After
five hours Thursday night and five
hours Friday at the Capitol Hilton covering the contest for
chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, I'm just about
OD'd on the RNC.
My source who predicted Mike Duncan to have 55 votes on the first
ballot was very near the mark. The two state party chairmen
who said Thursday they liked Steele's chances were prescient, so
I wish I hadn't taken their predictions with a grain of salt.
My belief that the all-star conservative endorsements for
Ken Blackwell could make him a favorite proved woefully
misguided. The thing about an RNC election is that there are only
168 voters, whose preferences are idiosyncratic and
influenced by factors (including personal friendships) that are
opaque to any outsider. Blackwell's
endorsements from Steve Forbes, Ed Meese,
Brent Bozell, David Keene, et al., which seemed so
impressive to me and others, simply did not penetrate the opaque
loyalties of the voting members.
This suggests a clear disconnect between the
operational mechanism of the GOP and the institutional
apparatus of the conservative movement. I don't think it is
"a
deliberate affront to the conservative movement," to use
Quin's phrase. Rather, I think that the people who are doing the
day-to-day work of the Republican Party simply don't pay any
attention to anything outside their particular operational focus.
What Bozell does at the MRC or what Meese does at Heritage
doesn't have anything tangible to do with canvassing
precincts or recruiting candidates or running
volunteer phone-banks. And so the names of these movement
leaders conjure no particular magic among RNC people.
As much as I'd like to ponder at length the phenomenon of
the GOP/conservative disconnect, or contemplate the significance
of the 77 votes for Katon Dawson on the final ballot, my synapses
are too frayed for any serious thinking now. If anybody else
has some unfatigued brain cells they'd like to apply to
these Big Picture questions, please have at it.
UPDATE:
Dan Riehl weighs in on the conservative movement:
In my opinion, they are Old School as organizations,
more DC-esque than grassroots now and suck up too many
valuable resources, some of which would probably serve the
GOP better in younger, fresher hands. And I say that as no
youngster myself.
There may be a problem of what I call institutional
inertia. Institutions over time develop patterned ways of
doing things -- institutional habits -- that are not
necessarily the only way to do things nor the best way to do
things. These habits become embedded, and are resistant to
reform.
You see this, for example, in the public school system: If the
current system did not already exist, no one seeking to
develop an ideal system would create anything like what we have
now. But institutional inertia causes the system to
fiercely resist reform, so those who don't like what the
system offers eventually just walk away. (I'm a homeschooling
dad.)
It is troubling to think that the conservative
movement may be an example of the same principle
of organizational dynamics at work. I know that the folks at
Heritage, etc., have worked hard to maintain their relevance
(e.g., adapting their output for online consumption) so I'm not
ready to write them off as dinosaur fossils. But reform and
innovation take time.
