For TPM, Greg Sargent reports:
In a frank and private memo sent today to Republican National Commitee members, the RNC chairman acknowledges that the GOP has grown too addicted to ideology, places politics before policy, and is bereft of ideas -- and that it's imperative that the party shift towards a genuine effort to develop concrete policy solutions to people's problems in order to rescue itself.
The memo, which we obtained from a Republican operative. was written by RNC chief Mike Duncan to explain the RNC's decision -- first reported by Politico -- to create a new in-house think tank called the "Center for Republican Renewal," which is devoted to coming up with new policies and ideas to chart a new direction for the party after November's devastating losses....
"Republicans have grown accustomed to having our party recognized as the `Party of Ideas,' but we must acknowledge that many Americans today believe the party is stale and does not deserve that label," reads one of the memo's starker assessments, adding that "we have not used our principles to provide solutions to the kitchen table concerns of middle-class America."
"We must recognize that being the `Party of Ideas' requires daily effort to apply principles to the particular public policy questions of the day," the memo says. "All Republicans have an obligation to develop principled solutions rather than falling back on ideology alone; we must show how our ideology can be applied to solve problems."
Despite the utter bogosity of both their "principles" and their "ideas", the GOP still has a lot going for it-namely that it recognizes the crucial importance of presenting itself as having principles that can be applied "to the particular public policy questions of the day," and the need to "show how our ideology can be applied to solve problems." Obama, OTOH, echoes the Versailles "bipartisan" CW that always takes over when Republicans are out of power. He is dedicated to the notion-though he doesn't put it quite this way-that principles don't matter, that all that matters is "getting things done" and it really doesn't matter if the ideas are liberal, conservative or whatever, so long as they "work"-whatever the meaning of "work" may be. More on what's wrong with this anon. For now, however, we focus on the bogosity of the GOP "party of ideas" meme.
In his memo , Duncan writes:
The Center for Republican Renewal is a natural development given the political landscape and follows on previous efforts in this vein after the elections of 1976 and 1992. In each of those years, a Democrat was elected president with vague promises of change and came to power with strong Congressional majorities and a majority of governorships. Moreover, the Republican "brand" was in trouble due, in large part, to self-inflicted wounds.
In reality, Democrats were not elected with vague promises of change. What Carter and Clinton lacked, rather, was a simplistic grounding in strongly articulated values repeatedly labeled as Democratic and progressive. Clinton, for example, had campaigned on "putting people first," and making America work for people who "worked hard and played by the rules." He repeated these phrases countless times, and he talked about things this would mean-including a massive overhaul of the health care system to provide universal coverage. But by failing to package his message properly-failing to dwell on values, derive principles, and connect them to specific policies-he left an enormous opening for being defined by his enemies-not just in the GOP, but from powerful special interests as well.
As we all know, circumstances quickly shifted in our favor. In 1980, the party rebounded and we had Ronald Reagan in the White House, a Republican Senate, and several new Republican governors. In the historic 1994 election, we gained control of both houses of Congress and a majority of governorships - after earning only 36 percent of the presidential vote just two years prior.
Those quick comebacks in 1980 and 1994 did not just happen. They took hard work and smart thinking - not only from the standpoint of candidate recruitment, fundraising, and political strategy, but also from the standpoint of ideas. Put simply, Republicans gave voters a reason to elect them, and that reason was better policy. Each time, the driving force behind the resurgence of our Party was the Republican National Committee.
This account, too, is highly dubious. In 1980, Carter was doing fine as long as people identified with him as struggling to gain the release of our hostages being held by Iran. This is why he managed to hold off Ted Kennedy's unprecedented primary challenge. However, by the time the general election season rolled around, people had largely stopped identifying with Carter, and switched to blaming him. Carter relied on painting Reagan as an unacceptable extremist, and when that effort failed-due to Reagan's affable TV demeanor, and very little more-Carter lost a referendum on his presidency.
