The Great Sobriety

Earlier this week I dropped in on a welcome party for Republicans in the new Congress. As a friend and I strode off the elevator at Eagle Publishing’s headquarters on Capitol Hill, we found ourselves alongside Donald Rumsfeld, who walked in with his wife on one arm and an old, yellowed briefcase on the other.

Beside walls festooned with the covers of conservative New York Times bestsellers — Newt Gingrich, Dinesh D’Souza, Laura Ingraham, you name it — we mixed and mingled with congressmen, senators, and Michael Steele, the new chairman of the GOP. Former Sen. George Allen, of “Macaca” fame, was there, as was the up and coming young Rep. Eric Cantor. One House member from a district in Peoria, Illinois, is younger than I am.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican and former chairman of the House intelligence committee, lamented that the Bush administration should have made the details of waterboarding public in the first place, because it was only performed on two or three people — though “maybe more than two or three times” — and the American public wouldn’t have had a problem with it. (Which is a problem in itself.)

Michael Steele made some pleasant but insubstantial remarks about the need for Republicans to atone publicly for their sins and win back people’s trust. All well and good. Then it dawned on me that since no one appears to be digging through the text of the bills to expose all the garbage in them, Republicans have basically no hope of halting Obama’s staggering expansion of the federal government. The truth is, in America, candidates don’t win elections. Their opponents lose.

We can all rest assured that Bush foreign policy has come to an end, but Obama domestic policy has only just begun.

In a surreal touch, on his way out, Orrin Hatch put his hand on my shoulder and told us all to behave ourselves. Thanks, Senator, but I don’t think we’ll be up celebrating.