If
she is to be believed, Republicans may have suffered low
turnout on Election Day because their "base" voters were too busy
slopping the hogs and tending their moonshine stills:
In a recent interview [Virginia Republican Rep. Tom Davis]
said, "We've become a regional party, basically become a white,
rural, regional party, and not a national party. And we're
going to have to retool ourselves."
That poses an acute problem considering that rural whites are
an ever-shrinking proportion of the electorate.
We have heard this refrain before -- 10 years ago, from Christopher
Caldwell, as
Jim Antle recently noted. And, considering her assertion that
neither limited government nor social conservatism are effective
issues for Republicans, Rubin's complaint bears a close
resemblance to what
David Brooks argued 11 years ago in urging "national
greatness" as a GOP objective.
This panic-struck reaction to the debacle of 11/4 is what I
sought to forestall in my columns of Nov.
5 and Nov.
12. First, there is the normal tendency of partisans to take
political defeat as a personal rejection: "We are unworthy!"
Second, there is a tendency of intellectuals to believe that
political defeat is the result of one set of ideas defeating
another, requiring that the losers must come up with "new ideas."
So Rubin looks at the results, exit polls and an
Electoral College map that looks very much like the
1996 map and comes to conclusions very similar to those that
Brooks and Caldwell drew from Bob Dole's defeat.
Candidates win or lose elections. Other factors being
equal, good candidates win, and bad candidates lose. This is a
political truism that ideologues and partisans ignore at their
peril. Elections are decided by independent "swing" voters who
are neither ideologues nor partisans. Independents tend to be
disconnected from and ill-informed about the political process.
The political scientist
Samuel Popkin coined the term "low-information rationality"
in an effort to explain how such people make political choices,
but it is clear that these voters act on general
perceptions of candidates and parties -- perceptions that
are sometimes at odds with political reality.
Is the GOP too Southern, too white and too rural? Might that have
something to do with the inarticulate Texas drawler who has been
the face of the Republican Party for the past eight years? And if
the party notably failed this year to connect with younger
voters, might that have something to do with the 72-year-old
presidential nominee?
This is not to minimize either policy failures or the tone and
content of political messages as part of the Republican Party's
problem. But to urge that the GOP abandon both limited government
and social conservatism (jettisoning both Grover
Norquist and James Dobson, as it were) doesn't exactly strike me
as a winning formula. Minus both social and fiscal issues, what
do Republicans have left -- invading foreign countries to promote
global democracy? That's really worked well so far, hasn't it?
Republicans should try to learn a lesson from the Democrats. In
terms of basic political philosophy and policy, Barack Obama is
indistinguishable from Howard Dean. But Obama is charismatic in a
way that Dean was not, and voters in 2008 were sick to death of
Republicans in a way they were not in 2004. After successive
defeats in 2002 and 2004, Democrats kept their powder dry,
improved their game, and were ready to score victories in 2006
and 2008.
Finally, as
Jim Antle pointed out yesterday, Republican "Reformists" -- I
prefer the term "Young Turks," since it is broader and less
ideological -- do themselves no favors by offering criticisms
that sound suspiciously like RINO mating calls. We've already got
one pro-gay-marriage, pro-abortion party, and we've already got
two pro-amnesty parties, so those aren't exactly "new
ideas." Soi-dissant "Reformists" who couch their
criticism in such terms might get published at the New York
Times, but they're unlikely to gain much influence among the
rank-and-file of the GOP.
