OPINION:
In the 1994 midterm elections, with a liberal Democratic president in the White House and opposition to “Hillarycare” (the precursor to “Obamacare”) as their primary campaign weapon, Republicans picked up a whopping 54 seats in the House, eight in the Senate, and 10 governorships.
Sixteen years later, in the 2010 midterms, confronting another liberal Democratic president and fueled by strong opposition to Obamacare, Republicans netted a jaw-dropping 63 House seats, six in the Senate, and six governorships.
Will history repeat itself yet again in the 2022 midterms? We’ll find out on Nov. 8, but the electoral ground this cycle is arguably even more fertile for a massive Republican electoral wave than it was 12 or 28 years ago.
That’s because, while the policies of Presidents Bill Clinton and especially Barack Obama were far too liberal for our liking, their presidencies were not nearly the constant five-alarm flaming train wreck that we have now in Joe Biden’s White House.
Mr. Obama was more prescient than he knew when he reportedly said of his onetime vice president: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.”
Mr. Biden has very much lived down to that prediction, giving us out-of-control tax-and-spend policies that have fueled inflation in excess of 8% year-over-year and food prices up 11.4% (the highest rates since the late 1970s) and a mindless war on fossil fuels that caused gasoline prices to spike to more than $5 a gallon. (The national average on Jan. 20, 2021, when Mr. Biden took office, was $2.39 for a gallon of regular unleaded, according to AAA).
Gas prices have since come down (though not to pre-Biden levels), but only because he has recklessly drained tens of millions of barrels of oil from the national Strategic Petroleum Reserve to replace the oil and natural gas we would be producing were it not for his radical anti-energy policies.
Then there was the precipitous and humiliating pullout from Afghanistan that left a still-unknown number of Americans behind enemy lines — and gifted the Taliban with $80 billion worth of military hardware.
There’s also Mr. Biden’s war on U.S. national sovereignty via a wide-open southern border that has seen 2 million or more illegal immigrants and thousands of pounds of deadly fentanyl and other illicit drugs flood into the country in the 20 months since he took office.
If all of that weren’t enough for GOP candidates for the House and Senate — as well as candidates for governor and other down-ballot races — to run on, there are the administration’s war on (real) women as it seeks to force the transgender agenda on female athletes (and everyone else).
And lest we forget: record levels of violent crime and homelessness; 87,000 forthcoming new IRS agents; and a Dow Jones that closed on Sept. 29 some 7,263 points lower than it was on Jan. 20, 2021, when former President Donald Trump left office.
Yet, incredibly, Mr. Biden and his congressional Democratic allies have the chutzpah to label Republicans as “extreme.”
If the GOP cannot parlay Mr. Biden’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad record into a red tidal wave comparable to those of 1994 and 2010 in November, they will surely deserve the title of “the Stupid Party,” the sobriquet first bestowed upon it, by some accounts, as far back as the 1950s.
The nation can ill-afford continued Democratic control of Congress, ramming Mr. Biden’s far-left legislative agenda and radical judicial nominees through.
But to adapt a line from Proverbs 29:18, “Where there is no vision, the people perish,” it’s deeply disconcerting that, given such a huge opportunity for major gains, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s vision is apparently 20/200.
While his counterpart in the House, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, California Republican, on Sept. 23 unveiled a positive “Commitment to America” of legislative initiatives Republicans will push if they win control of the House, Mr. McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, still refuses to put forward an agenda, preferring just to run against Mr. Biden and Democrats’ record in the midterm elections.
It’s as though Mr. McConnell can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.
With a record as execrable as Mr. Biden’s, it might indeed be possible to beat something with nothing, but why not put forward a positive, proactive conservative agenda to give Americans something to vote for, rather than just the Democrats’ record to vote against?
Mr. McConnell on Sept. 29 again complained about the supposed lack of quality of some GOP Senate candidates and suggested Republicans would be lucky to pick up just one or two Senate seats in November.
Mr. McConnell should instead direct the National Republican Senatorial Committee to create ads for Senate races across the country tying Mr. Biden around Democratic candidates’ necks like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross that he is and ending with the tagline: “Are you better off today than you were before Mr. Biden took office?”
The question answers itself.
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