F. Scott Fitzgerald on the GOP victory

“No second acts in American lives.” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that in 1932 and again at the end of his life. Yet, after wasting big election victories in 1994 and 2004, Republicans now have not a second act but a third act.

Pundits rightly stress the GOP’s new Senate majority, but the gubernatorial results are even more striking. Each of the five states comprising the old Northwest Territory—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin—now has a Republican governor.

The last three of those states seemed for a time to be Democratic preserves, but voters yesterday threw aside party labels in a search for competence and honesty. Add in Republican victories in the M&M states that seemed liberal locks, Maryland and Massachusetts, and we have a repudiation of recent class warfare themes.

Instead, we have a resurrection of the hope Thomas Jefferson expressed in his 1801 inaugural address. A majority of voters sought then and yesterday “a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”

Republicans who fight for that over the next two years can win the nation’s affection and maybe the White House. But the Republican Revolution of 1994 faltered with the adultery of Newt Gingrich and the political adultery of those who came to power and liked it too much. And the last election that left the GOP with both Senate and House control, that of 2004, led to a final two years of GOP adoption of another Fitzgerald line, from The Beautiful and Damned: “The victor belongs to the spoils.”

Most voters want a wise and frugal government, and maybe the passing from power of spoiled baby boomers will bring hope for that. Here’s one more Fitzgerald observation, from a letter he wrote to his daughter in 1938: “My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.”

Fitzgerald died two years later, at age 44, from a heart attack, after two decades of alcoholism. Yesterday’s election was a vote for work and courage and maybe old graces. Republicans need to avoid the arrogance that followed their victories 20 and then 10 years ago, or else the appropriate metaphor will shift from theater to baseball: Three strikes and you’re out.