Republicans in the Wilderness: Is the Party Over?

On Sun, 10 May 2009 13:59:56 -0700 (PDT), Too_Many_Tools <...@yahoo.com

Republicans are screwed.

TMT

Republicans in the Wilderness: Is the Party Over?
By MICHAEL GRUNWALD Michael Grunwald Thu May 7, 1:00 pm ET

These days, Republicans have the desperate aura of an endangered
species. They lost Congress, then the White House; more recently, they
lost a slam-dunk House election in a conservative New York district,
then Senator Arlen Specter. Polls suggest that only one-fourth of the
electorate considers itself Republican, that independents are trending
Democratic and that as few as five states have solid Republican
pluralities. And the electorate is getting less white, less rural,
less Christian - in short, less demographically Republican. GOP
officials who completely controlled Washington three years ago are
vowing to "regain our status as a national party" and creating woe-is-
us groups to resuscitate their brand, while Democrats are publishing
books like The Strange Death of Republican America and 40 More Years:
How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation. John McCain's
campaign manager recently described his party as basically extinct on
the West Coast, nearly extinct in the Northeast and endangered in the
Mountain West and Southwest.

So are the Republicans going extinct? And can the death march be
stopped? The Washington critiques of the Republican Party as
powerless, leaderless and rudderless - the new Donner party - are not
very illuminating. Minority parties always look weak and inept in the
penalty box. Sure, it can be comical to watch Republican National
Committee (RNC) gaffe machine Michael Steele riff on his hip-hop
vision for the party or Texas Governor Rick Perry carry on about
secession or Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann explain how
F.D.R.'s "Hoot-Smalley" Act caused the Depression (the Smoot-Hawley
Act, a Republican tariff bill, was enacted before F.D.R.'s
presidency), but haplessness does not equal hopelessness. And yes, the
Republican brand could benefit from spokesmen less familiar and less
reviled than Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich, but the party
does have some fresher faces stepping out of the wings. (Read seven
clues to understanding Dick Cheney.)

The Democratic critiques of the GOP - that it's the Party of No, or No
Ideas - are not helpful either. It's silly to fault an opposition
party for opposition; obstructionism helped return Democrats to power.
Republicans actually have plenty of ideas.

That's the problem. The party's ideas - about economic issues, social
issues and just about everything else - are not popular ideas. They
are extremely conservative ideas tarred by association with the
extremely unpopular George W. Bush, who helped downsize the party to
its extremely conservative base. A hard-right agenda of slashing taxes
for the investor class, protecting marriage from gays, blocking
universal health insurance and extolling the glories of waterboarding
produces terrific ratings for Rush Limbaugh, but it's not a majority
agenda. The party's new, Hooverish focus on austerity on the brink of
another depression does not seem to fit the national mood, and it's
shamelessly hypocritical, given the party's recent history of massive
deficit spending on pork, war and prescription drugs in good times,
not to mention its continuing support for deficit-exploding tax cuts
in bad times.

As the party has shrunk to its base, it has catered even more to its
base's biases, insisting that the New Deal made the Depression worse,
carbon emissions are fine for the environment and tax cuts actually
boost revenues - even though the vast majority of historians,
scientists and economists disagree. The RNC is about to vote on a
kindergartenish resolution to change the name of its opponent to the
Democrat Socialist Party. This plays well with hard-core culture
warriors and tea-party activists convinced that a dictator-President
is plotting to seize their guns, choose their doctors and put ACORN in
charge of the Census, but it ultimately produces even more shrinkage,
which gives the base even more influence - and the death spiral
continues. "We're excluding the young, minorities, environmentalists,
pro-choice - the list goes on," says Olympia Snowe of Maine, one of
two moderate Republicans left in the Senate after Specter's switch.
"Ideological purity is not the ticket to the promised land."

