Are Republicans flirting with disaster?

The WSJ’s John Fund has one of the sharpest political minds around. I rank him with Michael Barone.

Today Fund tells WSJ readers: yes, Republicans are flirting with a possible disaster come this November’s congressional elections. Let’s look at some of what Fund says:

Democrats must be pinching themselves about their good fortune. Last week, the Republican Congress saw deals on budget reform, immigration reform and extending the Bush tax cuts all collapse within 24 hours.

House and Senate members went home empty-handed to face an increasingly surly electorate, nearly 70% of which now thinks the country is heading in the wrong direction. Both parties are viewed negatively by voters, but it's Republicans who are in charge and stand to lose the most in November elections. Some GOP strategists are making comparisons to how the Democrats appeared to come unglued just prior to their losing Congress in 1994.

Take the budget. The conservative base is furious over the complete failure of both President Bush and the GOP Congress to exercise spending restraint in areas that have nothing to do with defense of homeland security.

On Friday Mr. Bush took the unusual step of challenging his party's congressional leaders. "If necessary, I will enforce spending restraint through the exercise of the veto," he told reporters. Sounds good, but in over five years Mr. Bush has never vetoed a bill. Few take his threats finally to do so now all that seriously. …

Fund cites instance after instance pork barrel budget items, policy disagreements and home district concerns have divided congressional Republicans. He compares the current fix Republicans are in to the situation Democrats faced just months before their election disaster in ’94.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the GOP majority is losing its team spirit, and many in Congress are going their own way as they eye a tough re-election climate.

Back in 1994, that kind of behavior over a crime bill that failed to garner enough Democratic votes to pass on the floor was an early indicator that Democrats were in serious political trouble. They wound up losing control of both houses of Congress that year.

No one quite expects a tsunami of those proportions this year. Incumbent-protection devices and gerrymandered districts are likely to minimize GOP losses. But Republican strategists are now openly talking about the parallels between 1994 and 2006. "Democrats had the health-care debacle; we have our base demoralized on spending," says a top GOP strategist who was intimately involved in promoting the Contract with America. "Democrats had corruption issues.

Both parties now have them, but it's the GOP that's getting the headlines. And finally, hatred of Bush on the left is at least as intense as hatred of Clinton was on the right in 1994."

In both years, the economy was in decent shape, but that didn't prevent many disillusioned voters of the party in power from staying home. "My firm conviction is that Republicans are going to show up at a lower rate" this November, Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, told Investor's Business Daily. …

Fund ends with a warning for Republicans

Unless they change course dramatically in the seven months between now and Election Day, they may well find themselves facing the same fate as the Democratic political dinosaurs of that year that they replaced.

When Fund speaks people should listen, especially if they’re congressional Republicans anxious to avoid disaster. There’s still seven months until November.

You can read Fund's column here.