Republican problems from the vantage of the moderate Left.
There are, however, plenty of problems.
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As Republicans ponder 2012 defeat,
party’s philosophy hangs in the balance
Published:
December 15, 2012
GREENCASTLE, Pa. — The Green Grove Gardens banquet hall
was decked out for Christmas, but the atmosphere at the
Franklin County Republicans’ annual Eisenhower dinner here
was anything but cheery.
As the evening’s speaker, former Pennsylvania senator and
2012 presidential contender Rick Santorum, made a
meet-and-greet round of the tables Tuesday, one woman
implored him to “get rid of Obamacare.â€
“We had a chance,†Santorum told her. “It was called
the last election.â€
So much for comfort and joy.
Not quite six weeks after Republicans lost a presidential
contest that many of them thought was in the bag, the shock
has begun to wear off. The recriminations, on the other
hand, are likely to go on for quite some time.
And the tough work — figuring out what needs fixing —
has only just begun.
Some Republicans still argue that nothing is fundamentally
wrong with the party. Or nothing that a better
get-out-the-vote operation, a field of more appealing
candidates, and more outreach to Hispanics and women
wouldn’t repair.
But others are coming to the conclusion that the problem
goes deeper than that, to the party’s philosophy and
policies, which are getting further out of step with the
nation.
“Republicans have lost a majority of the popular vote in
five out of the last six elections,†GOP pollster Whit
Ayres said. “There’s a message there. The Republicans
need a new business model, and a new product for the new
century. It’s not just a problem of one candidate or one
campaign.â€
That gloomy assessment is shared even by some of the
GOP’s most ardent ideological warriors.
“We have extraordinarily real and deep problems,â€
former House speaker and 2012 presidential contender Newt
Gingrich said in an interview. “We’re at a serious
point, not a trivial point.â€
The latest test of the weakened party’s philosophy is
playing out now, in negotiations to avoid the “fiscal
cliff.â€
Nothing is more central to GOP self-identity than its drive
to cut taxes. Conservative columnist Robert Novak used to
remark that Republicans were put on this Earth for precisely
that purpose.
The problem for them now is that the American public feels
otherwise, at least when it comes to the breaks for the
wealthy that were enacted under George W. Bush, which Obama
promised to end if he were reelected.
“It may be that a majority of the public, having heard
both sides of the argument, believes that upper-income
people are undertaxed,†Peter Wehner, who was a top
adviser in Bush’s White House, wrote in Commentary magazine. “If
that’s the case, it would be a significant error for
conservatives to assume we simply need to make the same
arguments, only louder, with more passion, and with more
charts and graphs.â€
His column was headlined: “What If Conservatives Have
Lost the Argument?â€
One of the most-heated arguments at the moment is the one
that is raging among Republicans themselves. In the
postmortems following Mitt Romney’s defeat, there are
factions that argue that the party should have presented a
sharper contrast by demanding ideological purity, and others
that say it doomed its nominee by doing exactly that.
“What we got was a weak moderate candidate, hand-picked
by the Beltway elites and country-club establishment wing of
the Republican Party. The presidential loss is unequivocally
on them,†Tea Party Patriots national coordinator Jenny
Beth Martin said in a statement released just moments after
the television networks called the race for President Obama
on election night.
That prompted this retort from pundit Ann Coulter: “The
party’s problem now runs more along the lines of moron
showoffs, trying to impress tea partyers like Jenny Beth
Martin.â€
Many say the party will not start winning again until it
starts looking for who to bring in, rather than who to
exclude.
“The party needs to fundamentally retool our thinking.
And to me, the biggest problem we have is our dismal
primaries, and the litmus testing that goes on there, and
all the money and all the groups that are there to divide
Republicans from Republicans,†said Joe Straus, speaker of the Texas
House of Representatives.
Last Monday, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince
Priebus launched what he promised will be a top-to-bottom
review, which he called the Growth and Opportunity Project, that
would include “mechanics, data, messaging, our coalition
groups and our outreach.†But he insisted the party’s
basic philosophy remains a sound one.
“If you look at the polling, 35 percent of the American
people consider themselves conservative and 20 percent
consider themselves liberal,†Priebus said. “We have
natural advantages as far as the principles of the
Republican Party — limited government and freedom and
opportunity.â€
But the polls also say that on the specifics of nearly
every major policy question, Republicans are positioned
against the tide of public opinion — on taxing the rich
and maintaining entitlement programs, on same-sex marriage,
on whether climate change is real and manmade, on whether
illegal immigrants should be given a path to citizenship.
“We need to find a way to make our core principles make
sense to voters who are part of a changing demographic,â€
said Ying Ma, 37, a Chinese immigrant and
conservative activist in California. “One of the reasons
all of these government goodies are so appealing is people
don’t believe they can make it any other way.â€
All that is why recent weeks have seen some of the
party’s rising stars road-testing more
compassionate themes that could have a broader
appeal.
At a Dec. 4 dinner, 2012
vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin
congressman, said both parties “tend to divide Americans
into our voters and their voters. Let’s be really clear:
Republicans must steer very clear of that trap. We must
speak to the aspirations and the anxieties of every
American.†It was an unsubtle contrast with running mate
Romney’s now-infamous suggestions that Obama supporters
were government-dependent freeloaders.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), speaking at the same event,
struck a similar theme.
Even more striking are some of the recent comments by
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, newly installed as chairman of
the Republican Governors Association and frequently
mentioned as a 2016 presidential contender.
When Romney after the election blamed his loss on the “giftsâ€
that Obama had offered young people, African Americans and
Hispanics, Jindal blasted the 2012 standard-bearer as
“absolutely wrong. . . . We need to continue to show
how our policies help every voter out there achieve the
American dream, which is to be in the middle class.â€
On Tuesday, Jindal gave an address at the Brookings
Institution that blasted teachers unions — a
familiar GOP target — but also noted: “It is completely
dishonest to pretend today that America provides equal
opportunity in education. We do not. And if you say that we
do, you are lying.â€
On Friday, an op-ed by Jindal appeared in the Wall Street
Journal advocating selling birth control pills over the
counter, as a means of taking “contraception out of the
political arena.â€
If there is a model for what confronts Republicans today,
it may well be the self-doubt and battles of the Democrats
in the late 1980s after three presidential defeats in a row.
In 1989, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck of the centrist
Progressive Policy Institute wrote a controversial paper
diagnosing the Democrats’ ills. Much of what they wrote
could apply to what Republicans are going through today: The
Democrats were captive of “liberal fundamentalism.†They
blamed their candidates for lacking charisma. They believed
that their answer was matching the GOP’s technological
edge (in those days, direct mail) and its get-out-the-vote
operation. They were losing the young. Their values were not
in line with the country’s.
“Once Bill Clinton ran in 1992, we actually had a
political center,†recalled Kamarck, who is a lecturer at
Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
“But creating a new Democratic brand was a process that
took several years, and also some luck.â€
In Clinton’s case, that luck included the decision of New
York Gov. Mario Cuomo, a liberal icon, not to run for the
1992 Democratic nomination, and businessman Ross Perot’s
third-party candidacy splitting the vote in November.
In Greencastle, local party Chairman Dwight Weidman
expressed confidence that his party will also find its way
back. But first, Weidman said, “there’s going to be a
really tough discussion in the Republican Party.â€
