Date Published: 11/04/10

How GOP will oppose Obama

The day after the election always dawns sunny and full of hope inWashington. From Representative John A. Boehner on down, Republicans talked on Wednesday about how open they were to working with the president (except, perhaps, for repealing that whole health care thing). Rand Paul, the next senator from Kentucky, said on MSNBC that his family was hoping to meet the Obama girls. You could almost see the two dads stretched out in front of the TV, sharing a laugh at “Phineas and Ferb.”

Reality will intrude soon enough, and Republicans will have to decide what kind of opposition they intend to be. One could argue that the most fundamental choice facing the new Republican House majority, in particular, is whether to stand on cultural or intellectual dissent — or, put another way, whether they want to cast themselves principally as the party of Sarah Palin or the party of Paul Ryan.

The election only enhanced the stature of Ms. Palin, who bucked her party’s leadership by endorsing several outsider candidates — among them Mr. Paul and Nikki Haley, the governor-elect of South Carolina — who won this week. A powerful force in the party, Ms. Palin represents an aggrieved, anti-elitist strain of conservatism that goes back to Richard M. Nixon’s Silent Majority. It is a rural conservative impulse, rooted most firmly in the South and West, that equates liberal government with tyranny and anti-Americanism.

In the kind of opposition Ms. Palin represents, issues aren’t always meant to be addressed through governance, but rather to be deployed as blunt instruments in pursuit of more electoral gains. For the new Republican-led House, that would mean more questions about the president’s birth certificate, more subpoenas flowing down Pennsylvania Avenue, more votes on abortion and flag burning and all of that mean passing a bill on gun rights or school prayer that excites the base, knowing full well that the Democratic-controlled Senate will simply let it die anyway.

Mr. Ryan, of Wisconsin, on the other hand, is the author of a radically austere plan to scale back federal spending, and he is about to become chairman of the House Budget Committee. Mr. Ryan, a Washington insider, is heir to the side of the conservative movement that grew out of think tanks and policy journals in the 1960s and ’70s.

To Mr. Ryan’s way of thinking, liberals in government aren’t cultural imperialists; in fact, he gets along with them just fine. Rather, Mr. Ryan sees the president and his allies as hopelessly misguided, reliant on unsustainable government spending rather than the market. Mr. Ryan’s kind of opposition would offer up an alternative, polarizing agenda, forcing President Obama and his allies to defend their philosophy and their intransigence.

In a sense, Ms. Palin and Mr. Ryan represent opposite sides of the Republican conundrum at the moment. Ms. Palin is an outsider with a serious following in the party’s grass roots, but she has not shown that she has a plan to actually govern. Mr. Ryan is a powerful Washington figure with an office full of detailed flip charts, but he has little, if any, following out among the faithful.

Mr. Boehner or his newly empowered lieutenants probably see some peril in pursuing either kind of opposition. Translating all of this Tea Party rhetoric about spending and deficits into some kind of alternative governing plan is a sobering undertaking — so much so that most Republican candidates this year refused to endorse Mr. Ryan’s version, which would partly privatize Social Security and Medicare.

But to adopt a less substantive, more cultural kind of opposition, while it might satisfy a lot of Tea Party types, would be to court another voter revolt in 2012 or 2016. After all, if exit polls and conversations with individual voters are any indication, a lot of the unrest that came to the surface Tuesday had to do with the perception that no one in Washington is serious about solving problems like the national debt. It’s hard to see how more subpoenas and more blocked judges are going to change that perception.

Many Republicans seem to hope they won’t have to choose the direction, that they can just sit back and respond, either culturally or intellectually, to various pieces of Mr. Obama’s agenda. But there will be pivotal moments of choice for the Republican opposition, and one of them may be only weeks away.

In December, Mr. Obama’s debt-reduction panel (of which Mr. Ryan is a member) is supposed to release its findings on the budget, which, assuming the bipartisan panel can’t reach a consensus, will most likely encompass several options for reducing spending in the long term.

A Palinesque opposition would probably seize on proposed tax increases or benefit cuts in the plans, accuse Mr. Obama of creating the commission as a gimmick and dismiss the whole exercise as just another waste of the citizens’ money. A more intellectual approach would be to embrace the most conservative option offered by the panel and take it up for debate, in hopes of pressuring the White House into some meaningful compromise.

Which way the new Republican majority goes will say a lot, perhaps, about whether it intends to oppose the president’s identity or his ideas. Copyright © 2010 The New York Times