Pope Francis faces a daunting challenge

Second of a two-part series

LeRoy Goldman
The Shadow Knows

The Roman Curia is the central government of the Catholic Church. Its roots go back to the collapse of the Roman Empire about 1,500 years ago. When the empire disintegrated, the vestiges of its governmental apparatus were absorbed by the Catholic Church.

The Curia's prime responsibility is to take direction from and implement the policies of the pope. When it does not, when it chooses to act independently, bad things happen. How the new pontiff chooses to address (or not) the Curia's actions will define his papacy and the vibrancy or decline of the church going forward.

In 2011, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, then the deputy governor of Vatican City, wrote letters to Pope Benedict denouncing corruption in the Curia. For his efforts, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state who had been hand-picked by Benedict, fired him. It's likely that Bertone's sacking of Vigano inspired the plot that led to the "Vatileaks" in January 2012.

The leaked documents illuminate a Curia obsessed with secrecy, intrigue and corruption. The Vatican denounced the Vatileaks as a brutal attack. But In March 2012, as the crisis mushroomed, Pope Benedict appointed a commission of three cardinals to investigate the leaks. That secret investigation has purportedly uncovered financial irregularities and the blackmailing of homosexual clergy.

In May 2012, the scandal intensified with the publication of Gianluigi Nuzzi's book, "His Holiness: The Secret Papers of Benedict XVI," which describes the Curia as a hotbed of jealously, intrigue and factional infighting. Nuzzi had access to more than 10 Vatican whistle-blowers.

Also in May, the pope's butler, Paolo Gabriele, was arrested for having been the source of the Vatileaks. Police seized documents in his apartment that dealt with allegations of corruption, abuse of power and lack of financial transparency in the Vatican. He was indicted for aggravated theft in the summer of 2012. After a four-day trial in October, he was found guilty and sentenced to 18 months in an Italian prison. However, he never went to prison. He remained in the Vatican until Pope Benedict met with him and pardoned him just before Christmas.

Five days before he pardoned Gabriele, Pope Benedict received the 300-page report from the three cardinals who had completed their investigation of the Vatileaks. Their secret report, "Relationem," was also given to Pope Francis.

Although the Vatican has denied that the contents of the Relationem had anything to do with Pope Benedict's decision to abdicate, such denials do not pass the smell test. The report was presented to the pope on the same day he reportedly decided to resign.

The Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported in February that the Relationem "all revolves around the breach of the Sixth and Seventh Commandments." Those are the commandments that prohibit adultery and stealing.

La Repubblica, relying on a source close to the authors of the Relationem, said the report identifies high-ranking clergy who were blackmailed by laymen with whom they had relationships of a "worldly nature." The paper recounts a gay network that organized sexual encounters in villas, saunas and even the Vatican itself. Nor is this the first revelation of a gay network in the Vatican. The British newspaper, The Guardian, reported similar incidents in 2007 and 2010 involving a senior official and a chorister.

Regarding stealing, Repubblica reported the main focus of the cardinals' report concerns an investigation of the Vatican Bank for money laundering. The Vatican Bank, known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), is a privately held institution that reports to a committee of cardinals, and through them to the pope. As such, the IOR is not subject to public scrutiny. Last May, as the Vatileaks unfolded, the IOR's board of directors fired its president, Ettore Tedeschi, who is under investigation for money laundering.

The IOR has a checkered history. It was involved in a major political and financial scandal in the 1980s concerning the $4.7 billion collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, of which it was a major shareholder. Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, head of the IOR at the time, was indicted as an accessory in the collapse. Banco Ambrosiano was accused of laundering drug money for the Sicilian Mafia. Marcinkus avoided trial because the Italian courts ruled that, as a high-ranking prelate of the Vatican, he had diplomatic immunity from prosecution. Marcinkus retired to Sun City, Ariz.

The inescapable conclusion is that it's not possible to overestimate the challenge facing Pope Francis. All the pomp and ceremony of the Vatican no longer disguises internal rot. If the church decides to turn a blind eye toward it or decides to make minor changes in secret, it will doom Francis' papacy, and more importantly the Catholic Church.

In fact, Francis has only one path that will save the church. He must publicly expose the corruption in the Curia, rip it out root and branch, and replace it with a governance structure that is transparent, honest and under his control. The way to begin that process is for Francis to release the Relationem report. Redact it where necessary only to protect the identity of innocent individuals who provided testimony to the commission. To get beyond a monstrous cover-up, you have to come clean in the light of day.

I pray that Pope Francis will remember what God told his namesake, St. Francis of Assisi: "Go and repair my house, which, as you can see, is falling into ruin."

The Shadow's in the Vatican, but the Swiss guards can't find him. Goldman can be reached at:  EmailMe

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LeRoy Goldman
The Shadow Knows
Part I 

Published: Friday, March 29, 2013 at 4:30 a.m.

