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<div class="ad"> </div></div><div id="campaignstops"><div align="left"><span class="timestamp published" title="2012-03-24T16:28:56+00:00">March 24, 2012, <span>4:28 pm</span></span><h3 class="entry-title">The Outsourced Party</h3>
<address class="byline author vcard">By <a href="http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/author/kevin-baker/" class="url fn" title="See all posts by KEVIN BAKER">KEVIN BAKER</a></address><div class="entry-content"><p>Who speaks for the Republican party? The answer is that everyone does — and therefore, no one does.</p>
<p>Much
air time and many trees have been wasted trying to explain the
division, rancor and lethargy that have beset the Republican nominating
campaign, now into its second year and threatening to run all the way to
the party’s national convention in late August. But it’s no great
mystery. Republicans have fallen prey to one of the favorite tactics of
just the sort of heedless, improvident, twenty-first century capitalism
they revere. Their party has been outsourced.</p><div class="w190 right"><a>Mark Pernice CLICK TO ENLARGE</a></div><p>For
decades, Republicans have recruited outside groups and individuals to
amplify their party’s message and its influence. This is a legitimate
democratic tactic that they have carried off brilliantly, helping to
shift the political spectrum in the United States significantly to the
right.</p><p>When Republicans came to believe in the 1960s that they
were up against a “liberal biased” media that would never give them a
fair shake, they began the long march to build their own, alternative
information establishment. As chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission, Mark Fowler, led the fight to abolish the “Fairness
Doctrine” in 1987, further empowering what was already a legion of
right-wing talk radio programs.</p><p>In 1949, drawing on a long history
of court decisions; on public hearings; and on legislation mandating
“equal time” for political candidates, the F.C.C. ruled that holders of
radio and television broadcast licenses must “devote a reasonable
percentage of their broadcast time to the presentation of news and
programs devoted to the consideration and discussion of public issues of
interest in the community,” and that this must include “different
attitudes and viewpoints concerning these vital and often controversial
issues.”</p><p>The Supreme Court repeatedly upheld the F.C.C.’s power to
make such a rule — but never gave it the power of law. In 1986, a pair
of Ronald Reagan’s judicial appointees on the United States Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Robert Bork and Antonin
Scalia, ruled that the Fairness Doctrine was not “a binding statutory
obligation.”</p><p>Armed with this verdict, Fowler, who insisted on
viewing television, in particular, as not a finite and supremely
influential broadcast medium but “<a href="http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2053">just another appliance — it’s a toaster with pictures</a>,”
persuaded his fellow commissioners to abolish the Fairness Doctrine.
Furious Democrats in Congress passed legislation to codify the doctrine
into law in 1987 and 1991, but these attempts were vetoed by Reagan and
George Bush, respectively; Democrats have gone on trying to make the
Fairness Doctrine law to this day, but have always been stymied by
adamant Republican opposition.</p><p>Right-wing radio was dominant on
the airwaves before the Fairness Doctrine was abolished. But now it had
the field of public discourse virtually all to itself. It provided
conservatives with a direct outreach to the public, free of any
intercession by the “elites” Newt Gingrich is still denouncing in this
season’s debates. Right-leaning media networks such as Pat Robertson’s
Christian Broadcast Network and especially Clear Channel Communications
soon became major media conglomerates, with no obligation to broadcast
any conflicting views.</p><p>The biggest media coup of all for the
Republican party, though, was the advent of nakedly partisan Fox News,
created by Roger Ailes, former media advisor to the Nixon, Reagan and
George Bush administrations. It was Ailes who thereby managed to throw
the entire weight of Rupert Murdoch’s worldwide media empire behind the
party — and <a href="http://nymag.com/news/media/roger-ailes-fox-news-2011-5/">it was Ailes, reportedly</a>,
who kept it on the conservative straight-and-narrow when Mr. Murdoch
toyed with the idea of putting the empire behind Barack Obama, the new
Democrat, in 2008, much as it had backed Tony Blair’s New Labour for a
time in Great Britain. Instead, thanks to Ailes, conservative
politicians and advocates saw both their ideas amplified and their
wallets fattened by a dizzying array of Murdoch television shows, books
and newspapers.</p><p>But it wasn’t just in the media where the
Republican party proved ingenious in outsourcing its rhetoric and
shifting the national dialogue. In 1971, during Richard M. Nixon’s first
term in office, Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Republican corporate lawyer from
Virginia, summoned the resources of the business community to the cause
with his famous memorandum to the National Chamber of Commerce, “<a href="http://law.wlu.edu/deptimages/Powell%20Archives/PowellMemorandumTypescript.pdf">Attack on American Free Enterprise System</a>.”</p><p>Powell
wanted “American business” to fight back everywhere it could against
what he saw as the many enemies of free enterprise. Tactics would
include demanding “equal time” on the nation’s college campuses and —
ironically enough — on the nation’s airwaves, by appealing to the
fairness standards of the F.C.C. Yet more importantly, Powell’s
memorandum inspired the founding of the Heritage Foundation, the Cato
Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and other conservative think tanks.