Some conservatives think that in the long run, the party will be
better off without squishes like Specter muddling the coherence of its
brand; a GOP campaign committee celebrated his departure with an e-
mail headlined "Good riddance," and Limbaugh urged him to take McCain
along. Inside this echo chamber, a center-right nation punished
Republicans for abandoning their principles, for enabling Bush's
spending sprees, for insufficient conservatism. South Carolina
Governor Mark Sanford, who has refused to accept $700 million in
stimulus cash for his state despite bitter opposition from his GOP-
dominated legislature, argues that Chick-fil-A would never let its
franchisees cook their chicken however they want; why should the
Republican Party let its elected officials promote Big Government?
"We're essentially franchisees, and right now nobody has any clue what
we're really about," Sanford tells TIME. "You can't wear the jersey
and play for the other team!" (See pictures from the view of the floor
of the DNC.)

No one seems to deny that many Republicans abandoned their principles
- especially fiscal responsibility - while in power, but even some
across-the-board conservatives see enforced homogeneity as a sure path
to oblivion. "Chick-fil-A can get fabulously wealthy with a 20% market
share," scoffs Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, President Ronald
Reagan's political director. "In our business, you need 50% plus one."
It's probably true that since 200,000 Pennsylvania Republicans have
switched parties, Specter followed them to save his own political
skin, but it's hard to see how the mass exodus bodes well for the GOP.
You can't have a center-right coalition when you've said good riddance
to the center.

Of course, politics can change in a hurry. Three years ago, books like
One Party Country and Building Red America were heralding Rove's plan
to create a permanent Republican majority. President Barack Obama is
popular today, but Democrats in general are not, and they will all
face a backlash if they can't reverse this economic tailspin now that
they own all the Washington machinery. Tom Cole, a longtime Republican
operative turned Oklahoma Congressman, recalls that shortly before the
Reagan Revolution, the GOP was in such dire straits, it ran ads
declaring that Republicans are people too. "We've lost our way, but
we'll find our way back," Cole says. "We'll get back into the idea
business, and the Democrats will overreach."

With his dramatic plans to restructure Wall Street and Detroit,
overhaul health care and create a clean-energy economy, Obama is
certainly taking political risks, even if he hasn't gotten around to
replacing the almighty dollar with some new, one-world currency the
black-helicopter crowd keeps warning about. But it's not clear that
the Republicans in their current incarnation would be a credible
alternative if he falters. "We've got to be at least plausible, and I
worry about that," says GOP lobbyist Ed Rogers. Republicans never
really left the idea business, but Americans haven't been buying what
they're selling, and their product line hasn't changed. They're
starting to look like the Federalists of the early 19th century: an
embittered, over-the-top, out-of-touch regional party en route to
extinction, doubling down on dogma the electorate has already
rejected. Our two-party system encourages periodic pendulum swings,
but given current trends, it's easy to imagine a third party in the
U.S.

At this rate, it could be the Republican Party.

"What Have We Got to Lose?"
House Republicans, eager to shed the Party of No label, recently
unveiled an alternative to Obama's 2010 budget. It was the kind of
fiasco that shows why Washington thinks Republicans are in trouble -
and why they really are in trouble.

The disaster began when GOP leaders, after calling a news conference
to blast Obama's numbers, released a budget outline with no numbers -
just magic assumptions about "reform." The mockery was instantaneous.
Then Republicans began blaming one another for the stunt, which
generated only more mockery about circular firing squads. And when
they finally released the missing details on April 1, the notion of an
April Fools' budget produced even more mockery; the substance was
ignored. "The President's dog got more attention," recalls Paul Ryan,
the top Republican on the House Budget Committee.

But if you pay attention, the GOP alternative is not just a p.r.
disaster. It's a radical document, making Bush's tax cuts permanent
while adding about $3 trillion in new tax cuts skewed toward the rich.
It would replace almost all the stimulus - including tax cuts for
workers as well as spending on schools, infrastructure and clean
energy - with a capital gains–tax holiday for investors. Oh, and it
would shrink the budget by replacing Medicare with vouchers, turning
Medicaid into block grants, means-testing Social Security and freezing
everything else except defense and veterans' spending for five years,
putting programs for food safety, financial regulation, flu vaccines
and every other sacred government cow on the potential chopping block.