Francis: Christ's vicar or Curia's caretaker?

In 1963, Morris West penned "The Shoes of the Fisherman." His novel was No. 1 on The New York Times' best-seller list that year. In 1968, it was the basis of a film starring Anthony Quinn in the title role of Kiril Lakota, the metropolitan archbishop of Lviv, who had been imprisoned in a Siberian labor camp for 20 years.

Lakota is unexpectedly freed by his former jailer, who had become premier of the Soviet Union. Lakota is sent to Rome and becomes a cardinal. When the pope dies suddenly, the conclave of cardinals deadlocks on the choice of a successor, and Lakota emerges as the next pontiff.

Lakota takes the name Pope Kiril and is immediately confronted with a worldwide threat of nuclear war that grows out of a dispute between China and Russia and exacerbated by a famine brought about by American trade restrictions against China.

He realizes that in order to avoid a nuclear conflagration, the Catholic Church must act. At his papal coronation, he removes his tiara in a gesture of humility and announces that the church will give away a majority of its wealth to feed the starving. Although the Curia, the church's hierarchy, is aghast at Kiril's stunning move, the crowd gathered in St. Peter's Square below stands as one with the pope.

All of this, of course, is fiction. But might there be a lesson in it for Pope Francis now?

The abdication of Pope Benedict XVI and the installation of Pope Francis I has already left its mark on the Catholic Church and in the minds of millions worldwide. The new pope breaks with tradition in a myriad of welcome and beneficial ways.

He comes from Latin America where more than 40 percent of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics live. He is the first pope who is a Jesuit, an order of Roman Catholic priests who are known for their intellectual prowess, their scholarship and their iconoclasm. Additionally, Francis is known for being approachable, humble and an outspoken priest on behalf of the least powerful — the poor, the disabled and the sick, whether they are believers or not.

Jesuits also take a vow of obedience to the pope. And that itself raises intriguing questions. The Rev. Nicholas Steeves, a French-American Jesuit pursuing doctoral studies in Paris, said, "Who will the pope obey now? How will this obedience work?"

And that is the central question. Will Francis be content to benefit from the immense amount of good will that has accompanied his selection, and not rock the Roman Curia's boat? Or will his obedience be to God and thus be the basis for breathing long overdue reform into a church in retreat and crippled by the moral black hole that is the Roman Curia.

The Roman Curia is the central governing body of the entire Catholic Church. Its authority comes from the pope. Its job is to carry out the pope's will, and not to substitute its own.

But in fact the Curia has taken on a life of its own and has become expert in resisting efforts to reign in its independent exercise of authority.

Criticism has mounted not only from Catholics in general but also from many cardinals who believe the Roman Curia is unresponsive and obsessed with aggrandizing its own power. All of this is made significantly worse by the fact that the Curia operates in secrecy. Secrecy is the shroud that conceals and perpetuates the Curia's corruption.

Writing in The New Yorker earlier this month, Alexander Stille said, "The leadership of the Catholic Church is a closed Roman fortress, hopelessly out of touch with the concerns of the 1.2 billion ordinary believers outside." No better proof of the church's insularity is the fact that it is hemorrhaging parishioners. In Europe, the church has been hollowed out. Even in Latin America, long a bastion of Catholicism, the church is losing worshippers to Pentecostal Protestantism.

In America, discontent with the church has been rising for decades and has reached epic proportions with the widespread scandal of priests who are pedophiles. In fact, the 22 million ex-Catholics in the United States are the second or third largest denomination here.

And the malaise goes far beyond the sex scandal. It encompasses the assault on American nuns by the Curia, the debates concerning women priests and the matter of homosexuality.

The Catholic Church in America is decades late and billions of dollars short in addressing the scandalous and criminal behavior of priests who have molested children and then been protected by the church.

Instead of insisting upon standards that mandated transparency, criminal referral and zero tolerance coupled with due process, the church engaged in a cover-up that started here and found willing accomplices in the Curia in Rome.

In a recent column in The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan recounts a story about St. Francis of Assisi, the man whose name the pope chose for himself. Francis of Assisi is reported to have visited the church of St. Damiano. In prayer there, he heard a voice saying, "Francis, go and repair my house, which, as you can see, is falling into ruin." St. Francis was in the church alone!

Part II of this column will appear in Sunday's edition.

The Shadow is in prayer for the pope, but Goldman can be reached at:  EmailMe

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Are we now a colorblind nation?

We now know that the enactment of the Voting Rights Act almost a half-century ago has been responsible for nothing short of a reformation in the expansion of voting rights, particularly in the South where there had been pervasive voter discrimination against African-Americans.

