Republicans Need to Run Against the Last 16 Years

Charles C.W. Cooke: “There is no doubt that the manner in which Obama has behaved as president has contributed significantly to our present anxieties. Indeed, one can only imagine that students of political language will one day be fascinated by the gaping hole that has opened up between his campaign rhetoric and his governing prose.”

“And yet, for all of the incumbent’s failures, it seems clear that America’s present funk did not begin in earnest on January 20, 2009. Rather, it can be dated back to the attacks of September 11, and to their various consequences. In a similar vein, it should by now be obvious to conservatives that the last American Golden Age obtained not during George W. Bush’s rather disappointing tenure, but in the mid- to late- 1990s, when the Republican party ran both houses of Congress and Democrat Bill Clinton ran the executive branch. If they are to run a successful campaign — and, crucially, if they are to capitalize upon the electorate’s present dissatisfactions — Republicans will need to acknowledge that they are not only running against the Obama administration, but against a broader national melancholia to which they themselves have contributed.”