The Republican Party needs a reality check
By _Michael Gerson_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/michael-gerson/2011/02/24/ABocMYN_page.html) ,
Feb 22, 2013 01:17 AM EST
The Washington Post
Published: February 21, 2013
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In the summer of 1999, George W. Bush chose the first major policy speech
of his presidential campaign to pick a fight with Grover Norquist. Bush
flatly rejected the “destructive” view “that if government would only get out
of our way, all our problems would be solved” — a vision the Texas
governor dismissed as having “no higher goal, no nobler purpose, than leave us
alone.”
Norquist had proposed to define conservatism as the “leave us alone”
coalition — a movement united by a desire to get government off our backs. Bush
countered that “the American government is not the enemy of the American
people.”
Ed Crane, then the president of the libertarian Cato Institute, said the
speech sounded as if it had been written by someone “_moonlighting for
Hillary Rodham Clinton_
(http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/clintonesque-george-bush) .” I can
formally deny that charge. But the Bush campaign was
purposely attempting to alter the image of the Republican Party. And the
party — rendered more open to change by eight years in the presidential
wilderness — gave Bush the leeway to make necessary ideological adjustments.
It is the nature of resilient institutions to take stock of new realities
and adjust accordingly. In a new _cover essay for Commentary magazine_
(http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/how-to-save-the-republican-party/) ,
Peter Wehner and I detail the examples of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
Clinton broke a long Democratic presidential losing streak by emphasizing
middle-class values, advocating the end of “welfare as we know it” and
standing
up to extreme elements within his coalition (thereby creating the “Sister
Souljah moment”). In Britain, Blair went after the “moral chaos” that led
to youth crime, abandoned his party’s official commitment to public
ownership of the means of production and launched New Labor.
The Republican Party now needs similar transformation. Out of the past six
presidential elections, four have gone to the Democratic nominee, at an
average yield of 327 electoral votes to 211 for the Republican. During the
preceding two decades, from 1968 to 1988, Republicans won five out of six
elections, averaging 417 electoral votes to Democrats’ 113.
This stunning reversal of electoral fortunes has taken place for a variety
of reasons: changing demographics; the end of a GOP foreign policy
advantage during the Cold War; a serious gap in candidate quality; the
declining
relevance of economic policies that seem better suited to the 1980s; and an
occasionally deserved reputation for being judgmental and censorious.
A full Republican appreciation of these disturbing fundamentals was delayed
by the 2010 midterms, in which an unreconstructed anti-government message
seemed to be riding a wave. Just two years later came that wave’s
withdrawing roar. The Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, lost by 5 million votes
to a
beatable incumbent presiding over an anemic economy. The explanation is not
purely technical or personality oriented. At the national level,
Republicans have a winning message for a nation that no longer exists.
In retrospect, last year’s Republican primary process was entirely
disconnected from the actual needs of the party. One candidate pledged to build
a
20-foot-high electrical fence at the border crowned with the sign, in
English and Spanish, “It will kill you — Warning.” Another promised, as
president, to speak out against the damage done to American society by
contraception. Another warned that vaccinations may cause “mental
retardation.” In the
course of 20 debates and in tens of millions of dollars of ads, issues
such as upward mobility, education, poverty, safer communities and the
environment were rarely mentioned.
A Republican recovery in presidential politics will depend on two factors.
First, candidates will need to do more than rebrand existing policy
approaches or translate them into Spanish. Some serious rethinking is
necessary,
particularly on economic matters. In our Commentary essay, we raise ideas
such as ending corporate welfare, breaking up the mega-banks, improving the
treatment of families in the tax code, and encouraging economic mobility
through education reform and improved job training. Whatever form Republican
proposals eventually take, they must move beyond Reagan-era nostalgia.
Second, Republican primary voters, party activists and party leaders have a
choice to make, ruthlessly clarified by recent events. They can take the
path of Democrats in 1988, doubling down on a faltering ideology. Or they
can follow the model of Democrats in 1992 and their own party in 2000, giving
their nominee the leeway needed to oppose outworn or extreme ideas and to
produce an agenda relevant to our time.
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