We also know that the 1982 amendments to the act were responsible for the creation of majority-minority congressional districts, and that they have produced so many gerrymandered seats for both parties.

Since its enactment in 1965, the act has been renewed four times. The most recent renewal was in 2006 for another 25 years. The renewal passed the House 390-33 and the Senate 98-0. Such lopsided majorities would seem to suggest that the extension is an obvious, unblemished good. But maybe there's more here than meets the eye.

Let's look at a case currently before the Supreme Court, Shelby v. Holder. Shelby County, Ala., is challenging the constitutionality of Section 5 of the act. That is the section that requires certain state and local governments in the South with a history of voter discrimination to seek and receive approval from the federal government prior to making any changes in their voting procedures, regardless of how trivial such changes are. This is what is called "pre-clearance."

When Section 5 was enacted, there was no doubt that the states and counties it covered in the South had an obvious track record of voter disenfranchisement aimed at blacks. And there is no disagreement that Section 5's requirement for pre-clearance tramples on federalism and the sovereignty of the states. In 1965, that was an acceptable price to pay in order to begin to deal with voter disenfranchisement. The question before the court now is whether it's still an acceptable price.

The oral argument before the court a month ago suggested that the four liberal justices favor the continuation of Section 5, while four conservative justices appear poised to strike it down. Justice Anthony Kennedy is the swing vote. By this June, we will know whether the court will do what Congress would not do when it overwhelmingly voted to extend Section 5 in 2006: defy political correctness and recognize that Section 5 has done its job but is no longer needed.

But wait. There's more!

The court is also considering another case where race is at the core of the constitutional dispute, Fisher v. University of Texas. Abigail Fisher, who is white, argues she was not admitted to the University of Texas because of her race. It is possible that the court's ruling in this case may profoundly alter the current nine-year precedent on affirmative action that it set in 2003 when Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote the 5-4 decision (Grutter v. Bollinger) in which the court affirmed the University of Michigan's use of race as a factor in its admissions policy so long as it did not amount to a quota system.

The central point of the Grutter v. Bollinger decision in 2003 was that the university can make use of race in its admissions policy until it achieves a "critical mass" of diversity within its student body. The problem then and now is that "critical mass" remains an undefined term. Universities won't define it for fear that, if they do, they will have cut across the bow of what is prohibited — using a racial quota system.

Greg Garre, who represented the University of Texas before the court, tried to argue that a "critical mass" was when underrepresented minorities don't feel isolated. Chief Justice Roberts didn't buy Garre's argument.

What makes this case so important is that its impact will likely go way beyond Fisher and the University of Texas. It's possible the Fisher decision will substantially reduce the degrees of freedom that universities have with respect to the use of race in their admissions policies. Such a ruling would amount to a watershed in the realm of affirmative action.

Like the Shelby case, Justice Kennedy holds the swing vote. A hint of Kennedy's thinking emerged during the questioning of Garre concerning the university's use of race in admissions. Kennedy pointedly asked Garre, "So what you're saying is that what counts is race above all?"

But the most significant piece of this fascinating puzzle is Chief Justice Roberts. Jeffery Toobin, a legal analyst who writes for The New Yorker, believes Roberts is on the verge of letting all of us know that his signature issue will be an affirmation that the Constitution is colorblind. The decisions this June in Shelby and Fisher may have the same bottom line — the nation's fight against racial discrimination has been won.

Toobin states, "Race-conscious policies have transformed our schools and workplaces. The Voting Rights Act has given the South new and very different politics. But affirmative action, in Roberts' view, has become discrimination against whites."

If, however, current policy is maintained, we can all look forward to 2043 when, according to Census Bureau statistics, America will be a majority-minority nation. At that point, it will be the whites who will be packed into racially homogenous, gerrymandered districts!

And, were that to happen, I believe Judge Robinson O. Everett would look down from heaven and conclude that white majority-minority districts in the mid-21st century are just as abhorrent and unconstitutional as black ones were in the late 20th century.

The Shadow's always been colorblind, and Goldman can be reached at: EmailMe

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           Gerrymandering: The poison pill

LeRoy Goldman
The Shadow Knows

Published: Sunday, March 17, 2013 at 4:30 a.m.

We all know the House of Representatives doesn't serve the nation well. And we all know that at the heart of the House's dysfunction is ubiquitous gerrymandering. More than 300 of the House's 435 seats are gerrymandered to the point that only one party can win them.

                       Gerrymandering has become the House's poison pill.

It's a zero-sum game. They win and we lose. North Carolina's a perfect example of gerrymandering gone wild. In Districts 1 and 12, both majority-minority districts, Democrats G.K. Butterfield and Mel Watt, both African-Americans, won last November with 75.3 percent and 79.6 percent of the vote, respectively.

