As if there were any doubt the GOP is unhip…
In case you too are unhip.
See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil
November 22, 2008 — JonIf you’re looking to engage in the kind of self-abuse that doesn’t involve playing with your wiener, I suggest heading over to the Washington Post’s “Right Matters” message board moderated by Ramesh Ponnuru where you can read things like this:
But I take strong issue on four points:
1. Sarah Palin is our possible salvation, not our ‘problem.’ Those who trash her or condescend to her should be shunned.
2. As a PhD geologist, I can tell you that the main arguments of global warming are more likely to be untrue than true. Beware of politicized science.
3. We are not Christian conservatives, nor small government conservative, etc. Most of us are mixtures, which is why the Reagan coalition worked.
4. This ‘declining white population’ blather, whether hopeful or alarmist, is RACIST and needs to stop right now. If the average American wants to see genuine non-racist behavior, there is no better example than the average white American.
Never mind the fact that even Sarah Palin eventually conceded on global warming, this is precisely what people mean when they suggest that the GOP has become detached reality. What does it suggest about someone’s ability to interpret reality when they refer to simple demographic fact about the decreasing relative size of the white population as “RACIST” “blather”?
False Choices and Bad Strategy
November 17, 2008 — Jon
Josh Marshall links to a piece in Defense News:
The uniformed services are trying to lock in the next administration by creating a political cost for holding the line on defense spending. Conservative groups are hoping to ramp up defense spending as a tool to limit options for a Democratic Congress and president to pass new, and potentially costly, social programs, including health care reform.
They also like the idea of creating an unrealistically high baseline of expectations for defense spending that will allow them to claim President Obama has cut defense spending.
As the editorial continues, this duplicitous strategy creates a false choice between defense spending and domestic spending for the sake of Republican political advantage. Malign as this may be, I don’t particularly see it working. If nothing else, this election was a highly corroborative referendum on Democratic domestic policies. People want health care reform and they want to end the War in Iraq. It’s unclear to me how this strategy is supposed to make the Republican message more resonant with a majority of Americans.
New Ideas
November 12, 2008 — JonJonathan Martin has interesting post on Jon Huntsman, the Governor of Utah, as a potential 2012 GOP candidate. Sounds like a pretty impressive guy, though I’ll not that as the economy goes, so too do governors. Anyway, the post reminded my of a theme I’ve been harping on of late:
Huntsman also talked fluently about education, energy and health care, making the case, as many of his fellow governors have, that the GOP needs to come up with practical solutions on such day-to-day concerns.
He said the party must look at the results of last week’s election, and make changes to stay relevant.
If Republicans think that “changes to stay relevant” mean cleverly repackaging traditional GOP policies, it’s not going to work.
Party of Ideas; Have any to Spare?
November 11, 2008 — Jon
Mike Duncan and the RNC have just launched “Republican for a Reason“, a new website that lets GOP yell it from the mountaintops (they take money, too). No results on what’s most popular yet, but sources tell me that “fervent distaste for integrated country clubs” is a close second behind “big government is totally gay.”
Denial, Not Just River in Egypt
November 9, 2008 — JonJonathan Chait has an article, inter alia, on the reality detached, but ideologically convenient, right wing meme that Bush’s failure stemmed from inadequate adherence to conservative dogma.
But to these critics Bush’s primary ideological apostasy is that he supposedly presided over vast new spending increases. Both Democrats and Republicans have gleefully taken up the charge–the former in order to discredit Bush, the latter to shield conservatism from the stench of his failure. It’s a trumped-up indictment. Bush did spend generously on defense and homeland security, with conservative approval, but domestic discretionary spending actually declined from 3.1 percent of GDP to 2.8 percent. It is true that Bush approved a vast new prescription drug benefit. But 89 percent of Americans believed in 2000 that Medicare should have such a benefit. Bush’s critics on the right have no explanation for how he could have gotten elected in 2000 without promising one or reelected in 2004 without following through. Still, the critique has taken hold. The Democracy Corps poll found that, by a 17-point margin, Republicans attribute their party’s failures in 2006 and 2008 to its insufficient conservatism. (Voters as a whole attributed it to excessive conservatism.)
