Published: Sunday, February 10, 2013 at 4:30 a.m.
The GOP has been in a death spiral
for a decade.
It started in 2003 when President
George W. Bush turned the focus of our invasion of Afghanistan, aimed
at the destruction of al-Qaida and its use of that forsaken land as
its training ground for international terrorism, to his unwise and
unnecessary war of choice against Iraq.
Since then, the GOP has been in a
state of denial that has precluded its ability to win national
elections and to present a governing strategy that could come
anywhere close to commanding the support of most Americans.
The Wednesday before the election
in 2008, my wife and I attended a dinner in Hendersonville. At our
table the conversation turned to politics, and I was asked whether
Barack Obama or John McCain was going to win. I said that Obama would
win and it would be a landslide for him in the Electoral College,
including North Carolina.
The man seated next to me, a
well-educated man with a professional degree, said I was wrong and
that McCain would win handily. He said the American people would
never elect a man who was not an American citizen and who was a
Muslim. Over the course of the next few minutes, virtually everyone
else at our table agreed with him.
My wife kicked me under the table
and gave me that look that said, "Don't say a word, stupid."
I kept my mouth shut. A week later, McCain went down in flames, and
four years later so did Mitt Romney.
In retrospect, the elections of
2008 and 2012 remind me of the reaction I encountered way back in
1964 as Republicans could not comprehend how Barry Goldwater had been
annihilated by President Lyndon Johnson. Sen. Goldwater had boldly
offered the nation a choice, not an echo. Only 38 percent of the
American people voted for that choice.
When all the votes were counted,
the Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, 68
seats, and more than a 2-to-1 majority in the House, 295-140. The
stage was set for the enactment of the Great Society, including the
war on poverty, Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act and
Johnson's escalation of the war in Vietnam.
All of this was the inevitable
consequence of doctrinal overreach coupled with delusional
expectations by the GOP.
Today the Republicans are in a
deeper hole of their own digging than they were following their
debacle in 1964. To survive, they must first stop digging and then
come up with a new governing paradigm. The first is relatively easy.
The second is not.
At the Republican National
Committee meeting last month in Charlotte, Louisiana Gov. Bobby
Jindal said, "We've got to stop being the stupid party."
And he didn't stop there. He also said, "Today's conservatism is
completely wrapped up in the hideous mess that is the federal budget,
the burgeoning deficits, the mammoth federal debt, the shortfall in
our entitlement programs. We seem to have an obsession with
bookkeeping. This is a rigged game, and it's the wrong game for us to
play."
Jindal's scathing critique of the
GOP is not a voice in the wilderness. Former RNC Chairman and
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour hammered the GOP for nominating Senate
candidates like Richard Mourdock in Indiana and Todd Akin in
Missouri. Both lost badly in states where the GOP should have won
easily. Barbour attributed their defeat to their inflammatory
comments on rape and pregnancy that he said hurt the party
nationally.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich
told the party, "A lot of Republicans, frankly, spent the last
two years saying, ‘Oh, gee, we don't have to do much because after
Obama loses, we'll work with the new Republican president.' Well,
that world ain't there."
But knowing you're sick doesn't
guarantee that you'll correctly diagnose the illness. For example,
Reince Priebus, the chairman of the RNC, is trumpeting the
soon-to-be-released RNC Growth and Opportunity Project that will
focus on "party rules and messaging." The extent that the
GOP deludes itself into believing that adjusting its message and/or
its rules will put it back on the governing path is nonsense. The
problems the GOP faces go much deeper.
The bankruptcy the party faces is a
bankruptcy of ideas. It no longer has a foundational base of
conservative thought that gives rise to a host of policy and
legislative proposals that appeal to a sustainable majority of the
American electorate. If the GOP doesn't get that point, it has no
future, and doesn't deserve one.
Trading in the likes of William
Buckley and Milton Friedman for Jim DeMint, the newly appointed head
of The Heritage Foundation, is an ominous sign for curing what ails
the GOP. It suggests that Heritage will pivot from its role as a
scholarly think tank to that of an action arm of the tea party.
The Shadow's founding a third
party, the Republican Party. But Goldman can be reached at: Email Me
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