TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

In the February 2009 edition of the Atlantic, Joshua Green wrote an excellent profile of Senator Charles Schumer. In it, he details Schumer’s—and Democrats’ generally—theory for why they won the 2008 election:

By contrast, Schumer’s agenda is primarily offensive, a series of mainly tax policies designed to support and encourage middle-class aspirations. The underlying rationale is to create a government that is more active on behalf of the middle class.

…

When I returned to see him just after the election, Schumer had the satisfied air of someone who feels thoroughly vindicated. The middle class had delivered a broad Democratic sweep, ratifying his view that the country had reached a pivotal moment. The Republican era that began in 1980 with Ronald Reagan had come to an end. “This almost always happens when people redefine their relationship to government,” he told me. Schumer saw the presidential election as having turned on the simple question of which candidate recognized this new relationship. “You look at just about every policy difference between Obama and McCain,” he said. “Underlying it was a more active government.”

When Democrats hear the phrase more active government, all sorts of well-established programs leap to mind. Schumer is dubious of them, and focuses instead on his idea of a redefined relationship. The last time voters redefined their relationship to government, in 1980, they wanted less of it: fed up with an onerous, spendthrift bureaucracy, the middle class chose Reagan, who promised to “get government off your back.” Schumer believes that the reason Republicans dominated for the past 28 years is that the standard Democratic agenda, though intended to serve the broad middle class, has too often missed the mark. To satisfy an electorate now eager for government to do more and not less, Schumer believes that his party must recognize how it erred over the past three decades. This entails changing the way Democrats think about the middle class and introducing new policies to serve it.

I haven’t found a more accurate explanation of how Democrats conceived their 2008 election victory than this. Democrats believed it to be a shift in the public’s politics away from less government involvement, less taxes and free markets to a society where government leads. There is a reason many Democrats have characterized Barack Obama’s presidency as FDR-like, and Obama has taken every opportunity to chastise Republicans for their small government policies (an inaccurate charge if there ever was one): they earnestly believed that Obama was elected because the American public changed its mind and decided that it would like more government in their lives.

It couldn’t be, of course, that Americans were fed up with the corruption and hypocrisy displayed by Republicans in Congress during Bush’s presidency, the Iraq war, the financial crisis and bank bailouts (all of which happened while Bush was president, whether he deserved final blame or not), and wanted to punish them for it and bring in some new people. Nor was it because the Republicans fielded a weak presidential ticket. No; that certainly isn’t possible. Clearly Democrats won big in 2006 and 2008 because they wanted Democrats to pass every part of their agenda.

This is a brilliant example of how easy it is to delude ourselves about reality, and what happens when we do so. Democrats thought the election meant the public had handed them a mandate to do as they please; actually, they had given both parties a warning to act responsibly. Democrats kept their eyes shut and their imagination firmly stuck on dreams of higher spending and government-controlled healthcare, and as a result face a tough midterm election this November.

Republicans, should they take control of the House and even the Senate, must resist this same temptation. The public, although more conservative than it is liberal, won’t vote Republican because they’re suddenly enamored with their agenda (there isn’t much of one right now to be enamored with)—they’re voting against Democrats, not for Republicans. Republicans must learn this lesson: the public doesn’t want them to attempt to force through their agenda. It wants a government that acts responsibly, in the best interests of the country.