Wealthy businessmen and other individuals from Richard Mellon Scaife to
the Koch brothers stepped up, pouring millions of dollars into
right-wing magazines, books and political campaigns.</p><p>Powell won
himself an appointment to the Supreme Court — and the nation’s capital
won itself a major new industry. It may seem as if lobbyists in
Washington have always been more numerous than locusts, but in fact when
Powell wrote his memo just over 40 years ago, there were at most only a
few hundred. Today, there are tens of thousands — leaders of a
multi-billion dollar industry in its own right, and one mostly
interested in “freeing” business from regulation and taxes.</p><p>The
Republican effort to rally every conceivable outside entity to the
party’s cause was wildly successful. Again and again over the years,
conservative policy institutes have armed the party’s candidates with
intellectual arguments, while the conservative media barrage has blasted
a way through to high office for even the most lackluster Republican
nominees.</p><p>Yet increasingly this meant that the Republican Party
was outsourcing both body and soul. Both what the party believed in and
its ability to do the heavy lifting necessary to win elections was
handed over to outside interests — outside interests that did not
necessarily share the party’s goals or have any stake in ameliorating
its tactics.</p><p>This has become suddenly and painfully evident this
year. Party leaders may not have liked Rush Limbaugh’s disgusting
attacks on a Georgetown law student — calling her a “slut” and a
“prostitute” for advocating that insurance companies provide affordable
birth control — but what does he care?</p><p>If the Republicans lose the
election, it will most likely mean all the more angry conservatives
tuning in and driving up the ratings for Rush and his fellow radio
ranters. Limbaugh is now facing a challenge from outraged liberals and
others urging his sponsors to drop his show. But the most that the
usually garrulous Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney would allow himself
to say was that “it’s not the language I would have used.” Rick
Santorum averred that Rush was “being absurd,” but implied that was O.K.
— “an entertainer can be absurd. He’s in a very different business than
I am.”</p><p>But of course, he’s not. Rush Limbaugh is in the very same
business that Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney are in — and guess who’s in
charge? It’s not the radio calamity howlers who take their cues from
the party leaders now, but the other way around.</p><p>This campaign
season we’ve seen all the major Republican candidates for president
adopt the bombastic, apocalyptic rhetoric of talk radio, insisting that
we will “lose America” if they aren’t elected, and filling their
speeches and debates with ugly personal insults, directed at each other
and at President Obama. The results are in the poll numbers. Unlike the
sharp but generally civil 2008 primary fight between Obama and Hillary
Clinton, which galvanized the Democratic base, the Republican struggle
this year has been steadily driving down the party’s appeal and driving
up the candidates’ negative ratings.</p><p>Poll numbers for Republicans
in Congress have taken a nosedive, too, as the party’s intransigence on
Capitol Hill has allowed President Obama to appear reasonable by
contrast. But what does that matter to the thousands of lobbyists who
bring in more and more of the money for congressional campaigns? Sure, a
Republican victory might afford them more closed-door sessions on
rewriting federal regulations. But Democratic victories will serve their
purpose just as well, making clear to the money men who send them to
Washington that they are more needed than ever to resist “job-killing
regulations.”</p><p>Meanwhile, Fox News has become a special impediment
to Republican order — largely thanks to its own success. All the
enticements of the Murdoch empire have produced a generation of reality
show pols, at least as interested in landing their own TV series as
winning office. Two of the most popular Republican candidates for
president going into the race, Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin, both
declined to run rather than jeopardize their shows. Newt Gingrich turned
much of his campaign into book tours for himself and his wife. Ask
yourself which was most likely: that Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann
really thought they could be elected president or that they were looking
to improve their “brand.”</p><p>And after decades of trying to undo
federal campaign-finance laws, Republicans at last succeeded — only to
watch the party’s wealthy sponsors diversify their interests from think
tanks to super PACs. Why bother with all the time and expense of hiring a
bunch of intellectuals to occupy some expensive piece of Washington
real estate and hammer out policy positions — when you can go out and
make a straight cash exchange for a candidate?</p><p>Even as Rick
Santorum was pleading that sometimes you have to “take one for the team”
in the last Republican debate, his candidacy was being kept alive
largely by money from a single donor, Foster Friess, the conservative
Christian multimillionaire with the Batman villain name. Gingrich has
his own sponsors, the casino billionaires Sheldon and Miriam Adelson,
hawkish supporters of Israel. Does what these individuals care about
most fit in with the Republican party’s election strategy? So what?</p><p>It’s
not that these individual donors believe in things — conservative
Christian stands on abortion, unmitigated support for Israel and so on —
that are so different from what much of the party’s base believes in.
