Rudderless in post-Gipper America
The GOP chairman candidates in search of a clue
Rudderless in post-Gipper America
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
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Good grief, the Republicans are doing it yet again. Even though they were thrashed in the 2008 election, as well as in the 2006 congressional elections, they still apparently persist in believing that they can resurrect their political fortunes by convincing everyone that it's 1981 and that our clocks are still set on Gipper Standard Time.
Such was the spectacle yesterday, as the six male candidates for the national Republican party chairmanship met in Washington, ostensibly to debate each other, and wound up invoking RonaldReagan 10 times in the first 48 minutes. Somebody please get these guys a compass, for their own sake, and point it toward the future.
This race for the GOP chairmanship, which will culminate three weeks hence in an election engineered by the 168 voting members of the Republican National Committee, provides us with a window into the party's current identity crisis. It is leaderless and rudderless; judging by what I heard yesterday, it clearly wants to reaffirm its conservative values - but it has no idea how to reconnect with the independent swing voters who decisively rejected the GOP in 2006 and 2008.
Whoever wins this job will become the face of the national party, at least for the next couple years. But all six candidates have significant flaws.
The current chairman, Mike Duncan, who's running to keep his job, has already presided over devastating losses, and he's a snooze on TV. Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland, is African-American (unlike roughly 98 percent of the party), and he shows up a lot on Fox News, but the conservatives who dominate the national GOP hierarchy don't like the fact that he was recently the leader of a moderate Republican group that stressed tolerance and outreach. Another contender, Michigan party chairman Saul Anuzis, has some outside-the-box assets (he's a Teamster, he has a goatee, he rides a motorcycle, he can talk to working-class voters), but GOP presidential candidates have been losing Michigan ever since 1992.
There are three more. Ken Blackwell, the longtime African-American pol from Ohio, has a lot of Christian conservative support, but the GOP has had tough times in Ohio lately, as evidenced by Blackwell's disastrous gubernatorial bid in 2006, when he won only 37 percent of the vote. Katon Dawson, the South Carolina chairman, might be a nice choice, if not for the fact that the GOP already is stuck with its image (and growing reality) as the southern white party.
And lastly, we have Chip Saltsman of Tennessee (same regional problem as Dawson), who ran Mike Huckabee's presidential bid, and who most recently distributed the satire song "Barack the Magic Negro" to party members as a Christmas gift - a gesture which will hardly endear him to the minority voters who have been emigrating from the GOP in droves these last few election cycles. (Newt Gingrich has denounced Saltsman's behavior as "so inappropriate that it should disqualify any Republican National Committee candidate who would use it.")
Among these candidates, there seems to be a consensus that George W. Bush screwed up big time. They dislike his fiscal track record - the runaway federal spending, the record deficits - and, when prompted, they said so. Anuzis said, "Big-government conservatism is an oxymoron, and pushing big spending and deficits really damaged the (party) brand." But none of the candidates addressed the key issue, which is whether the GOP can recoup by preaching small-government conservatism...at a time when every poll indicates strong support for more government activism, and a sharp spike since 2004 in voter identification with the Democratic party.
For starters, Republicans need a leader who will practice inclusiveness, and successfully woo minorities and swing voters to the GOP. That's how you win elections. The problem, however, is that the party's conservative base - a major force among the 168 Republican National Committee members - cares more about ideological purity. At yesterday's debate, which was sponsored by the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, the six candidates were asked how many guns they own. The audience murmured with satisfaction when they heard the response: four of the candidates own a combined 22 guns, and a fifth candidate said that he owned too many to count.
Every once in awhile, a candidate said something that was designed to pull Republicans out of their (shrinking) comfort zone. Steele suggested that it's important to reach out more effectively: "We cannot look at folks and say, 'Well, you do not (meet) my litmus test of choices, and therefore I don't want any part of you.' I think at this stage, for this party, everyone who can help us should be brought into the room." Hearing that, Dawson nodded in agreement: "We have practiced the politics of subtraction, not addition...When we become the party of addition, we start winning elections."
Some candidates even acknowledged that the party will be toast for years to come unless they can somehow connect to minorities and young people. That should be obvious; according to the 2008 exit polls (and thanks to the Bush baggage), 45 percent of under-age-30 voters now define themselves as Democrats, while just 26 percent are Republican. And the latest nonpartisan Pew poll reports that the current gap among young voters is even bigger: 61 percent identify themselves as Democratic, only 32 percent as Republican (by contrast, the gap in 2004 was only seven percent). Meanwhile, in terms of the actual '08 voting, only 31 percent of Hispanics and four percent of blacks chose John McCain.
Blackwell spoke yesterday about the importance of "growing a new electorate," and others echoed him. But GOP leaders say this stuff all time; a former party chairman, Bush ally Ken Mehlman, launched a major outreach effort to minorities, traveling extensively to meet with them, and even apologizing for the GOP's various race-coded campaign tactics - all to no avail.