At least in a totally superficial sense, there is something to this argument; as Chait notes, total spending did in fact increase substantially. Conservatives point to this particular profligacy as evidence that federal expenditure spells anathema, but to call this theory half-baked would be an insult to an entire class of inchoate bakery items. According to the Brookings Instutition, total spending in Iraq now totals $600 billion (and to put that in context, it’s roughly enough to surpass current record setting $455 billion deficit by almost $150 billion). The problem with this sort of spending is that it’s an economic black hole. Sure, some of the money goes to bloat the pockets of a few parochial interest groups like Haliburton, Lockheed Martin, and ExxonMobil, but in general, it’s money lost. Unlike spending in World War II, the War in Iraq doesn’t employ hordes of housewives or coincide with the expansion of American manufacturing capacity. And unlike infrastructure investment or social investments like education or health care spending, the $600 billion in Iraq will pay no dividends toward increasing economic productivity. That it has done nothing to gaurantee our safety adds insult to injury. In any event, $600 billion down the tubes hardly adduces the conclusion that even further reduced domestic spending would have vindicated conservative principles.
Smoke and Mirrors
November 6, 2008 — Jon
Patrick Ruffini at the Next Right is a pretty sensible guy most of the time. Erick Erickson from RedState.com, a little less so. In any event, via Marc Ambinder, we learn these two and a few others are banding together to launch www.rebuildtheparty.com, a website aimed at pulling the rusting and outmoded conservative party into the future. From the website:
The challenge is daunting, but if we adopt a strongly anti-Washington message and charge hard against Obama and the Democrats, we will energize our grassroots base. Among other benefits, this will create real demand for new ways to organize and route around existing power structures that favor the Democrats. And, you will soon discover, online organizing is by far the most efficient way to transform our party structures to be able to compete against what is likely to be a $1 billion Obama re-election campaign in 2012.
Look, there’s no question that the Republicans will benefit from joining the 21st century (if only in terms of technology), but if Republicans think this election was only about Obama’s superior infrastructure, they’re missing the point. Obviously, part of the money gap can be traced to McCain’s decision to accept public financing, but the enthusiasm surrounding Obama’s campaign not only had a great deal to with Obama’s peerless political skill, but also the platform on which he ran. 62 percent of voters cited the economy as their primary concern; if John McCain had been the beneficiary of a better infrastructure it’s unlikely Republicans would have overcome this issue. If John McCain had an economic platform credibly built around bolstering prosperity of middle class Americans, his prospects likely would have been considerably better. Simply put, Obama’s infrastructure served as a mutiplier of enthusiasm, not the other way around. Without the desire for change, the infrastructure was simply code on a server.
Now, in fairness, the platform listed does include “Recruiting a New Generation of Candidates,” but like the emphasis on the infrastructure per se, a look at some of the specifics betrays a similarly misguided focus on aesthetics:
Undoing the damage to our party’s brand among America’s youth will take more than new slogans and hip spokespeople. It will mean making young voters the face of the Republican Party, and not just another target group with its own bulleted list of “outreach” talking points. To that end, the next Chairman should commit to a simple goal: working towards a Republican Party where at least 40% of our challenger and open seat candidates for Congress are under 40. Such a party will send a signal to all Americans that the GOP is once again the party of the future.
This same logic underpinned the selection of Sarah Palin: find a candidate whose primary appeal is a shared resemblance with a target demographic. Rather, if Republicans seek to build their party around a younger generation, they should demonstrate why their party best represents the interests of young people. I’d really hate to sound like a bleeding heart, but Obama’s success rose in part because of the empathy he projected to a broad coalition of voters. If conservatives hope to build a new base of support, they should start by abandoning the Reaganite tax-cutting dogma and listening to what voters want.
Department of Oxymoronic Headlines
November 6, 2008 — Jon“Conservative intellectuals plan to meet.” Ba-dum-ch! No, but seriously…
In attendance will be such figures as Rich Lowry, Bill Kristol, David Brooks, Ramesh Ponnuru, Jonah Goldberg, Maggie Gallagher, Ed Whelan and Andy McCarthy.
