Mary Matalin Calls Election ‘Last Gasp of Liberals’

By Ronald Kessler

The Democrats’ takeover of Congress is the “last gasp of liberals,” says Mary Matalin, the Republican strategist and former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.

“I don’t even consider the election a setback,” Matalin told me, “because it’s not just the House Democrats that won as conservatives. Joe Lieberman won, and a number of Senate candidates won who are conservatives. So I see it as more of a last gasp for what we’ve come to call liberals. It is a necessary course correction.”

Matalin is currently traveling through most of the country.

“I haven’t been in any region where people who are conservatives or Republicans are dispirited,” Matalin says. “I get the gripes and righteous debate that’s going on, as it always has to, in the way that Republicans do so well, circling the wagons and shooting inward. But we will come out of our soul-searching faster because we know what we did wrong and can regroup more productively than the other side is going to be able to. That’s because they have no ground — they’re standing on smoke.”

Matalin notes that voters did not vote for candidates with a liberal agenda. In fact, according to a post-election survey by the National Taxpayers Union (NTU), GOP candidates who strayed from the principles of fiscal conservatism were more likely to alienate their base and be defeated.

Moreover, Americans for Tax Reform found that most Democrats won by dressing up as Republicans. Based on what they said on their Web sites, ATR determined that nearly all the Democrats who defeated Republicans in the House did so using a conservative message of lower taxes and accountability.

Democrats Have No Wiggle Room

Having run against Bush without a positive vision of their own, the Democrats now have “no wiggle room to do what they did in the last two cycles, which is to just not put anything seriously real on the table,” Matalin notes. “They have no agenda. So the election couldn’t possibly be a mandate for anything.”

Asked how she and her husband, Democratic strategist James Carville, interacted after the election, Matalin muses, “You know, we’re professional about it. I’m not a very good loser, but as I keep telling him, ‘show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.’”

Carville, on the other hand, is a gracious loser, she says.

“That’s good, because he’s had many opportunities to do it, and he’s going to have more in the future.”

While polls have shown voters favoring Democrats, “I don’t care what the polls say about people identifying as Democrats,” She says emphatically. “That is not the same as people getting elected as liberals. So we go into 2008 with a growth in acceptance of center-right philosophy. It’s completely unchartered territory. We’ve never had this kind of election in this country in modern presidential politics. Not in the information age. You haven’t had one like this for what, 50 years? So it’s a thrilling time in history, and it’s a thrilling time in politics.”

Those conservatives who say the Bush White House has abandoned the conservative principles of Ronald Reagan forget that Republicans first have to get elected, Matalin feels. By giving seniors drug prescription coverage under Medicare, for example, Republicans won votes and fulfilled Bush’s compassionate conservative approach.

“One Reaganism was you’d rather get 80 percent of a loaf than no loaf,” she says.

“But I think the whole trajectory of compassionate conservatism was overrun by events. We’re at war, and that’s a big trajectory. The philosophy I think going forward has to be going back to basics and updating it.”

Credit Where Credit Is Due

The Bush administration has gotten “credit for nothing that goes right and blame for everything that goes wrong,” she states. “You know we have not been hit for five years. We have a booming economy. Somebody deserves credit for doing something right along the way. And I think our practice of just trashing everybody on every side, and the elite media particularly, but all of us share blame in just trashing public servants and trashing politicians and ascribing to the multitude the sins of the few.”

People in most parts of the country are “just sick of being down on everything,” Matalin feels. “It’s not in our nature; it’s not in our DNA. Some proportion of this country is chronically cynical, and they tend to live in blue epicenters, but most of the country is sort of relentlessly optimistic.”

She and her husband are in basic agreement about the election.

“It could’ve been worse if Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman hadn’t done what they did [to motivate potential Republican voters],” she says. “We would have lost 12 to 15 more seats. James agrees with that and respects what they did.”

Turning to the 2008 presidential election, “The guy or gal who comes out of the box the most hopeful and optimistic, not in a corny way, but in a realistic way, in the Reaganesque kind of way, in the happy warrior way, is going to predominate over this American hating-everything-that’s-wrong-with-us kind of way,” she says.

Mitt Romney Hangs Tough

Matalin calles Mitt Romney “a spectacular candidate.” He is “methodical, and he’s definitely got the happy warrior thing,” she says. “He’s substantive, and he’s got executive skills. And he’s 21st century, too.”

Romney’s Mormon religion will turn out to be a plus, she speculates.

“I think his religion has a value component to it that is deep and true. People don’t split hairs on what is your source of strength. They like that you have a source of strength, and you are anchored like that. You know this is not 1960, and religion didn’t even work as an issue in 1960 with John F. Kennedy.”

Rudy Giuliani presumably has people lined up who are going to overcome objections to his views on social issues like abortion, Matalin says.

“Look, we know when we don’t stand together we hang separately,” she says.

Matalin thinks Sen. John McCain believes what he says and is liked by many conservatives.

“He certainly has brought out a lot of seriously smart and good people,” Matalin says. “His challenge is to go from being the insurgent maverick to the establishment front-runner.”

Newt Gingrich has a “huge and serious following, and many are holding out for him,” she sys.

If Sen. Hillary Clinton runs for president, “She will galvanize the base, or a portion of the base, that’s for sure,” Matalin says. “But as we know, it’s not pure base all base all the time. It’s base plus. You can’t go anywhere until you’ve pinned down your base. But if you only turn out your base, it’s not enough on either side. You’ve got to grow your base. That’s what Karl did in 2000, and did significantly in 2004. And so, yes, she'll galvanize our base, but we have to get more than our base. Those voters that always make the difference, which we grew in 2004, are back in play — Hispanics, Jews, women. Just because they voted one time against Republicans does not mean for all time they are lost to conservatism. It just depends on how she goes at it and what we put up against it.”

Do Not Underestimate Hillary

At the same time, she says, “I just think conservatives should not underestimate her prowess, and they should not underestimate her ability to go to the middle the way she’s been doing. They should not underestimate how strategic that team is, and her husband is, or how hungry they are to get it. All these things add up. The Democrats might be having pre-buyer’s remorse, but she’s a very sturdy utilitarian SUV for them.”

To be sure, people may think they want a sports car in a candidate, Matalin says.

“But in the end, They gotta have somebody that’s got a record, and she does have some serious substantive stuff in there. She was so scorched by going to the liberal end. She’ll have to run in the middle, and she knows how to run a campaign.”