A National Party or a Regional One?
That’s the question Ross Douthat’s column doesn’t ask explicitly about the GOP’s future. But it’s a key question. Can the GOP compete at all in the Northeast? Is there any role for the region in the national party’s future?
The “New Democrats” and “neoliberals” that Ross refers to were concerned with many things, from questions of policy to questions of marketing, but one of the key things they were concerned with was being competitive nationally, and particularly in the South, the region that was most dramatically trending in a Republican direction. Leading lights included Tennessee Senator Al Gore and Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. The “Super-Tuesday” primary was designed for the 1988 election to insure that the nominee was acceptable to the Southern electorate (and wound up delivering Michael Dukakis: go figure). Even as they made gains in traditionally Republican-leaning regions (California favored Bush Sr. by a much narrower margin than the nation as a whole in 1988, a far cry from 1976 when the state went for Gerald Ford while the election went to Jimmy Carter), the Democrats (other than John Kerry) understood that ceding an entire section of the country was dangerous folly.
Do the Republicans see things that way today? I don’t really think so. The national party would, of course, like to keep as many votes as it can. But other than trying to hang on to the Snowes and Specters, it’s not at all clear to me that the GOP has any strategy for competing in the Northeast. The reformers who have played well to Ross – Pawlenty, most prominently, but also Jindal, and to some extent Huckabee – are all basically solid social conservatives who don’t take an especially hard ideological line on the role of government and who position themselves as pragmatic problem-solvers interested in the problems of a family of four earning $50-75,000 per year, and not just the problems of big corporations and the wealthy. Ross is right that these guys don’t add up to a faction, but I’m making a different point: guys in this mold are not going to be competitive in Maryland, in New Jersey, in Connecticut. Nor are they going to be competitive in California. And once you’ve conceded the Northeast and the West Coast, the road to either 270 electoral votes or 51 Senate seats looks mighty steep.
I’m not making the argument that the GOP needs to throw the social conservatives overboard in order to be nationally competitive. I am saying, though, that a party that isn’t nationally competitive isn’t going to win national power except on a fluke. Not that long ago, people like Rudy Giuliani, Pete Wilson and Bill Weld were considered part of the big tent. I have disagreements with all three of them, politically, as does Ross – and they have disagreements with each other. But none of them was cut from the cloth of Specter or Jeffords. Look at what the ambition to be viable to the national GOP did to Mitt Romney, who once looked like a pretty decent governor.
Gore and Clinton were not the equivalents of Breaux or Tauzin; they were the vanguard of their party, not its rear guard with an eye on the exit. But Senator Al Gore was a lot friendlier to tobacco interests than your average Democrat. Governor Clinton was a lot more pro-death-penalty than your average Democrat. What does a GOP candidate aiming to be competitive in New York but have the support of and the potential to rise within the national Republican Party look like? In the last national election, the answer was: somebody who is willing to invoke 9-11 at every turn, “double Guantanamo” and prepare the country for a 100-year occupation of Iraq. I don’t think Ross thinks that’s the way forward. So: what is?
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— runescape powerleveling · May 6, 02:02 AM · #
You are asking the right question. Now consider Minnesota to Pennsylvania sans Indiana. While that area is easier for the GOP to reverse, the Democrats are making more of the Statewide offices noncompetitive. My own advice to the GOP would be to focus more on labor and try to move from 40-45ish to 70-75ish. I think it would be the easiest demograph to add at this point.
— Badger · May 6, 02:31 AM · #
but isn’t the repub. situation not as dire as the dem one was? after all, new england doesn’t have that many electoral votes. depending on how you define it the south includes 40% of the american population. the dems won it for cleveland and wilson by holding the solid south and picking off a few non-southern states between the civil war and FDR. i think the repubs can ignore new england, and probably assume minority status in the mid-atlantic and the far west. they start with a solid base in the rockies & the south. so the real battleground is the midwest. so just nominate a midwestern governor and you might be able to even the playing field a lot.
— razib · May 6, 02:55 AM · #
Douthat’s column was total bullsh^t. He’s writing from the point of a conservative who turns to Moderates and tells them how to be good, docile, and useful to the conservative cause. But most Moderates, as I know them and as I conceive myself to be, have not been, are not, and don’t aspire to be a part of the conservative movement, or movement conservatism. They like to vote Republican, notably for House Rep, or at the local level, because compared to the Democrats, GOP candidates come off as more reasonable and rooted in the real world of meeting the bottom-line. Key words for them are reasonable and common sense.
Like Souter’s explanation of his philosophy. He aspired for reasonableness.
Reasonablenes has always been something foreign & strange to the ears of orthodoxy. I think Douthat would have the utmost difficulty in understanding John Locke’s “The Reasonableness of Christianity” since, like the good classical Liberal he was, Locke eschewed doctrinal thinking and aspired to an understanding of his own faith which both drew from reason and recognized the limits of reason.