David Brooks is a bit of a contrary asshat (see: Patio Man), but occasionally makes sense, and I’ve seen some reasonable stuff out Ponnuru lately, but this sophist brain trust probably risks an unsafe mass of water carrying hackery and delusional paranoia. That’s the same Bill Kristol who led the Palin cheer leading, the same Jonah Goldberg who wrote a book arguing that liberalism is a precursor to fascism, and the same Andy McCarthy who wrote this:
Second, and relatedly, Obama’s radicalism, beginning with his Alinski/ACORN/community organizer period, is a bottom-up socialism. This, I’d suggest, is why he fits comfortably with Ayers, who (especially now) is more Maoist than Stalinist. What Obama is about is infiltrating (and training others to infiltrate) bourgeois institutions in order to change them from within — in essence, using the system to supplant the system. A key requirement of this stealthy approach (very consistent with talking vaporously about “change” but never getting more specific than absolutely necessary) is electability. With an enormous assist from the media, which does not press him for specifics, Obama has walked this line brilliantly. Absent convincing retractions of his prior radical positions, though, we should construe shrewd moves like the ostensibly reasonable Second Amendment position as efforts make him electable.
I look forward to seeing some of the ideas that come out of this meeting.
Back to the Future
November 6, 2008 — JonJonathan Martin has an article up on Politico outlining the vision prominent (and younger) Republicans have for their party. Most of those interviewed were not, at any point, loudly in the Palin tent, and it’s telling how much even these Republicans — most of which would fall between the moderates and the far right — struggle to define the future of conservatism.
“We have to have actual ideas,” said Pawlenty, 47. “The Republican idea factory has dried up. And we’ve got to catch up on the key issues of our times — health care, renewable energy and education.”
“We need real solutions,” adds Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, 37. “It’s not enough to be just against single-payer health care, for example. We’ve got to discuss how we promote private coverage, to apply our principles to the issues that affect people’s lives.”
And they’re right: as inequality grows traditional Republican ideas are increasingly discordant with the needs of most Americans, and what’s more, the challenges facing the country aren’t well suited for a hands-off approach. To wit, profit incentive doesn’t currently exist to invest heavily in sustainable infrastructure and the private insurance market is inimically opposed to providing broad and inexpensive coverage. I’ll grant that education might be the one area in which conservative ideas could be helpful, but the immediacy of the issue pales in comparison to threats of global warming and ballooning health care costs. And as Jeb Bush warns, the political consequences of continued inaction on these salient issues will be dire.
“I would suggest that conservatives need to do the math of the new demographics of the United States,” said Jeb Bush. “We can’t be anti-Hispanic, anti-young person, anti-many things and be surprised when we don’t win elections.”
But Republicans can’t afford to simply pay lip service to these ideas; they need to craft a policy agenda that actually suits America’s increasingly urban, diverse, and tolerant electorate. Fortunately for liberals, it seems they’re not quite ready to adapt.
“We shouldn’t be talking about lower taxes because supply-side economics is better for Americans but because it puts more money in people’s pockets,” said [Rep. Eric] Cantor. “Where we have to focus is on reconnecting with people across this country where they live.”
Granted Eric Cantor is most closely aligned with the Palin tent of conservatives interviewed, but Cantor’s blind support for supply-side economics after it’s demonstrable popular failure demonstrates the need for a serious reconsideration of the emphasis placed on so-called conservative “principles.” Cantor and other conservatives can’t seem to countenance that adapting to a morphed electorate will require the abandonment of the treasured relics of the conservative past in favor of policies that will tangibly benefit the majority of non-rich Americans. Until Republicans are willing to think beyond the policies of Reagan — and understand that the tools of Reaganism aren’t germane to today’s problems — they will continue to represent a dwindling minority of Americans.
Correlation
November 6, 2008 — Jon
Sort of in the same vein of members of the hard right failing to recognize that the financial crisis and Republican ideology are correlated entities, Andy McCarthy straps on the blinders over at the Corner.
Preliminary indications are that the youth vote (ages 18-29) was way up: an increase of somewhere over 2.2 million (maybe way over) from 2004 (a year in which it was very high), and as much as 13% over 2000. The Left’s dominance of the academy is now having a material impact on electoral politics. As we think about the future of conservatism, we ignore that at our peril.
I went to an extremely liberal, liberal arts school and I think I must have skipped the radical indoctrination lectures. What’s more, I can personally vouch that the conservatives at my school did not graduate as Stepford liberals. It seems to me that the more sensible conclusion to draw is that the correlation between age and liberalism in this election probably results from a disinclination towards the socially backward agenda of the far right among a generation that grew up without Richard Nixon or segregation. After all, it’s not like young people aren’t familiar with the right’s platform; they just don’t agree with it. This is supported by academic research (I suppose to McCarthy’s credit), which shows a correlation between higher education and cultural open-mindedness, but then again, I imagine the research was done by crypto-radicals hell bent on subverting the conservative agenda.