Anuzis lamented yesterday that "we haven't done a very good job of articulating our values," and Saltsman lamented that "we've done a very poor job of communicating who we are and what we believe." But Ken Mehlman was a fine communicator; the real problem was that minorities - and, over the past four years, young people - have wanted no part of what the GOP was selling. (Duncan had a grand idea for how to connect with the kids. Watch out, Democrats, this is real cutting-edge stuff. Here's Duncan: "We have to do it in the Facebook, with the Twittering, the different technology that young people are using today.")
Ultimately, the candidates yesterday articulated their fallback position: somehow the Obama team will screw up, and therein lies the opportunity for a comeback. Dawson talked about how the Democrats will be "overreaching and overpromising...They'll give us the gift of an overreaching, overpowering government that will limit our freedom."
That would certainly allow the GOP to talk about what it is against. But, in an ethnically and racially diverse nation, what does the party stand for? And how will it sell those affirmative principles to an increasingly wary electorate? It will take more than the election of a GOP chairman to sort out that dilemma.
Lame, Richard. More past living. Let's see from the real news happening now area, you have the fiasco with Bill Richardson and the debactle of Il. caused by greed in Il. and Obama himself because they would not endorse a special election out of fear of losing to repubs. Get a pair, Richard.— CD75- OK, I didn't learn much from the postings once NEPhilly listed "smaller government, lower taxes & strong national defense" the conversation seemed to meander to "Safer? Sez who?" So I decided to go to the source: http://www.gop.com/2008Platform/Preamble.htm— Phrossty
- "We offer [our platform] to our fellow Americans in the assurance that our Republican ideals are those that unify our country: Courage in the face of foreign foes. An optimistic patriotism, driven by a passion for freedom. Devotion to the inherent dignity and rights of every person. Faith in the virtues of self-reliance, civic commitment, and concern for one another. Distrust of government’s interference in people’s lives. Dedication to a rule of law that both protects and preserves liberty."— Phrossty
- Who knows if we are safer or not since 9/11? Bush appears to kept the terrorists at bay (not by going to Iraq but on basic terms) and I give him credit for that. However, if another attack happens within the next few months Bush would be as much to blame for it as Clinton was for 9/11. Hopefully Obama will actually listen to his own intelligence organizations and stop it before it happens like Bush could have done in August 2001.— James TL
- Without reading between the lines, all of those ideals appeal to me. Why am I still not persuaded to change my registration? Is it that "foreign foes" smacks of Xenophobia? Is it "optimistic patriotism" sounds like "don't Question Authority?" Was it the Dems accusatory catch phrase that 'Pubs say, "You're on your own" when times are tough is affirmed here by "virtue of self-reliance." Could it be I simply disbelieve the sincerity of "[d]evotion to the inherent dignity and rights of EVERY person." (Emphasis added.) Again, I support all the ideals listed. I'm just not sure the GOP does, particularly the "[d]edication to a rule of law that both protects and preserves liberty" - unless it suits their agenda to impeach the guy or gal from the other side of the aisle.— Phrossty
- Tom, Madoff is the result of no regulation. Some accounting firm needs to take the hit for that. I understand that a very small shop - who should not have been auditing a firm the size of his- was responsible for the green light that he was getting. I'm sure that Tom of Del.LLC is a very competent accounting operation, but you probably shouldn't be the corporate accountant for GE.— JimR
- JTL, what was Bush supposed to do after that NIE, go to Logan airport and screen everyone getting on a flight? The NIE I wrote about below proves we are safer, at least the experts think so''We assess that greatly increased worldwide counterterrorism efforts over the past 5 years have constrained the ability of Al Qaeda to attack the US Homeland again and have led terrorist groups to perceive the Homeland as a harder target to strike than on 9/11. These measures have helped disrupt known plots against the US since 9/11' http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20070717_release.pdf— NEPhilly
- Phrossty, I'm sure i could go through the 2008 Dem platform and pick info out and put my conservative spin on it. If you read the words and not add the spin, it is a very honorable platform.— NEPhilly
- I agree. My conundrum is why aren't the honorable ideals evident in the stump speeches (or devotees' postings)?? I'm sure it's true of both sides. I've been taught this lesson here before, but didn't learn it thoroughly. I should do my homework BEFORE posting. If I really wanted to know what the GOP stood for, I could look it up rather than ask a bunch of political junkie idealogues on a chat board. It's just more fun to engage in the (probably ill-informed) debate as opposed to doing research. I mean if everyone did the research, then Roger Daltry would be right. But it seems we always get fooled again.— Phrossty
- True that:) Maybe the next Repub candidate in 2012 can express him/her-self and the party's ideals better than Mr. McCain could:) I'll see you on the next board:)— NEPhilly
- I didn't expect Bush to got to Logan himself but he had many people at his disposal and seemed to do nothing about the intelligence reports. I'm not sure whether or not we will ever get a true accounting of what happened in the months prior to 9/11. It's becoming ancient history now and the fact is there haven't been any attacks on this country after that (except fot the anthrax thing that seems to have all but disappeared). I'll give Bush credit for that.— James TL
Cited by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the nation's top political reporters, and lauded by the ABC News political website as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation," Dick Polman is a national political columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as "writer in residence." Dick has been a frequent guest on C-Span, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and the BBC. He covered the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential campaigns.
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