The Pledge and the Contract
Here are National Review's editors, comparing the new "Pledge to America" that the House G.O.P. is rolling out today to the 1994-vintage Contract With America:
The inevitable question will be: Is the pledge as bold as the Contract? The answer is: The pledge is bolder. The Contract with America merely promised to hold votes on popular bills that had been bottled up during decades of Democratic control of the House. The pledge commits Republicans to working toward a broad conservative agenda that, if implemented, would make the federal government significantly smaller, Congress more accountable, and America more prosperous.
You can read the Pledge here, and the original Contract here, and draw your own conclusions. My view is this: The Pledge is "bolder" than its predecessor primarily in negation. Its most substantive promises — indeed, nearly all of its substantive promises — involve the rollback of the Obama agenda: The health care bill will be repealed, discretionary spending ("with common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops") will go back to pre-stimulus levels, the Bush tax cuts will be renewed rather than amended or eliminated, etc. Given the public's provisional verdict on the Obama era, this kind of emphasis no doubt makes political sense. But it doesn't inspire great confidence in the G.O.P.'s ability to tackle America's challenges in ways that don't just involve saying "no" to Barack Obama. (Especially since, as you may recall, neither the Republican Party nor the country were exactly in wonderful shape in the two years before Obama took office. "Let's go back to 2007!" may be a winning slogan for 2010, but it's a pretty depressing vision for America.)
By contrast, the original Contract's promise to hold votes on bills that had long been "bottled up" reflected the fact that in the early 1990s there was an affirmative conservative agenda (on welfare reform, crime policy, family-friendly tax reform, etc.) waiting to be implemented. Indeed, even on deficit reduction, supposedly the great cause of the contemporary Republican Party, the '94 document's proposed Balanced Budget Amendment was arguably a more significant (if misguided) attempt to grapple with the growth of deficits than the Pledge's promise to merely impose a "cap" on discretionary spending.
Yes, the Contract With America avoided saying anything directly about entitlements, whereas the present-day Pledge insists that Republicans "will make the decisions that are necessary to protect our entitlement programs for today's seniors and future generations." But promising to "make decisions" isn't much of a promise at all — especially since the Pledge also continues the newfound Republican pattern of attacking Democrats for daring to cut Medicare. Which is to say that there's no evidence in this document that the G.O.P. is serious about dealing with the real roots of America's long-term fiscal imbalance, as opposed to simply posturing about spending discipline in the hopes of making the Democrats look bad.
Such posturing is commonplace, and understandable. (As David Frum suggests, a party "cruising to a handsome election victory" has little reason to jeopardize their prospects "by issuing big, bold promises to do deadly unpopular things.") But the Pledge needs to be recognized for what it is — more a campaign prop than a blueprint for responsible governance, and a sign that anyone hoping for visionary conservative leadership is still better served looking to individual Republican politicians (a Paul Ryan, a Mitch Daniels, a Chris Christie) than to the Republican Party as a whole.
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Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
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