Rick Scott, a Republican U.S. senator from Florida, deserves every bit of the heat he’s taking for the GOP’s failure to win control of the Senate in last month’s elections.
Marc Thiessen, a columnist for The Washington Post, criticized Scott’s management of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, whose job is to raise money for the party’s Senate candidates in the general election.
Thiessen said Scott’s committee had raised $181 million by July, but then spent much of that money on “consultants, self-promotion and a failed digital fundraising scheme.”
In August, the NRSC had to cancel $13 million worth of ad buys in swing states like Pennsylvania and Arizona, and in September it had to borrow $13 million to cover its operating expenses. That’s just poor management.
In addition, Scott made it easy for President Biden and other Democrats to criticize Republicans in the months before the elections. This past spring, Scott released proposals that would raise taxes on many Americans, and would end safety-net programs like Social Security and Medicare every five years unless Congress reauthorized them. Many fellow Republicans balked.
After the elections, Thiessen added, Scott kept digging his hole by challenging Sen. Mitch McConnell for the Senate Republican leader’s post. Scott lost badly, giving him, as another Republican put it, “a chance to crash and burn twice in the same year.”
Now comes political analyst Chris Cillizza, who reports on the CNN website that Scott is defending himself, taking on not only Democrats but McConnell in an effort to spread the blame for the poor midterms performance.
In an opinion column in the Washington Examiner, Scott said Republicans are good at criticizing Democrats, but they have failed to tell voters how the GOP would solve the country’s problems. And he has a point.
As a leader of the party out of power the last two years, McConnell’s strategy was to watch Democrats put their programs in place and see what happened.
That actually was a good move. Whether from covid-19’s persistence, excessive borrowing to help individuals and business during the pandemic, or policy errors like cutbacks in domestic oil production, too much of the economy under President Biden was lousy. Everyone felt the sting of 8% inflation, and everyone figured voters would toss out a lot of Democrats.
Except voters didn’t. In 2023, Republicans will have a narrow majority in the House, but Democrats held onto the Senate.
So Scott’s argument is worth considering. Why don’t Republicans have an alternative to Obamacare? How would they get a handle on inflation? Where would they put the brakes on government spending? How would they fix Social Security and Medicare?
Scott made plenty of mistakes during this year’s elections. But he’s right that Republicans need to offer more solutions and ideas instead of expecting Democrats to keep messing up.
— Jack Ryan, McComb Enterprise-Journal
