To be sure, Mr. Shadegg has the look of a decided underdog. He will take on party-heavyweights John Boehner of Ohio and the acting leader, Roy Blunt of Missouri. But for many of the new-generation, reform-minded House Republicans, Mr. Blunt is seen as too shackled to the K Street/DeLay money-machine to clean up the abuses of power that taint the party. He's an unapologetic supporter of earmarks (at least he's honest!) and was the whip who strong-armed a handful of conservatives to vote for the Medicare prescription drug bill with its multi-trillion dollar price tag. Mr. Blunt has sprinted into the early lead with a pitch that is pure horse-trading power politics -- of the kind that Republicans once denounced and which, thankfully, still repels some in the caucus. If he wins, the leadership team will be composed of the DeLay machine, minus only Mr. DeLay. Where the policy vision and voice for political reform will come from is anyone's guess. The Pelosi Democrats certainly won't complain.
Mr. Boehner, who has Sinatra good looks and style, is regarded as right-of-center on the ideological spectrum, but has never been active in the conservative movement. To his credit, he's pledged to dredge the algae-filled swamp of federal spending. In an interview last week, he derided the pork that keeps getting buried in appropriations bills. "We've become addicted to earmarks as if it were opium," he complained. Mr. Boehner will also resist the xenophobic anti-immigrant streak that has invaded the party, and which is the surest course for the GOP to alienate Asian and Hispanic voters, slow down the economy, and land the party back in the minority.
Still, it is Mr. Shadegg who is unquestionably the primary change-agent in this field. He wants the party, in effect, to make a declaration of independence from pork spending and the government-for-sale corruption that has become its abiding image. "The American people are with us on our substantive policy agenda and our Reaganite values, but are becoming repulsed by our behavior," he told me. With a truthful message like that, don't expect him to corral any votes from the Old Bull Republicans or the College of Cardinal appropriators who have turned pork into haute cuisine of late.
Win or lose, Mr. Shadegg's candidacy will be a measuring rod of just how much trouble congressional Republicans really think they're in. It will also serve as a leading indicator of whether House conservatives will devote the next nine months of this term to slamming the brakes on a domestic legislative policy that has careened off course. The era when Republicans promised to make government smaller and smarter by abolishing hundreds of obsolete federal agencies seems a distant memory now in this era of Bridges to Nowhere. In the last five years, Republicans have enacted the largest increase in entitlement spending in three decades, doubled the education budget, nearly tripled the number of earmarked spending projects, and turned a blind eye toward the corrosive culture of corruption on Capitol Hill that seems so eerily reminiscent of the final days of Democratic rule in the House.
If the Republicans vote for Blunt, they're clearly not interested in cleaning house, Boehner isn't much better. Shadegg would at least try to clean things up. He's also what you would think of if you were to try to remember the Contract With America Republicans. Shadegg has to be voted in to return to the House of '94 instead of the Republican version of the House of '93.
One wonders whether the young-gun conservatives in the House fully appreciate what's at stake here. Few current House members even remember that the first shots in the Republican Revolution of 1994 were fired in 1989 when upstart Newt Gingrich rallied the conservative troops in the House and shockingly defeated by one vote the Bob Michel-machine-candidate for Minority Whip (the #2 leadership perch). The conservatives for the first time in a generation had a foothold of power. Shortly thereafter, the power structure shifted again when free-marketer Dick Armey of Texas, a long time backbencher in the House, evicted another old bull Republican from the leadership team, Jerry Lewis of California. (It's a sign of the party's lost bearings that Mr. Lewis, the epitome of so much of what's wrong with the congressional Republicans, has been made appropriations committee chairman and has been even talked about as belonging back in the leadership.)
The Armey-Gingrich political coups were instigated by a gang of rebellious House conservatives and triggered a domino effect of momentous political changes. For years, Republican House leaders had suffered from Stockholm syndrome, becoming subservient to their captors, the Democratic majority. That gave way to Messrs. Gingrich and Armey devising a D-Day-type battle plan for the hostile takeover of the House in the '94 mid-terms. Its Republicans ran on Reaganite economics and a reform agenda of bringing squeaky clean ethics to Capitol Hill in the wake of House Democratic banking and post-office scandals. Delusional Democrats thought they could merely cover the reek of scandals with disinfectants and then move on -- a catastrophic blunder that Republicans may now be in danger of repeating.
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