[Vision2020] Has the G.O.P. Gone Off the Deep End?

[Art Deco]

 [image: Opinionator - A Gathering of Opinion From Around the
Web]<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/>
  July 17, 2013, 11:34 pm Has the G.O.P. Gone Off the Deep End? By THOMAS
B. EDSALL <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/thomas-b-edsall/>

Thomas Doherty<http://www.mercurypublicaffairs.com/staff-member/thomas-doherty>,
patronage czar and political enforcer for former New York Governor George
Pataki, reached the breaking point last week when he read that House
Republicans were preparing to “slow walk” the Senate immigration bill to
death.

Doherty turned to Twitter:

If Senate Immigration bill gets ripped apart and ultimately defeated by
House #GOP I’ve decided to leave my political home of 32 yrs #sad.

Doherty told me that he has

come to the conclusion that my party has elements within it that dislike
homosexuals and think America is still in the 1940s. And while we talk
about freedom and liberty, that liberty and freedom only seem to be
acceptable for some.

Doherty, no liberal, is representative of the growing strength on the right
of the view that the Republican Party has gone off the deep end.

“Their rigidity is killing them. It’s either holy purity or you are
anathema,” Tom Korologos <http://www.dlapiper.com/tom_korologos/>, a
premier Republican lobbyist and the ambassador to Belgium under George W.
Bush, said in a phone interview. “Too many ideologues have come in. You
don’t win by what they are doing.”

A number of prominent figures in the Republican Party share this harsh
view. Jeb Bush warned last
year<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/us/politics/jeb-bush-takes-aim-at-fellow-republicans.html>that
both Ronald Reagan and his own father would have a “hard time” fitting
into the contemporary Republican Party, which he described as dominated by
“an orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement.”

A few months ago, Bush, who is expected to run for the party’s nomination
in 2016, took it up a
notch<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-15/ryan-questions-economic-recovery-warns-of-growing-debt.html>.
At the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in March, Bush
declared:

All too often we’re associated with being anti-everything. Way too many
people believe Republicans are anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-science,
anti-gay, anti-worker, and the list goes on and on and on. Many voters are
simply unwilling to choose our candidates, even though they share our core
beliefs, because those voters feel unloved, unwanted and unwelcome in our
party.

Two months later, Bob Dole —  the Republican presidential nominee in 1996
and a 35-year veteran of the House and Senate – was
asked<http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/fox-news-sunday-chris-wallace/2013/05/26/sens-graham-durbin-talk-doj-irs-scandals-rare-interview-americas-veteran-former-sen-bob#p//v/2411280923001>on
Fox News Sunday: “Could people like Bob Dole, even Ronald Reagan, make
it in today’s Republican Party?”

I doubt it. Reagan wouldn’t have made it. Certainly Nixon wouldn’t have
made it — because he had ideas.

Dole added, “They ought to put a sign on the National Committee door that
says, ‘Closed for repairs. ’ ”

As early as September, 2011, Mike
Lofgren<http://www.nationaljournal.com/daily/the-quiet-staffer-who-went-nuclear-on-the-gop-20110911>,
a staff member for 16 years on the Republican side of both the House and
Senate Budget Committees,
wrote<http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/3079:goodbye-to-all-that-reflections-of-a-gop-operative-who-left-the-cult:>on
the liberal website TruthOut:

The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political
party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic
cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th
century Europe.

Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard and one of the original
architects of the bomb-throwing right, jumped ship 7 months
ago<http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/footprints-sand-time_665188.html>
:

The conservative movement — a bulwark of American strength for the last
several decades — is in deep disarray. Reading about some conservative
organizations and Republican campaigns these days, one is reminded of Eric
Hoffer’s remark, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a
business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” It may be that major
parts of American conservatism have become such a racket that a kind of
refounding of the movement as a cause is necessary.

Needless to say, there are many on the left who share these negative
assessments.

My colleague Paul Krugman has made the
case<http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/looking-back-with-shrillness/>
repeatedly<http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/the-new-republicans/>and
eloquently<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/15/opinion/krugman-hunger-games-usa.html?hp>.
Jonathan Chait, a New York Magazine columnist, has
been<http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/07/republicans-pass-bloated-socialist-monstrosity.html>
no
slouch<http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/07/conservatives-hate-all-legislation-now.html>
in
this regard<http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/republicans-need-minorities-anyway.html>either.

Norman Ornstein and Tom Mann, scholars at the American Enterprise Institute
and the Brookings Institution respectively, leveled the most detailed
charges against the Republican Party in their book, “It’s Even Worse Than
It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New
Politics of Extremism” and in their Washington Post
essay<http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-04-27/opinions/35453898_1_republican-party-party-moves-democratic-party>,
“Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.”

How far has self-flagellation spread among Republicans? To see, I surveyed
a number of strategists, lobbyists, pollsters and think-tank types.

Ed Rogers <http://www.bgrdc.com/x-bios/bgr-rogers.html>, the chairman of
the BGR Group (formerly Barbour Griffith & Rogers) and a top aide to both
Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, wrote in an email:

The G.O.P. House has between 20 and 30 members who are ideological purists
who think every issue and vote is black or white. Combine that with the
members who fear a primary from the right, and you have maybe 60 votes that
are hard to get. We have lost the art of governing in Washington. In the
Congress no one is able to make and execute long-term plans.

