Whose Agenda, What Agenda?

Whose Agenda, What Agenda?

The revolution is over. While November’s election may have been a knock in the head to the Republican Party generally, it was a dagger through the heart of the Republican right. As moderate GOP governors swept to victory all across America, hard-right GOP governors and gubernatorial candidates—Alabama’s Fob James, South Carolina’s David Beasley, California’s Dan Lungren—were going down in states long regarded as Republican strongholds. It was the congressional right that suffered the gravest defeats. Not only did it lose its national leader when Newt Gingrich was shoved from the speakership, but it then lost the brief and intense battle to elect his successor. Christopher Cox, the five-term Republican representative from Orange County who waged a two-day campaign for the post, was the darling of the party’s economic right. A former Reagan White House lawyer who advised supply-side fanatic Arthur Laffer during his quixotic 1986 Senate campaign, Cox was endorsed by the <...