But political campaigns, especially national campaigns in America, are
all about nuance and finesse — about just how you say something and when
and where you say it. Presidential candidates need to elide certain
issues at times, either things they know that they cannot do, but are
loath to tell their base; or things that they intend to try, but cannot
tell the rest of the electorate until they have gained power and built
up the necessary public support; or things that they have no idea how
they will handle until certain events play out and force their hand.</p><p>The
question of whether or not the United States or Israel should attack
Iran to suppress its nuclear program is a good example of this last sort
of issue. Just what Iran’s capabilities are of developing nuclear
weapons, what its intentions are once it should have them, how
successful any attack on them can be and what the consequences of such
an attack might be are just some of the immensely complicated questions
surrounding this debate.</p><p>Yet such complexities don’t seem to
matter much to the ravenously egotistical Gingrich, so long as they
don’t much matter to his sponsor. Money, it’s true, has always played a
critical role in American politics. But in the past, presidential
nominees did more than simply try to raise money. They tried to build
consensus within their party. Fringe candidates like Gingrich and
Santorum were generally eliminated from the start by their past defeats
or by their extremist views — college is evil — but if they weren’t, our
political system gave them the chance to take their arguments to the
people in relatively small, manageable states and see if they caught on.</p><p>Now,
none of that really matters so much. Forced to resign as speaker of the
House by your own party? Handed the worst electoral defeat in your own
state that anyone can remember? Way behind in the delegate count? In
some circumstances, it might be good that even though you’ve failed
previously you can still go out and make your case to the people. But
now you can even fail at that, as well. It doesn’t matter. Just one
billionaire can keep you on the campaign trail!</p><p>Thanks to their
inventiveness, Republicans have stumbled into the brave new world of
American politics. From primaries to photo ops, from direct mail to
voter suppression laws, the Republican party has almost always been the
real innovator in electoral politics, usually leaving their slower
brother, the Democrats, in the dust for at least a campaign season or
two.</p><p>Now they’ve achieved the political equivalent of shuttering
that foul old steel mill and shipping the hard work off for others to do
while they dabble in these fascinating new derivatives. Now their
candidates and their ideas are seen as so many junk bonds, and they
don’t seem to have the wherewithal to make the party over from within.</p><p>The
Republican party has been moving to the right for half-a-century now
and generally carrying the country with it. But in the past, even under
the right’s greatest hero, Ronald Reagan, this movement came in fits and
starts, as Republican candidates and officeholders had to accommodate
themselves to real-world situations and the qualms of their
constituents. This is the chastening role that elections are supposed to
play. Participating in a democracy means more than simply insisting,
over and over again, in as loud and arrogant a voice as possible, in as
many venues as your money will allow, what it is that you want. It means
listening, it means convincing, it means compromising — all those
things that political parties and their leaders used to be fairly good
at.</p><p>At long last, Republicans seem to be finally coalescing around
Mitt Romney’s candidacy, and he could still win the presidency if the
economy slumps again. But the longer-term problem will remain: how to
maintain a coherent, mass political party when so many individuals are
empowered as never before to redirect it to their own, personal ends.</p><p><em>Kevin
Baker is the author of the “City of Fire” series of historical novels,
“Dreamland,” “Paradise Alley” and “Strivers Row.” A shortened version of
this essay appears in the March 25 edition of Sunday Review.</em><br></p></div></div></div>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br>