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The Leaderless Republican Implosion
A funny thing happened on the way to Michael Steele's Republican resurgence - Kevin Stevenson lost his job.
Here he was, a spokesperson for the Marathon County Republican Party for -- years, a hard working good Republican not in lockstep with Obama and yet he was fired - for criticizing Rush Limbaugh and being a moderate!
Mr. Steele must be feeling like a jinxed aerialist.
You see, this is paranoia mode. How does a party in a paranoid state deal with adversity? It crawls deeper into itself, and even though that paranoia was the seed of it's destruction, the party clings to it all the more to the self-destructive exclusion of any other outlook that mlght save it.
The hardcore party members say to the moderates, "We have the canon of the party! We are the pure, who damn the unbelievers! Moderates are back stabbers, and weak-willed fellow travelers!"
Limbaugh:We have a really huge tent in California, right?' Limbaugh said on his show. 'I mean, Schwarzenegger describing how to put the Republican Party together after helping destroy the state. And you know how he helped destroy the state? He fell for his own talk about big tents. If he would have just stayed the course that he was talking about when he announced his candidacy on Leno and when he had all these people out there to start his administration, when he was on the conservative path, he could have taken this by the gangbusters and maybe gotten the Supreme Court to change the Constitution so that foreigners could run for president. He had that opportunity, and he blew it big time going moderate.
So, on the one hand, it's okay to accuse the President of not being bipartisan, but on the other, if you're a Republican trying to be bipartisan, the Limbaugh Taliban will pick you apart! Not quite the way to attract the lndies!
Maybe Obama gauged this intollerance well as he chose to pursue a fifty state strategy during the election. He separated out the Indies from the GOP. Independents must be really disgusted with the ideologically pure Right and the GOP politicians who all but ceded leadership of the party to it. How disgusted are moderates and Independents with the Right Wing mafia?
USA Today and the Gallop company
So the dominant faces of the Republican Party are all men, all white, all conservative and all old enough to join AARP, ranging in age from 58 (Limbaugh) to 72 (McCain). They include some of the country's most strident voices on issues from Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court to President Obama's policies at home and abroad. Two are retired from politics, and one has never been a candidate. came out with a report that broke down the demography of the GOP's public image, give demography and compared it to the present "leadership" of the GOP. Would the present leaders resurrect the GOP?
Only McCain holds elective office, and his age and status as the loser of last year's presidential election make him an unlikely standard bearer for the party's future.
And Indies would be - alienated.
But what about the moderates who are left in the party? Aren't they restless enough now to finally take a stand and wrest control from the ideologues who tyrannize them?
Obama is going after the low - hanging fruit of the disillusioned moderates and poaching Spector, Huntsman and others from the GOP. And they are listening:
The Washington Examiner:
The Republican strategist who helped Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman prepare for a possible presidential run says the Republican party is in for a devastating defeat if its guiding lights are Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney. 'If it's 2012 and our party is defined by Palin and Limbaugh and Cheney, then we're headed for a blowout," says strategist John Weaver, who advised Huntsman and was for years a close adviser to Sen. John McCain. "That's just the truth.'
That leaves the wide-open GOP presidential field even more open than it had been before. Whatever happens, the way forward won't likely be smooth; Weaver's 'headed for a blowout' comment indicates the depth of division over the GOP's prospects. 'I firmly believe that Huntsman and people like him are the prescription for what ails us,' says Weaver. 'But I have the feeling that our party maybe won't order that prescription in 2012.
In my opinion, either the Republican party will renew itself or implode. Something tells me its going to be the latter. And it will be a quiet implosion.
The Right won't go easily. They have the money, and enough of a base to be a regional party. However in places like New York State, New England and California, l'm sure enough people will be so disgusted as to bolt.
What the Right doesn't understand, is that by shoring up the base to the exclusion of everyone else, they are ceding the opportunity to expand it. According to Republican strategist Mike Murphy, in a telling article for Time Magazine, the changing demographics does not bode well for Right Wing thinking. In 2008, Obama lost no opportunity to exploit the situation.
Time Magazine:
t was a huge shock to the GOP when Barack Obama won Republican Indiana last year. The bigger news was how he did it. Latino voters delivered the state. Exit polls showed that they provided Obama with a margin of more than 58,000 votes in a state he carried by a slim 26,000 votes. That's right, GOP, you've entered a brave new world ruled by Latino Hoosiers, and you're losing.
Murphy goes on to say that while in 1980, Latino cast 2% the vote, in 2008, they cast a whopping 9%. Obama took their vote by a 35-point margin.
And the GOP's response would be denial.
Rather than face up to all this, too many in the GOP are stuck in a swoon of nostalgia. Most of our party leaders come from bloodred GOP states or safe districts, so they are far more at home in the tribal politics of Republican primaries than in those of the country as a whole. You could say their radio dials are stuck on AM. The result is we hear a lot about going back to "the winning ways of Ronald Reagan." Well, I love Reagan too. But demographics no longer do. In 1980, Reagan beat Jimmy Carter by 10 points. If that contest were held again today, under the current demographics of the electorate per exit polls, the election would be much closer, with Reagan probably winning by about 3 points.
The opportunity cost of such a head - in - the - sand attitude is that the Republicans are ceding fertile electoral ground with panicky, exclusionary denial. But courting the minority would require major changes in their attitude on things like welfare, privatization, health care, and of course, immigation. According to Salon.com, Democrats are taking full advantage of the changing voter demographics in the Hispanlc community.
By 2008, the Hispanic share of the electorate had increased by a third, to 41 percent, and voters in the demographic were much more Democlratic, going 69-30 for Obama over McCain. That change by itself can account for almost all of Obama's advantage in the state, especially since the white vote stayed essentially the same (though whites' share of the electorate was down by 7 percentage points) and the African-American population is small.
And if I may go back to my attitude argument, I don't see the Republicans getting any progress done precisely because of their past history with any minority and the obstacle of livng it down. From Bobby Kennedy marching with Cesar Chavez on down to Jesse Jackson, the Clintons, finally on down to Obama himself, we've had a history of breaking bread with the poor, acting on their behalf, and organizing with them. Political action on the street level is part and parcel of being a Democrat.
What do I expect will happen to the GOP? I expect either a civil war within, or over the years there will an exodus of the dissatified to the Democratic party, or the rise of a viable third party, with the GOP becoming a shadow of it's former self. I can't expect any moderate to stay in a party that keeps shooting itself in the foot, a party the has killed the better angels of it's nature. No wonder moderates will in the future, refrain from joining the party.
And let me leave you with this:
The Republican Party can thank Karl Rove and George Bush for their current descent in obscurity. By injecting ideology into every personnel and policy choice, they cut their followers adrift. The constant historical lesson is that the American polity recoils from extremism. No matter the political bent of ideological excesses, Americans get a belly full and return to the middle as surely as the leaves turn in the fall.
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Shhh...
Don't tell Rushbo that the Supreme Court can not change the Constitution. That has to come through the amendment process.
June 18, 2009 11:27 AM | Reply | Permalink