Ryan is one of the smart, young, telegenic policy wonks who have been
hailed as the GOP's future, and his budget includes relatively few the-
Lord-shall-provide accounting gimmicks by D.C. standards. He knows its
potential cuts could sound nasty in a 30-second ad, but he wants
Republicans to stop running away from limited-government principles.
"We've got to stop being afraid of the politics," he says. "At this
point, what have we got to lose?"

Well, more elections. Big Government is never popular in theory, but
the disaster aid, school lunches and prescription drugs that make up
Big Government have become wildly popular in practice, especially now
that so many people are hurting. Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as
Joe the Plumber, tells TIME he's so outraged by GOP overspending, he's
quitting the party - and he's the bull's-eye of its target audience.
But he also said he wouldn't support any cuts in defense, Social
Security, Medicare or Medicaid - which, along with debt payments,
would put more than two-thirds of the budget off limits. It's no
coincidence that many Republicans who voted against the stimulus have
claimed credit for stimulus projects in their district - or that
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal stopped ridiculing volcano-monitoring
programs after a volcano erupted in Alaska. "We can't be the
antigovernment party," Snowe says. "That's not what people want."

Not even in South Carolina, not now. Sanford has gone further than any
other governor in passing up the Democrats' stimulus money, but he's
turning down only 10% of his state's share, about 2% of his state's
spending. He is still being portrayed as Scrooge, a heartless
ideologue who wants to close prisons, fire teachers, shutter programs
for autistic kids and ultimately shut down state government during a
recession. And those portrayals aren't coming from Democrats. "The
governor has one of the most radical philosophies I've ever seen,"
says state senator Hugh Leatherman, 78, the Republican chairman of the
finance committee. "I'm a conservative, but this could be the most
devastating thing our state has ever seen." To Sanford, Leatherman is
a fraudulent Republican franchisee, but to most Republicans in the
legislature, the governor is the one tarnishing the brand. "Most of us
are Ronald Reagan Republicans, Strom Thurmond Republicans," grumbles
Senate majority leader Harvey Peeler. "Republicans control everything
around here. It would be nice if we could accomplish something."

Sanford was once a lonely voice for fiscal restraint in Congress, one
of the few Republican revolutionaries of 1994 who kept faith with the
Contract with America. Back then, his bumper stickers said "Deficit"
with a Ghostbusters-style slash through it, and his apocalyptic
speeches chronicled how debt had destroyed great civilizations like
the Byzantine Empire. I watched him give an updated version at a tea-
party rally in Columbia, S.C., on April 15 as the crowd screamed about
Obama's tyranny and waved signs like "Keep the Government Out of Our
Health Care" and "USA 1776-2009, RIP." Sanford himself is not a
screamer; he's a provocateur. "We've become a party of pastry chefs,
telling people they can eat all the dessert they want," he says. "We
need to become a party of country doctors, telling people that this
medicine won't taste good at all, but you need it."

It's principled leadership, but only the tea-party fringe seems to be
following. "Nobody likes Dr. Doom," Sanford says with a smile. Leading
a state with the nation's third highest unemployment rate, he
understands the Keynesian idea that only government spending can jump-
start a recessionary economy: "I get it. I'm supposed to be
proactive." But if spend-and-borrow is the only alternative to a
depression, he says, "then we're toast."

The Old Issue Set
His party could be too. Hispanics, Asians and blacks are on track to
be the majority in three decades; metropolitan voters and young voters
who skew Democratic are also on the rise. This is why Rogers recently
decided to quit being a talking head: "I had a meeting with myself,
and I said, Do we really need more white lobbyists with gray hair on
TV?" But it's not clear that more diverse spokesmen or better tweets
can woo a new generation to the GOP; support for gay rights is
soaring, and polls show that voters prefer Democratic approaches to
health care, education and the economy. "The outlook for Republicans
is even worse than people think," says Ruy Teixeira, author of The
Emerging Democratic Majority. "Their biggest problem is that they
really believe what they believe."

So Republicans need to decide what Republicans need to believe. What
does their three-legged stool of strong defense, traditional values
and economic conservatism mean today? Does strong defense mean
unqualified support for torture, outdated weapons systems and pre-
emptive wars? Do traditional values mean no room in the tent for pro-
choicers like Specter and Snowe? Even Joe the Plumber - who opposes
abortion and homosexuality and considers America a "Christian nation"
- wants the party to drop its "holier than thou" attitude on divisive
social issues.

