Indiana Democrats have a winning strategy for the midterms. It doesn’t employ policy reform or a demonstration of shared Hoosier values. Their professed affinity with working families was abandoned some time ago. No, their secret weapon is, quite logically, distraction, with Donald Trump being the primary distractee.
Beau Bayh, a candidate for Secretary of State with no conviction and an only casual connection to Indiana, is the perfect vehicle. His hugely expensive advertisements tactically placed during Indiana University football games stoke fears on an issue hard for Democrats to find — that is, a crisis they didn’t in fact create.
Data centers, a recent phenomenon, do the trick nicely. They cannot be traced to the Biden or Obama eras, and Bayh, on cue, says they will drown families in utility bills, a contention grabbed out of the air without evidence campaigning for an office for which it is irrelevant.
The centers, unless Indiana plans to go full Luddite, will be built nonetheless as soon as the political wheels (Republican and Democrat) have been properly greased — again, a distraction, a bugaboo.
Left undiscussed will be the recent policy reforms — historic breakthroughs really — for which Republicans have been arguing for decades, long before the hated Trump descended that golden staircase. William Voegeli of the Claremont Review of Books lists a few:
- Illegal immigration has been slowed.
- School choice has been implemented in a majority of states.
- Supreme Court decisions instituted on abortion, affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act.
- Executive orders have curtailed affirmative action.
- Public broadcasting has been defunded.
- Universities have been put on the defensive over DEI, anti-Semitism and the denial of academic freedom.
- The federal bureaucracy and funding for government-dependent non-profit organizations have been scaled back.
Meanwhile, Sweden, the model for Beau Bayh and the globalists, has quietly reversed course. The Wall Street Journal reports that after government outlays rose to 70 percent of GDP in the early 1990s, Sweden cut taxes, unemployment benefits and housing subsidies, reformed the pension system, privatized many public services and reduced interest paid on public debt from over 10 percent of GDP in the late 1980s to under one percent today (here it is four percent.)
These are policy gains that can be applied to Indiana. Republicans, especially conservatives, have much for which to be proud. But rather than amplify and elaborate them in a Hoosier context, we appear stuck on talking points fashioned by the increasingly absurd Indianapolis Star. I give you today’s opinion-page headlines:
“Shocked by High Diesel and Gas Prices, Remember to Blame Republicans.”
“Young Men Are Souring on Trump.”
“Indiana Colleges must Break the Monopoly on Campus Parties.”
A monopoly on campus parties? That’s what should worry us? Thus distracted, our Republicans of the MAGA bent seem to argue for only slightly less intrusive government but with a GOP strain.
I again lean on Voegeli for the alternative. He thinks there is a promising synthesis of Trump’s Republican Party with Reagan’s, one that would leave Democrats like Beau Bayh spinning their wheels insisting we emulate the nation’s mistakes. Voegeli’s argument:
“The goal is not a bigger welfare state but a better one, realized through: eliminating failed and redundant programs; helping those people in greatest need while constantly encouraging self-reliance, responsibility and initiative; and making as many programs as possible either federal or state responsibilities, rather than ambiguous mixed ventures where several governments are sort of responsible but none are clearly and simply in charge. America’s welfare state, in other words, yields too little welfare and too much state. Promising to change that would be good politics, and effecting those changes would be good governance — the best kind of syncretism.”
A bit tame for our tastes, but it should be given a try. — tcl
