…and vice versa.
The immediate spin after their landslide losses in 2006 from your typical conservative was that the Republicans in Congress were not conservative enough, and that is why they lost. I think that is debatable. They were plenty conservative on a host of issues, and they were also breathtakingly corrupt. But that is an argument for another time. What is true however, is that in an election and in any debate over policy, you must offer a contrast to the voters.
If the choice is between Republican and Republican-lite, they will chose the real thing everytime, the Republican. And the converse is true: if the Republican acts like a Democrat, then the real Democrat is going to win.
The public knows the basic difference between the parties. Republicans are against government regulation and intervention of and into the free market and enterprise. They believe the less government there is, the better, because government is the problem. Democrats believe government can be the solution to problems, depending on the situation. It is not the answer to every question, but in some vital areas, government intervention and regulation is needed to curtail the greed, corruption and malfeasance that always seems to rise up whenever no law is in place.
Now, history, and the public’s mood goes in cycles. Sometimes, we come to a point where the public tires of the government, and like Reagan said, “wants [it] to get off our backs.” And after a while, after the government has not been involved, and after the resulting corruption and greed has endangered the very fabric of society itself, the public swings back to the government as a possible solution to the problem.
We liberals were angered in the early 2000s when the national Democratic Party decided to be Republican lite and not challenge Bush and his minions on anything. And that led to losses to the Republicans and Bush in 2002 and 2004. Only when Democrats started portraying the actual differences between the parties again did they win, in 2006.
In 2008, both John McCain and Bill Lee are trying to blur the distinctions between them and their opponents, because they feel their Republican brand is so damaged and so disfavored by the public that they can win no other way. McCain, with his new $300 billion additional mortgage bailout (which seems redundant, because wasn’t the $700 billion supposed to cover that anyway?); and Bill Lee, with his wanting to split DNREC into two cabinet level agencies.
A Republican wanting to create more government agencies, in fact, two agencies to do the job of one? A Republican wanted to expand DNREC when in the past Delaware Republicans have wanted to eliminate DNREC?
Now Lee’s actual plan may have some merit, if such a split will in fact result in efficiency, a reduction in cost, and more regulation and sanction of polluters. But the Markell-Denn plan is trying to make the one agency we have now, DNREC, more efficient before taking the drastic step of creating more and probably redundant agencies.