The notion that people were voting for Reagan because of his ideas was utterly bogus. On the one hand, Carter's foreign policy was already quite hawkish, with projected military spending increases almost identical to Reagans, while on the other hand, people did not support Reagan's desire to slash domestic social spending-and, indeed, Reagan largely gave up on fighting this, most dramatically when he struck a bargain with Tip O'Neill to save Social Security in 1983.
Similarly, the GOP's success in 1994 was founded on two things: first, Clinton's alienation of Perot voters created an opening for the GOP to court them (see my discussion of this in my diary, "The Perot Pseudo-Realignment-Lessons For Today"), and second, the GOP's concerted effort to thwart health care reform, in order to deny any sort of success for government action to substantially improve the lives of Americans.
There was, however, some sense in which Duncan has a point in 1994-namely, the careful crafting of the Perot-voter-targeted "Contract With America." While the Contract itself was nowhere near as widely known as the political press made it seem, it seems fairly clear that it helped impose message discipline in a manner rarely seen. However, the message sent was quite bogus, as it was aimed at Perot voters, heavily laden with their reformist agenda items, and not the Christian/social conservative agenda that would quickly come to the fore once the Republicans were in office. This was reflected in many ways, not least the shift in the sectional makeup of Congress, as the GOP quickly lost many of the gains it made in 1994 outside the South, compensating for those losses by adding new pickups in the socially conservative South.
In short, The "Contract With America" was successful for the GOP in supporting the appearance of "principled solutions" that "show how our ideology can be applied to solve problems." But nothing of the sort actually happened. Indeed, the GOP shutdown of the federal government proved widely unpopular, Clinton did balance the budget-but he'd already begun doing that before the 1994 election-and the GOP turned to what they do best: tearing down a Democratic President via a moralistic witch-hunt. Bush then "won" in 2000 with a huge assist from the corporate media, which painted Clinton and Gore as equally responsible for the divisiveness in Washington as the Republicans who obsessed over impeaching Clinton. Again, this had virtually nothing to do with GOP "ideas"-though the catchy slogan of "compassionate conservatism" no doubt helped in erasing the bad taste left by the truly nasty conservatism of the Gingrich/Ken Starr variety. Once again, the appearance of "principled solutions" that "show how our ideology can be applied to solve problems" was highly useful to the GOP. But in reality, once again, there was no there there.
The amazing thing is how utterly the GOP manages to bamboozle the Democrats, over and over and over again. Indeed, as mentioned above, they've now got Obama echoing the Versailles bipartisan consensus which pretends that conservative Republicans, too, can have "good ideas" that "work."
Although this is, in some respects the Clinton formula all over again, since Clinton, too, tried to adopt some rightwing stances, policies and ideas, vainly hoping to gain some Republican support, it's actually closer to H. Ross Perot (even farther to the right), and his talk of popping the hood and fixing the engine, as if liberal vs. conservative ideas were no more different than right-handed vs. left-handed wrenches.
This is particularly maddening, since progressives really did have reasons to expect better than this, despite some strong signals to the contrary (the FISA flip-flop, for example.) The reasons to expect better from Obama were (1) his voting record, (2) his background, (3) his professed values. Indeed, even his talk of inclusion is fundamentally a progressive value. The problem is two-fold: First, it's not articulated as a specifically progressive value. Second, it's not articulated within a principled framework-requiring honesty, integrity and fair dealing from all sides. This means, essentially, extending a blank check for GOP sabotage, as now appears to be unfolding with attempts to torpedo the Holder nomination.
It doesn't have to be this way, but quite frankly it really does appear that Obama himself simply has no clue that there is a set of progressive values that can form the foundation for a principled governing philosophy. Rather, he seems to be aware that progressive ideas, at least, if not values, exist. But that they're only there Chinese menu style, in a column right alongside conservative ideas. One from column "A" and one from column "B". That very much appears to be his governing philosophy. And it's not a philosophy for success. The party of ideas as weapons will be back in the game very quickly if something doesn't happen to make him wise up very fast. |