The most urgent question is the meaning of economic conservatism.
Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, a conservative who
keeps a bust of Reagan on his desk, surprised me by declaring that the
Reagan era is over. "Marginal tax rates are the lowest they've been in
generations, and all we can talk about is tax cuts," he said. "The
people's desires have changed, but we're still stuck in our old issue
set." Snowe recalls that when she proposed fiscally conservative
"triggers" to limit Bush's tax cuts in case of deficits, she was
attacked by fellow Republicans. "I don't know when willy-nilly tax
cuts became the essence of who we are," she says. "To the average
American who's struggling, we're in some other stratosphere. We're the
party of Big Business and Big Oil and the rich." In the Bush era, the
party routinely sided with corporate lobbyists - promoting tax breaks,
subsidies and earmarks for well-wired industries - against ordinary
taxpayers as well as basic principles of fiscal restraint. South
Carolina Senator Jim DeMint's Republican alternative to the stimulus
included tax cuts skewed toward the wealthy; at this point, the GOP's
reflexes are almost involuntary.

Now that they've lost their monopoly on power, many Republicans are
warning that spending-fueled deficits will cause inflation, reduce
demand for U.S. Treasuries and shaft future generations. They don't
seem so worried about an imminent depression, which would explode
deficits in addition to the shorter-term pain, and their newfound fear
of borrowing has not cooled their ardor for budget-busting tax cuts.
"They talk about fiscal restraint, but they've got an atrocious
record, and they've still got atrocious plans," says Robert Bixby,
executive director of the nonpartisan Concord Coalition.

Still, a 2012 presidential candidate could catch lightning in a
bottle, Reagan-style or Susan Boyle–style - although when you think
about it, Republicans found a nationally admired war hero with proven
bipartisan appeal in 2008, and he lost to an inexperienced black
liberal with a funny name. Outside Washington, moderates like Charlie
Crist in Florida and Jodi Rell in Connecticut as well as pragmatic
conservatives like Mitch Daniels in Indiana and Jon Huntsman in Utah
have remained popular despite their brand. They all share an aversion
to ideological rigidity: Rell signed a bill legalizing same-sex
unions, Crist has pushed an ambitious environmental agenda, Daniels
proposed a tax increase, and Huntsman has cautioned Republicans not to
obsess about social issues.

There's always the chance that some new issue - immigration? Iran? cap
and trade? something nobody has thought of yet? - will blow up and
bring the GOP back to life. Maybe one of the new GOP chin-stroking
groups will come up with some killer new ideas to help the party
reconnect with ordinary Americans. But Republicans know their best
hope for recovery, whether they say it like Limbaugh or merely think
it, is Democratic failure. Now that Democrats control both Congress
and the White House, hubris is a real possibility; it's hard to
imagine Obama floating his pitiful plan to cut $100 million in waste -
a mere 0.0025% of federal spending - if he had to worry about a
formidable opposition.

The problem for Republicans, as the RNC's Steele memorably put it in a
TV appearance, is that there's "absolutely no reason, none, to trust
our word or our actions." Republicans, after all, proclaimed that
President Clinton's tax hikes would destroy the economy, that GOP rule
would mean smaller government, that Bush's tax cuts would usher in a
new era of prosperity; now the House minority leader says it's
"comical" to think carbon dioxide could be harmful, and Steele says
the earth is cooling.

Polls show that most Republicans who haven't jumped ship want the
party to move even further right; it takes vision to imagine a
presidential candidate with national appeal emerging from a GOP
primary in 2012. DeMint, the South Carolina Senator, greeted Specter's
departure with the astonishing observation that he'd rather have 30
Republican colleagues who believe in conservatism than 60 who don't.
"I don't want us to have power until we have principles," DeMint told
TIME after firing up that tea-party crowd in Columbia. Voters
certainly soured on unprincipled Republicans. But it's not clear
they'd like principled Republicans better.