[Posted by Karl]

I come to neither praise nor bury Sen. Robert Bennett. He was a fairly conservative senator who overstayed his welcome, became unpopular, and the very conservative GOP base in Utah thinks it can do better this year. However, it is clear that Bennett is still smarting from his party convention loss. Going into that convention, he claimed that the message of a loss would be: “No more legislating. Just stand there and shout slogans.” Weeks later, the same idea pops up in his Washington Post op-ed, which improbably compares Tea Partiers to those who supported Jimmy Carter. It’s an awful analogy that displays a denial of the history that the 76-year-old Bennett lived through.

Sen. Bennett seems to think that Jimmy Carter was a one-term president because all he had was “good slogans.” In reality, Carter was a one-term president because he had plenty of bad liberal policies behind those slogans — a dynamic with an obvious parallel today. Missing this point demonstrates that Bennett is as out of touch as his constituents thought or that anger now clouds his vision.

Bennett argues:

Unlike Carter, Reagan had more than slogans. He came to Washington with a clear plan to revive the economy and overhaul the tax code, revitalize the military, and, most important, boost the national spirit. He saw the Republican Party as a “big tent,” and he successfully did what is considered political suicide today: He worked across party lines and tried to find compromise.

With Carter, Democrats had the White House for one term; with Reagan and the first George Bush, the Republicans held it for three. That has happened only once since World War II.

There’s a profound lesson in this for the Tea Party movement.

Per Bennett, then, the secret is to campaign on a clear, conservative plan, but then work across party lines and compromise. Bennett’s analysis overlooks that Congress was less polarized when Reagan took office than today. Moreover, even in today’s more polarized climate, tax cuts and a strong military are popular with the public and with Congress.

Bennett also over-simplifies history while beating straw tea-partiers:

As president, Carter was downright depressing. His famous “malaise” speech warned us that America’s best days were behind us and suggested that we are a country in irreversible decline. Too many Tea Party speeches sound the same note, even as they invoke Ronald Reagan’s name. They are wrong to do so, in my view, because Reagan never lost his optimism and his hope for the future. He was elected because he was good at slogans, but he succeeded as president because he focused on solutions.

Here, Bennett omits that Carter campaigned on the hopey-changey notion of having a government as good as its people, and was left with “malaise” as the residue of his own declinist policies. He also glosses over the fact that Reagan was not above reminding us that liberal policies left the country in need of his bold plans. But maybe most important in this context, Bennett leaves out that while Reagan succeeded on the popular planks of tax cuts and military spending, those compromises Bennett loves meant Reagan was far less successful at shrinking government — and ends up taking the blame, to some degree unfairly, for the resulting deficits.

It is the unsustainable deficits accruing and planned under the Obama adminsitration — and the government leviathan they are intended to support — that are at the heart of the Tea Party movement. Bennett is at perhaps his most delusional in painting Tea Partiers as believing that America is in irreversible decline. If that was true, Tea Partiers would be packing their rations and heading off to their wilderness cabins. They would not be talking about repealing ObamaCare. They would not be getting involved in politcs and toppling people like Bennett.

The sad part is that if had Bennett taken a harder look at the political landscape, including his own situation, he could have given Tea Partiers useful advice. He might have grasped that the extent that Tea Partiers (and more broadly, the GOP) are succeeding and make gains in November, it will not be because voters want people who legislate for the sake of legislating. Rather, it will be the voters’ desire for gridlock. Had Bennett figured this out, even after his loss, he might have advised Tea Partiers of the risk of over-interpreting their victories (much as the GOP did after 1994 and the Dems did after 2008). Had Bennett looked at the less successful parts of the Reagan-Bush years, he might have advised Tea Partiers that the politics of austerity are likely to be a much tougher haul than the era in which Bennett served. Given his own bent, Bennett might have used those points to explain the usefulness of being able to work the system over time.

Of course, I doubt Tea Partiers would have cared much to hear that advice from a guy who voted for TARP and wanted to set up some version of RomneyCare in all 50 states. But at least it would not have been bad advice based on bad history lessons.

–Karl