Memo to GOP Candidates: Be Realistic

Great expectations preface great disappointments, as the students at Yale and Vanderbilt and the University of Missouri, currently dismantling their institutions in a fit of inchoate rage, remind us. Writing in City Journal, Matt Hennessey fills out the context of that disappointment:

The average 18- to 25-year-old remembers the lofty promises of hope and change that he heard from Obama during his presidential campaigns. He looks at the American political system and thinks to himself: “Even the great Obama can’t snap his fingers and bring about the world of perfect justice that I desire.” What does he conclude? That all politics — even Democratic Party politics — are irredeemably broken. It’s time to tear that down, too.

“Lofty” is an understatement. Senator Barack Obama’s promises were stratospheric:

I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.

That was June 3, 2008. He wouldn’t even be elected for another five months.

I can’t remember now who wrote — probably several people — that Obama’s Kennedyesque turn in 2008 (the rebirth of Camelot, etc.) was likely to lead to a similar end: bitter disappointment. Kennedy’s assassination left Americans bereft, not simply because he was the president, but because he had offered a vision of sunlit uplands, to which he, the boy-king, would lead them. It was never going to happen, but it was intoxicating, as utopianisms tend to be.

Similarly, Obama reinforced the “historic” quality of his candidacy with bold, vague promises — remember “post-racial America”? — that cast him in the role of messiah (on occasion replete with halo). If young people, already inclined to idealism, are now bereft, it is because those promises have been cut down to size — in this case, not by an assassin’s bullet (thank God), but by the one thing out of Barack Obama’s control: events. By any reasonable metric, this president has been extraordinarily successful at implementing his platform. But even so, he promised much more than he ever could have delivered. And, unlike JFK, he salted the earth behind him along the way.

#share#It is a bipartisan phenomenon, of course. Republicans overpromised in the wake of last year’s midterm victories. There has never been a realistic possibility of overturning Obamacare as long as the president who signed it was still in the White House, and there was never any realistic possibility, as long as Democrats toed the party line, of stopping Obama’s Iran deal. There were winnable fights, to be sure, but they were left unfought, and the backlash against Republican officeholders can be partly explained as the curdling of high — improperly high — hopes.

And so, with a presidential election looming, the warning to our current crop of candidates should be obvious. I would love to believe that Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Ben Carson will reduce our constitutional republic to a Nockian paradise where Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrats are employed by the Koch brothers to build the Keystone pipeline, and Secretary of Defense Rick Perry personally leads routine F-35 overflights of Tehran, and Toby Keith gives a show on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial while Americans fry bacon on their gun barrels and tar and feather Lois Lerner.

But it’s not going to happen. Not just in George Will’s sense is politics like football: In both, progress more often than not comes in small, punishing advances. And because of the successes of the Obama administration over the past seven years, which have entrenched not only massive, complex programs, but the understanding of state/citizen relations that accompanies them, a Republican president will face an unprecedented amount of inertia.

Ironically, in this context, it’s attractive to promise the moon. A war of worldviews is on, and candidates must respond accordingly. But now more than usual, big promises are likely to fail. Costs are high, and returns are likely to be low. And at some point, Republican candidates and Republican voters must acknowledge this. This is not an excuse, either for failure or for failing to try. But it is important to be clear-eyed. We must be able to distinguish between what we want and what we can expect to achieve — that is, in vision, idealism; in expectations, realism. Making that distinction thoughtfully now makes it more likely that the two might align in the future.