Confess and Apologize, Republicans

On the eve of the judgment of the American electorate, these last hours before the rout of Bushism and the Republican Party, it is time to plan ahead. We Republicans have been here before; we have taken a whipping at the polls in wartime and found a way to recover the trust of the republic and to reclaim authority.It was 1874, and the legendary President Grant and his Radical Republicans ruled with an iron fist not only over the federal vault but also over the futile, blindfolded occupation of the smashed Confederacy. The nation was not secure, the Army was not stable, the government was not credible, and the Republicans were not listening to the screaming from their own partisans that there was rot from pillar to post.It was intolerable to the Republican voters that the man they celebrated as Unconditional Surrender Grant had engineered nothing less than a giant pay raise for himself at the same time the country was collapsing into the panic of 1873.Worse, the railroads openly bought the Congress as well as Grant’s first and second vice presidents in the Credit Mobilier scandal that continued to stain the party for a decade.All this private greed took place amid daily reports of the failure of Reconstruction in the South, where larceny, lynchings, and the flagrant Klan replaced what tiny justice had existed at war’s end. In a final disgrace, the Republicans witnessed a public debate by a party organ that Grant should extend his presidency to a third term, the better to shield his allies on Capitol Hill.The American people rose up and rejected the Republican supremacy in the “tidal wave” midterm election on Tuesday, November 3, 1874, giving the Democrats a 79-vote majority in the House in the 44th Congress, returning the Senate to parity, and passing the Union forges of Massachusetts and New York to the Democrats. Republican editorialists determined that the verdict of the election, called “The Rout of Grantism,” was deserved. “The result of the elections yesterday in this and other Eastern States will not be a surprise to anybody, except perhaps to a few persons at Washington, and it certainly will not surprise any of our readers,” wrote the Unionist New York Times.The fundamental Republican broadsheet, the late Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, was more severe in the voice of the gifted Whitelaw Reid, “The verdict of the country against Grantism is delivered. There were only two great questions before the people at this election. One was whether the Administration deserves the public confidence, and the other was whether it ought to be perpetuated. They have both been answered in the negative, so loudly that even the President must hear the verdict.”What I make of 1874 today, prepared for a petite Democratic majority in the House and (worst-case) parity in the Senate, is that the Republicans have taken a much harder punch than this and found a way back from the beating. Comparing the backhanded occupation of Iraq to the death-grip occupation of the Confederacy, comparing the malfeasance by Jack Abramoff to the plundering by the Credit Mobilier gang, comparing the deaf White House to the purchased vice presidents under President Grant, and most specially comparing the transparent GDP of 2006 with the scary banking of 1874, there is no cause to quit or even to whine.We are rookies in the big leagues of Republican election disaster. Back then, the party dusted off its battered campaign hat, told the truth about its own stupidity, and went back to work for the next cycle.There was a secret to recovery that the defeated Republicans of 1874 possessed that will come in great use in the years to the next polling. The secret was the Democrats. “It has happened heretofore so invariably as to become almost a proverb, that the Democratic party has been ruined by partial successes,” the New York Times warned presciently. “It has shown no capacity for self-restraint or moderation. Engrossed in the pettiness of dividing the spoils or yielding to the passion for revenge over the griefs and hatreds which the years of its fierce vain struggles have engendered, it has not undertaken in any broad sense to administer government, to grasp or even to look out upon the future in a manly fashion and with a clear, honest vision.”As it happened, the Democrats chose pettifoggery over purpose and would remain the disinherited party until 1932. This is not today, despite John Kerry’s peculiar sense of humor, to give confidence to my Republican colleagues. The first order of business is to confess to and to apologize to our own voters.The second order, far more profound, is to be mindful that future presidents are watching our candor and will judge us when we are anecdotes.Recall that in 1876, when Theodore Roosevelt entered Harvard College with wide eyes and a yearning to please his father’s Republican Party, he carried in him a political lesson he had learned long before he became an accidental president: “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”Mr. Batchelor is host of “The John Batchelor Show,” now on hiatus.

Confess and Apologize, Republicans

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