% from George H. W. Bush, and 88% of conservative Republicans, up
6% from
George H. W. Bush. Among conservative independents, Bush got 53% with
Perot
getting 30%. Bob Dole would get 60% of that demographic four years
later.
In
the Republican Primary of 1992, Pat Buchanan, explaining his
decision to primary President Bush went straight back to the 1990 tax
increase,
said
If
the country wants to go in a liberal direction, if the country
wants to go in the direction of [Senate Democratic Leader] George
Mitchell and
[Speaker] Tom Foley, it doesn’t bother me as long as I’ve made the best
case I
can. What I can’t stand are the back-room deals. They’re all in on it,
the
insider game, the establishment game—this is what we’re running against.
One
upstart candidate who took Rollins’s advice to not wrap his
arms around President Bush was a state representative from Ohio named
John
Boehner. Boehner had primaried a sitting Republican, Rep. Buz Lukens,
who had
refused to resign after a sex scandal. Boehner, in a heavily Republican
district, beat Lukens in the primary, then won the general. Perhaps it
was the
heavy tilt to the GOP in that district that left Boehner immune to the
national
angst over George H. W. Bush’s lie. I say perhaps, because John
Boehner, Mitch
McConnell, and the rest of the Republican leadership in Washington are
on the
verge of their own “Read My Lips” lie.
Since
2010, they have pledged to do anything and everything to
fight and end Obamacare. 40 times the House Republicans have taken
symbolic
votes so their voters know they are committed to repeal. On March 23,
2013,
Mitch McConnell tweeted his plan to repeal Obamacare by driving up
constituent
outrage.
“Constituent
pressure is overriding the view that virtually all
Democrats have had that Obamacare is sort of like the Ten Commandments,
handed
down and every piece of it is sacred and you can’t possibly change any
of it
ever,” McConnell said. “When you see that begin to crack then you know
the
facade is breaking up.”
Of
course, Republicans are doing their best to highlight and stoke
the kind of constituent anger that would force Democrats to tweak the
law. In
fact, if Democrats come under enough pressure, Republicans believe they
might
be able to inject Obamacare into the broader entitlement-reform
discussion they
are planning to tie to the debt-limit debate this summer.
But
now, with a continuing resolution before them, John Boehner,
Mitch McConnell, and their cohorts are refusing to hold to their word
to fight
Obamacare. The constituent outrage they are driving up is against them…
Read
the rest of the article at Redstate
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