There is a striking correlation between the rise of conservative talk radio
and the difficulties of the Republican Party in presidential elections. In
an April Reuters
essay<http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/04/11/right-wing-talk-shows-turned-white-house-blue/>,
“Right Wing Talk Shows Turned White House Blue,” Mark Rozell, the acting
dean of the George Mason University School of Public Policy, and John Paul
Goldman, a former chairman of Virginia’s Democratic Party, wrote:

Since Rush Limbaugh’s 1992 bestseller “The Way Things Ought to Be,” his
conservative talk show politics have dominated GOP presidential discourse –
and the Republicans’ White House fortunes have plummeted. But when the
mainstream media reigned supreme, between 1952 and 1988, Republicans won
seven out of the 10 presidential elections.

The authors continue: “The rise of the conservative-dominated media defines
the era when the fortunes of G.O.P. presidential hopefuls dropped to the
worst levels since the party’s founding in 1856.”

John Feehery <http://www.politico.com/arena/bio/john_feehery.html>, the
president of Quinn Gillespie Communications and a former aide to House
Majority Leader Tom DeLay and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, wrote in an
email:

Talk radio has been very destructive when it comes to coming up with new
ideas to solve current problems. Talk radio is very good at attack. It is
not particularly good at thinking deeply about public policy problems and
coming up with effective solutions.

Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center,
raised similar questions:

It seems to me that some on the right, at least in their rhetoric, don’t
have a proper appreciation for prudence. There’s a tendency among some to
elevate every political skirmish into a clash of first principles. And some
on the right seem eager to go over a cliff with their flag waving.

But Bill McInturff<http://pos.org/about/partners-and-vice-presidents/bill-mcinturff-va/>,
a founder of the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, argued
in a phone interview that at least for members of the House, the Republican
strategy of relentless opposition to Democratic initiatives has paid off:

Look at the quotes from 1993 and 1994 when Republicans were blocking
Clinton’s health care bill, and again in 2009 with Obamacare. The exact
same stuff, the same handwringing, the same, except one led to a 50-plus
gain and the other a 60-plus seat gain in the House.

McInturff sees presidential politics as relatively insignificant to most
Republican congressmen:

There are very few Republican Congressional incumbents who wake up and have
that concern. At an individual level, they are acting as rational actors,
on the basis of their own perceived political interests.

Noting that only 16 current Republican members of the House represent
districts carried by Obama, McInturff observes that “the rational political
incentive for most elected Republicans is to be sure they don’t lose to a
primary challenger.”

McInturff put his finger on the problem: House Republicans are invested in
their own reelection and not in the long-term viability of their party.
Those who put the lowest priority on presidential politics are those most
worried about a primary challenge from the right, and it is this cohort
that forms the backbone of the Tea Party faction in the House — the cohort
most wedded to nativism, intolerance and hostility to the poor. These are
the members nudging the Republican Party over the cliff.

A part of the Republican dilemma lies in the party’s disproportionate
dependence on white southern voters. These voters are well to the right of
the rest of the nation and they elect the dominant block of hard-right
conservatives in the House. Of the 234 Republican members of the House, 97
— two fifths — come from the 11 Confederate states, and these 97 are almost
uniformly opposed<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-11/republican-north-south-split-on-taxes-previews-debt-talks.html>to
negotiation of any kind with Democrats.

It is the southern conservatives who, along with their northern Tea Party
colleagues, seek to
kill<http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/behind-the-curtain-immigration-reform-heads-for-slow-death-93930.html>immigration
reform and who insisted
on removing<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323740804578600044099228364.html>the
food stamp program from the recently passed Farm Bill.

These members of the House are what Feehery
describes<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/19/heritage-action-widens-gop-s-immigration-split.html>as
“nostalgia” Republicans who define conservatism as “the ability to
fight
progress.” They produce a flood of statements and declarations that Bobby
Jindal, the governor of Louisiana,
calls<http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/gov-bobby-jindal-gop-stop-stupid-party-article-1.1247645>“offensive
and bizarre” and which he claims are turning his party into “the
stupid party.”

It is these politicians whom the opinion writers of the Wall Street Journal
had in mind to when they wrote

The dumbest strategy is to follow the Steve King anti-immigration caucus
and simply let the Senate [Immigration] bill die while further militarizing
the border. This may please the loudest voices on talk radio, but it
ignores the millions of evangelical Christians, Catholic conservatives,
business owners and free-marketers who support reform. The G.O.P. can
support a true conservative opportunity society or become a party of closed
minds and borders.

The Republican Party is struggling to resolve the conflict between its
pragmatic establishment wing and its ideological-suicidal wing. Speaking
right after President Obama’s re-election, Haley Barbour, a former governor
of Mississippi and a former chairman of the Republican National
Committee, summarized
the party’s dilemma<http://thehill.com/video/campaign/268415-barbour-says-gop-needs-proctology-exam>succinctly.
At a meeting in Las Vegas of the Republican Governors
Association, Barbour said: “We’ve got to give our political organizational
activity a very serious proctology exam. We need to look everywhere.”


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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