When looking at Souter, a conservative like Douthat looks for the result of his decision and asks the question, “did Souter’s voice further the conservative cause?”
A good Yankee Republican would wonder about the manner, the epistemology, of Souter’s reading of the constitution.
Its Douthat & company who are more like liberals in Ginsburg’s mold. For a conservative like Douthat, the decision of any case brought before the SCOTUS is a foregone conclusion. The constitution is made to conform to a pre-fab, conservative ideal (with emphasis on the “social” & religious end). This is of likekind to the doctrinal liberalism of RB Ginsburg & co. who would want to make the constitution conform to their own vision .
The problem with guys like Douthat & other conservatives is that, for them, there can only be one definition of what constitutes “big tent” GOP – namely, their definition, the conservative definition. For them, the conservatives are to both set and own the agenda and determine what kind of Moderate can be allowed in.
Moderates aren’t going to disappear. and they’ll even remain in droves in the Northeast. So long as there are Democrats – be they leftist, liberal or even “right-of-center” – who screw things up when in office and abuse their power, and so long as there are reasonable people who reject such shenanigans, there will always be Moderate Republicans.
— JB · May 6, 11:38 AM · #
It’s funny you should mention Weld, because he was really the guy I thought of reading Douthat’s column. It’s really amazing what a big shadow Weld cast: he turned the governorship Republican at a time when nobody thought that that was possible (so much so that even though his opponent was the psychotic John Silber I remember Silber’s election was seen as a foregone conclusion in many quarters). But he also made that position solidly Republican in a way that survived dead hands (Cellucci, Swift) in the office, and really Romney was supposed to be — and should have been, was elected on a mandate to be — Weld 2.0. Weld effected a kind of Bay State-limited Reagan Revolution and some of that — e.g. school choice — had national echoes. The Democrats fell over htemselves trying to emulate him, running three Weld clones against him (Bachrach was never a Weld clone, mind you — but Mark Roosevelt was.) I think Douthat goes way wrong there when he critiques the Northeastern Republicans: they’re not Rockefeller Republicans (whatever that even means nowadays), they’re Weld republicans: and Weld was hardly mushy: there was definitely an ideology there, and although Bill Clinton might’ve been closer to it than any other major pol, well, it’s hard to imagine Bill Weld switching parties either. So I think JB gets this one wrong too: the Northeastern Republican was in a sense an ideologue.
And the thing is, the ascendant Republicans purity-tested and booted him. So I think these guys are screwed, and have been for a long time.
@Razib: yes, there’s few electoral votes, but they’re the smartest ones.
— Sanjay · May 6, 01:39 PM · #
JB – You weaken your case considerably by talking about Souter as a moderate. He and Ginsberg were the justices that voted together most frequently (even more than Scalia/Thomas), and I’ve never heard anyone claim Ginsberg was conservative. What kind of Republican appointee waits until 100 days into a Democrat president’s turn to retire? Souter was and is a liberal, not a moderate. Moreover, the idea that conservatives have some idea about how cases will be decided in a way liberals don’t is laughable on its face, as the Souter/Ginsberg voting together numbers suggest. You seem to be confusing your agreement with some of Souter’s positions with ‘moderation’.
— jlr · May 6, 02:08 PM · #
We need a candidate like Pete Wilson.
— Felipe · May 6, 03:17 PM · #
Jack Balkin actually had a good piece a while ago, pointing out how silly this “Republican party in peril” meme is.
Obviously Douthat has to justify his existence, which he does by making up ideological strategies for the Republicans to follow. But most of that is pretty pointless. Here are some basic political rules. If the president starts a war that lasts more than four years, his party will lose power (there have been no exceptions in my lifetime). The party that holds the presidency when a recession starts will lose power in the next election (depending on how you measure, you might find an exception in my lifetime, but not many). It is very, very difficult for one party to hold the presidency for more than eight years (there has been one exception in my lifetime). And, what is more and most of all, there is no ideological strategy so brilliant and powerful that it could permit a political party to overcome the foregoing three rules.
— y81 · May 6, 03:30 PM · #
Noah: I don’t think Ross thinks that’s the way forward. So: what is?
The party of technocrats?
— Sargent · May 6, 04:50 PM · #
Ross Douthat’s nyt photo has a spot on the bridge of the nose. I really enjoy his writing – but could Noah or Reihan have a word with Ross so as to get this photoshopped. It’s just so distracting.
— distracted · May 6, 07:33 PM · #
It’s amazing that the issue isn’t framed this way more often. In a two party system both parties must necessarily be broad coalitions to be successful. The issue isn’t so much “which vision for the GOP,” but, rather, “which coalition?”
— LarryM · May 6, 08:48 PM · #
Here’s how the Republican Party saves itself and (maybe eventually) wins the Northeast. (Note: more comprehensible if you read Shakespeare).
Romney ’08 = Prince Hal
Right wing kooks = Falstaff
President Romney = Henry V
Next problem to solve?
— Woodrow · May 12, 03:57 AM · #