Opinion

GOP bailing on bailout supporters

W. James Antle III Managing Editor
Font Size:

Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) has served six terms during two stints in Congress. When South Carolina Republicans held their runoff Tuesday, he managed to win just 29 percent of the vote.

Elsewhere on the ballot, Inglis’ colleague Rep. Gresham Barrett didn’t fare much better. Once the front-runner in the race for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, Barrett lost to upstart Nikki Haley by an eye-popping 30-point margin.

Still, Inglis and Barrett were the lucky ones, relatively speaking. In Utah’s Republican primary for U.S. Senate that same day, three-term GOP Sen. Bob Bennett didn’t even make it on the ballot. He was eliminated in the voting at the Republican state convention earlier this year.

What do these three defeated Republicans all have in common, besides their impending unemployment? All three of them voted for the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), which is Washington-speak for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout that was rushed into law when the panicky political class decided to “do something” about the financial meltdown.

TARP was a bipartisan initiative. In the heat of the 2008 presidential campaign, both Barack Obama and John McCain supported it. The leaders of both parties ended up voting for it. George W. Bush signed it into law. Since then, both the Bush and Obama Treasury departments have spread the wealth around.

But TARP was never particularly popular with rank-and-file Republicans, particularly grassroots conservatives. Many anti-Wall Street progressives and deficit-conscious moderates also had serious misgivings about the bailout. And when the bailouts continued after TARP, the program began to symbolize the big-government Republicanism of the Bush era.

In making a clean break with that brand of Republicanism, fiscal conservatives from the Tea Party activists to the Club for Growth have targeted wayward GOPers who succumbed to the TARP temptation — a group that unfortunately includes such stanch conservatives as Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). Wobblier Republicans who went along with the bailout, beware.

Republican Sen. John Cornyn was booed for his TARP vote while speaking to a Tea Party gathering in Texas. A Republican activist in Tennessee refused to shake GOP gubernatorial candidate Zach Wamp’s hand because Wamp had voted for the bailout in the House. For some, the bailout is the litmus test issue.

In the Republican primary for Senate in Kentucky, Secretary of State Trey Grayson — the GOP establishment candidate — tried every one of the old litmus test issues: abortion, the war in Iraq, and the party’s post-9/11 foreign policy more generally. He still came up well short against Rand Paul, who ran primarily as an anti-bailout candidate. TARP trumped the Bush Doctrine.

In Nevada’s race to challenge Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Republican front-runner Sue Lowden was excoriated by her opponents for comments they characterized as being sympathetic to the bailouts. She hit back by insisting she was in fact anti-bailout, but to no avail: the more fiscally conservative Sharron Angle exploded from the single digits to win the primary.

The anti-bailout backlash hasn’t prevailed everywhere. Rep. John Boozman, the Republican nominee for Senate in Arkansas, voted for TARP but won his primary. Ditto Rep. Mark Kirk, the GOP senatorial candidate. They are considered two of the party’s brightest prospects for gaining Senate seats this fall.

But all other things being equal, a vote for TARP is a political loser in Republican primaries — and a huge gift to conservative challengers. Former Rep. J.D. Hayworth may have voted for No Child Left Behind and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, but he is making McCain’s support for TARP an issue in their Arizona contest. The Republicans running against former Sen. Dan Coats in Indiana also tried to tie him to the bailouts.

It is too early to say that big-government Republicans are on the ropes. But they are looking for someone to bail them out. Here’s some advice: Don’t hide under a TARP.

W. James Antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel