On Soz's little politics blog thread, I
excerpted at length a portrait of Tom Cole, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), in the NYT Magazine. Long, in-depth article, very much worth the read.
A bunch of the excerpts were more about the Democrats than about the Republicans, but there's still plenty of choice observations about the Republican party, the conservative movement, and the choices they face when seeking an electoral future. The following ones seem a propos for this thread. It's a lot - but it's still just half of the actual article :wink:
Cole compares the Democrats' win in 2006 with the Republican revolution of 1994:
In light of all this, Cole shows himself a realist. While the conservative movement's hardcore partisans insist that if the Republicans lost, it was only because they werent conservative enough, Cole takes another view:
Quote:
Yet Cole has been almost strangely sunny about his prospects. "This isn't an ideologically conservative country, and maybe some of us overreached in thinking that it was, and have been corrected for that," he told me in January. "But I believe that it is still a center-right country, and I think this election will show that."
The demographic detail of the 2006 results suggest that the political map as we have known it, the last 25 years, may be shifting, and not just the division between blue states and red states. The Reagan Democrats are about ready to return. Working class evangelicals are ready to vote Democratic. Underlying it all: the return of economics as battle ground:
while the notion that the political map is shifting to the Democrats is widely accepted, there are differing perspectives on which parts are main the focus. Above, the article referred to the "working-class, conservative towns around Evansville and Terre Haute" won by Ellsworth in Indiana. But the Democratic consultant Mark Gersh sees different vistas:
Quote:For Gersh, the modern political map has sustained two basic changes in the past 30 years. The first, beginning with Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 but only culminating with the 1994 election of Newt Gingrich's insurgents, was the slow, top-down conversion of socially conservative blue-collar voters, in the South and elsewhere, from Democratic partisans to Republican ones. In 2006, Gersh saw the culmination of the second big shift. "The biggest thing that happened in 2006 was the final movement of upper-income, well-educated, largely suburban voters to the Democrats, which started in 1992," he says. The largest concentrations of districts that flipped were in the suburbs and the Northeast. This, Gersh says, was the equal and opposite reaction to the earlier movement toward the Republicans and to some degree a product of the social conservatism demanded by the Republican majority. When I spoke to Emanuel earlier this month, he told me: "I believe there's a suburban populism now. The Republican Party has abandoned any economic, cultural or social connection to those districts."
The Republicans, in any case, are worried:
Again, in Cole's view, the explanation is clear. And it's not that the Republicans have just not been conservative
enough:
Quote:For operatives like Cole, focused on expanding the party's appeal, the conservative movement had become too demanding: its aggressive rhetoric on some social issues alienated young voters, its swagger on immigration hardened Hispanic voters against Republicans and its emphasis on tax cuts for the wealthy made it difficult for the party to appeal to populist voters. [..] "If there are Republicans out there who think that 2006 was a year that could be changed by a few votes in a few districts, they need to wake up," Mehlman told me. "It was a rejection."
In this context, Bush and Cheney are definitely more liabilities than assets:
The only chance Cole has, therefore, is to capitalise on McCain's 'maverick appeal'. To make that work, he notes, he doesnt even need McCain to win; he just needs to come close:
Quote:Cole says that his task is to help the Republicans move from something that looks roughly like Bush's party to something that looks mostly like John McCain's. The places where Cole must hold the Republican line are largely moderate districts, where the president's conservatism is a divisive thing and where McCain's maverick reputation might permit the party to pull the trick of running against Washington even while controlling the White House. "I don't need the nominee to win; I just need him to be competitive enough that we can win behind him in the places that should be ours," Cole said. "I need him to be Gerald Ford."
Cole also draws some comfort from the ways in which McCain, in turn, could also open up the map:
To make all that happen, he needs to push the perception of the Republican Party away from where it is now: from the party of Washington to the outsiders' party, and from the ideological, conservative party to a moderate, pragmatic one:
But in many ways, the creation of a more moderate party for the post-Bush era will have to be a reinvention from scratch:
It's pretty amazing, isn't it, to see a Republican top honcho from so high in the apparatus lay out in no uncertain words how the Republicans have just radicalised themselves out of the cultural mainstream? The words in which he scorns the influence of the hardcore conservatives are pretty commonplace in the average Blatham copy/paste, but from the head of the NRCC?
Skipping ahead a bunch of paragraphs, Cole is openly dismissive of the conservative operatives who believe that it's just stuff like earmarks that did the Republican Party in, in 2006; that if only the party had remained true to its small government ideology, all would have been well:
Quote:at a moment when Boehner was trying to rebuild the party's reputation on small-government principles (Boehner told me that the matter of the Republican abuse of earmarks, in which congressmen secure funds for favored projects in their districts, is "the most poignant" reason voters rejected Republicans), Cole was openly skeptical of this approach. "Earmarks are not the reason that we lost the election," Cole told me. "I can't find a single seat we lost because of them."
And skipping on a bit more still, check out what Cole has to say about the Club for Growth!
Stupid and inept, there you go.
Skipping back in the article, more illustrations of the purely pragmatic approach Cole is taking - focused on the politically moderate, but also on pure calculus:
Quote:Cole's staff didn't know all that much about Greenberg ideologically, but then they don't make it their business to know. I once asked Cole about the positions his candidates were taking on immigration and the war. "I don't think I've ever asked a candidate what he believes," he said. "We're just looking for winning candidates." But one of the things they did know, and do make it their business to know, was geography. Greenberg was from one of the towns that tended to flip back and forth, the wealthy suburb of Long Grove. If he could simply prevail upon his neighbors to vote for him, Greenberg would have gone a long way toward winning back the seat. "There's a head start already," Morgan Sr. said.
Cole himself is from Oklahoma, and from the rougher end of the state. This was once the heart of FDR's New Deal country; and of course, subsequently became the epitome of the Republican push-back, which eventually landed it as one of the very reddest states of the country. But it's not necessarily a welcoming place for your hardcore conservative, anti-government ideology:
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