That grinding sound is the GOP shifting gears

AT HIS NEWS conference after Tuesday’s elections, President Bush struck a note of reassurance. “I have a message for those on the front lines,” he said. “To our enemies, do not be joyful. Do not confuse the workings of our democracy with a lack of will.... To our brave men and women in uniform: Don’t be doubtful. America will always support you.”

Why would terrorists or U.S. soldiers think electing Democrats would suggest a lack of will or support for the troops? Oh, right. Because Bush had been saying so. “However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win, and America loses,” he told a GOP crowd in October. “That’s what’s at stake in this election.”

I guess if I were a terrorist, I would have been joyful to learn that the people who were going to help me win had prevailed in the elections.

It’s a political tradition for candidates on both sides to immediately change their tune after an election. Last week, Democrats were ripping Bush to shreds, and now they’re promising to work with him. Still, even by these standards, the Republican turnabout has been unusually abrupt. Suddenly they’re all but admitting that everything they had said before the election was a lie.

Even beginning as early as election night, the conservative spin asserted that Democrats had won by running as ideological ciphers.

“Democrats, in my mind, don’t have a mandate because they stood for nothing,” said conservative radio host Laura Ingraham. And from a Wall Street Journal editorial: “While a thumping defeat for the GOP, the vote was about competence, not ideological change.”

Of course, the Journal, and every other Republican organ, has been insisting for months that Democrats are a bunch of left-wing tax lovers. They have endlessly repeated a quote by incoming Democratic House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel of New York -- who, when asked which Bush tax cuts he’d extend, replied that he couldn’t think of one. Bush repeated this quote as recently as two days before the election. Presumably, some people actually believed the president when he said this.

Now they tell us that a vote for the Democrats was really a vote to continue Republican policies. It’s kind of cruel to have the rug pulled out from under us. Hey, I was supporting the Democrats precisely because I thought they’d jack up taxes!

To be fair, the conservatives are right that there were plenty of nonideological reasons for the Democratic victory. People were frustrated about Iraq, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Republican corruption and scandals and (though conservatives won’t admit this last one) an economy that isn’t raising most people’s living standards.

So it’s perfectly true that the election should not be interpreted as a line-item endorsement of the Democratic agenda.

Yet that’s almost always the case.

Four years ago, George W. Bush won reelection in large part because he happened to be in office Sept. 11, 2001 (and also because nobody could stand John Kerry). That didn’t stop conservatives from insisting that voters had signed up for his domestic and foreign agenda in its entirety. The Journal’s 2004 postelection editorial called Bush’s victory “a decisive mandate for a second term” and proceeded to explain why voters had endorsed measures such as privatization of Social Security.

Possibly the funniest about-face in last week’s elections came from Rush Limbaugh, who gleefully declared that, with the elections over, “I no longer am gonna have to carry the water for people who I think don’t deserve having their water carried.”

Other conservative talk-show hosts offered up similar sentiments. It’s nice for Limbaugh to concede that up until this point he had simply been a GOP mouthpiece. But maybe he should have let his listeners in on the secret before.

jchait@latimescolumnists.com