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.â€
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,
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 momentâ€). 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.
