Give Barack Obama credit for this much: he’s made “change” such a
popular buzzword that even Republicans want a piece of the
action.
Candidates for chairman of the Republican National Committee wrap
themselves in the mantle of change. A supporter of former Ohio
Secretary of State Ken Blackwell urged “members of the RNC who
are supporting other ‘change’ candidates” to vote for his man. A
Washington Post political blogger
says former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele is the candidate
of change.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also
agrees that his party needs to “change” and “adapt” if he is
ever going to become majority leader again. McConnell supports
the incumbent RNC chair, Mike Duncan, who presumably also likes
change.
This political environment prompted political writer David
Frum to make a change as well. At the beginning of the Obama
administration, he shut down his blog on National Review
Online — where he’d been standing athwart his colleagues on
such topics as the vice-presidential candidacy of Sarah Palin —
and set up shop at a website called the New Majority. This new site is
“dedicated to the reform and renewal of the Republican party and
the conservative movement” as well as “building a conservatism
that can win again.”
Frum and his fellow New Majoritarians are particularly
concerned about the
shrinking Republican base. Just five years after
some polls found parity between Republicans and Democrats,
Gallup has determined that Democrats now outnumber Republicans by
the biggest margin since 1983. Frum
concludes, “The news is so very bad that there will be only
one possible response from our party leadership and our radio
talkers: Ignore it.”
It would indeed be folly for a political party to ignore the fact
that only 28 percent of the American people identify with it. The
trouble with the New Majority, however, is that the site’s
contributors are often more specific about what’s wrong with that
28 percent than about the kind of voters Republicans can win.
Don’t expand the GOP — dissolve the party and elect another.
Perusing the site, one learns that “rigid social-issues
conservatives” are “the primary internal obstacle to Republican
renewal nationally.” Or that social conservatives, the largest
single voting bloc in the GOP, are disloyal Republicans on
account of a few
contrarian bloggers. (By the way, when did “peacefully
annexing Mexico” become part of the Republican platform?) Or that
we should be
worried when the Today Show says House Republicans
voted against the stimulus plan because it didn’t contain enough
tax cuts.
The last bit is a reader comment rather than a blog post, but it
nevertheless shows a representative mindset at work: “Now imagine
if the GOP did not have such a knee-jerk opposition to spending
and actually thought strategically. The lede could have been
‘Republicans voted against the measure because it did not include
enough large infrastructure projects and lacked imagination.’”
Yes, that’s definitely what the Today Show would have
said about it.
Although former FCC chairman Michael Powell appeared on the site
to
lament the Republican Party’s lack of racial diversity — in
an entry that contained more general complaints about the GOP’s
fuddy-duddiness than specific policy proposals — the
constituencies the New Majority seems most aimed at are white,
educated, upper-middle-class voters in the Northeast. Republicans
need to move on from the Southern-fried
“Bush/Cheney/Rove/DeLay-era” and replace it with the moderate
Republicanism of
Henry Stimson.
In other words, we need a Republican Party that can win
Greenwich, Connecticut and Lincoln, Massachusetts again: Meet the
new majority, same as the
old majority. Or the old minority, actually. When the GOP had
its Rockefellers and Saltonstalls and Lindsays, Republicans lost
most elections. The level to which Republicans are now sinking
was the norm for the pre-Reagan Republican Party.
More recently, Chris Shays, Sue Kelly, Lincoln Chafee, Jim
Leach, and Connie Morella were not purged from the party by
censorious, single-issue conservatives. They were thrown out of
office by their own voters. Chafee, like Arlen Specter an
election cycle before him, beat a conservative in the primary.
The most liberal Republican senator went on to win 94 percent of
Republicans and 74 percent of conservatives that November. But he
was defeated just like his more conservative colleagues.
Perhaps, then, the problem is the Republican Party’s intolerant
conservative national brand. Except the GOP of the 1990s — with
leaders like Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay — were
more socially conservative and more antigovernment in their
rhetoric than the Republicans of the dreaded Bush era. And still
the Northeast elected Rudy Giuliani in New York City, George
Pataki in New York State, Bill Weld in Massachusetts, Tom Ridge
in Pennsylvania, Lincoln Almond in Rhode Island, John Rowland in
Connecticut, and Christine Todd Whitman in New Jersey. All were
pro-choice social liberals, though Giuliani, Weld, and Whitman
emphasized their conservative credentials on taxes, balanced
budgets, crime, and welfare.
What did Republicans left, right, and center have in common in
the 1990s that all party factions lack now? Back then, the GOP
could run against entrenched Democratic majorities that had
governed badly. Now, fairly or unfairly, George W. Bush is
regarded as a presidential failure of almost Carter-like
proportions. The Iraq war, unpopular even after the surge, is one
of the biggest reasons for the aura of Republican failure. Yet
the war is seldom questioned on the New Majority, suggesting that
at least some issues are above political considerations.
The New Majority massages the prejudices of its intended audience
— the independent voters
described by John Avlon as “fiscally conservative, socially
progressive and strong on national security” — as much as Rush
Limbaugh or Ann Coulter play to theirs. It is frustrating to see
commentators with
so much to say about policy waste their talents on politics,
trying to build a new majority by insulting the old one.