At the same time, Republicans Walter Jones and Howard Coble won in District 3 and District 6 with 63.1 percent and 60.9 percent of the vote, respectively. Compare those blowout victories to the fact that statewide Mitt Romney defeated Barack Obama by only 2 percent! Or how about House Speaker John Boehner winning with 99.2 percent and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi winning with 85.1 percent of the vote?

You get the point — contort and distort the district lines and you create congressmen (and women) for life. It's not a House of Representatives. It's a House of Disrepute. But maybe, just maybe, beneficial change is on the wing. But before we look forward, we need to look back.

Gerrymandering is not new. The term was first used in the Boston Gazette in 1812 when then-Gov. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts signed a bill into law that drew the lines of state Senate election districts to benefit his Democratic-Republican Party. One of the contorted districts had the shape of a salamander. Thus, "Gerry-Mandering" was born.

Both parties have engaged in this process for 200 years. But there is no doubt that the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 and its amendments in the early 1980s took gerrymandering to a whole new and more combustible level. It both permitted and sometimes required the creation of majority-minority congressional districts. In so doing, the shaping of district lines was no longer simply a matter of one party attempting to gain political advantage. Now it was also a matter of race.

Section 2 of the VRA prohibits the drawing of congressional district lines that results in the denial of the right to vote based on race or color. Section 5 of the VRA requires certain covered jurisdictions, in the South and including certain counties in North Carolina, to "preclear" their proposed changes with the federal government.

Under Section 5, the burden of proof is upon the covered jurisdiction to prove to the feds that neither the purpose nor the effect of the proposed voting change will deny the right to vote based on race or color. No matter how you cut it, Section 5 tramples on the constitutional doctrines of federalism and state sovereignty.

Since the enactment of the VRA, the number of majority-minority congressional districts has grown substantially. There are 42 members of the House who are African-American, 28 who are Hispanic and 12 who are Asian. The vast majority of them are Democrats, and most have been elected from majority-minority districts.

However, packing large numbers of such minorities into those districts has created many opportunities for the Republicans to win seats that are no longer competitive for the Democrats because so many minority voters have been packed into the majority-minority districts.

None of us will be surprised to learn that a racially charged matter such as this would inevitably end up in the courts. And it did, beginning in the 1990s, thanks to the efforts of Duke law professor Robinson O. Everett. Everett was not the person one would have expected to have led the charge against the constitutionality of North Carolina's majority-minority districts. He was, after all, a liberal Democrat and was close to and respected by the African-American community in Durham.

But Everett believed that racial gerrymandering was wrong, and, more importantly, he believed it was unconstitutional. His efforts gave rise to what became known as the Shaw-Cromartie cases that the Supreme Court ruled on no less than three times by 2001.

At the heart of this dispute was a question upon which people of good will could and did strongly disagree. Was the creation of majority-minority districts simply a way to ensure that people long denied political power could achieve it? Or was it an inappropriate use of race and thus a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution?

In 1993 and 1996, the Supreme Court twice agreed with Everett in 5-4 decisions (Shaw v. Reno and Shaw v. Hunt). But in 2001, he lost 5-4 in Easley v. Cromartie because Justice Sandra Day O'Connor switched sides. Everett's concept of a colorblind Constitution would have to wait for another day.

But that day may be closer than most realize. President Obama has twice been easily elected president. He didn't need a racially contrived district to win those elections. Did he? No, his district was the United States of America! I'm confident that, if Robinson O. Everett were alive today, he would be smiling and he would make that point far more compellingly and far more eloquently than have I.

Next Sunday, my column will look forward to cases now before the Supreme Court and will speculate about the agenda of Chief Justice John Roberts.

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Addressing inequality of opportunity

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At the end of World War II, America was at the front edge of something profound. A colossus was emerging — the American middle class. The GIs had come home, and millions of them, thanks to the GI Bill, were in school preparing for a new life and a good job. The baby boomer generation had just begun to boom. The nation was confident and exuberant.

Americans became accustomed to sustained economic growth. Sure, there were recessions along the way. But they typically were short-lived and, most importantly, not a deterrent to national prosperity and a better life for most Americans.

Presidents and members of Congress hooked their careers and their re-election campaigns to the rise of the middle class. It was a win-win scenario for all of them, especially the Democrats, who quickly figured out that they could win elections by frightening the middle class into believing the Republicans would dismantle programs like Medicare. It's a strategy that has worked for decades in large part because the GOP has never figured out how to counteract the demagoguery.

Today, however, it's hard to deny that the party's over. The signs and symptoms of economic stagnation and national decline are evident everywhere.

In the first decade of the 21st century, 45,000 factories and plants closed their doors. Since 2000, median family income has fallen 6 percent, and total wealth for the middle class has dropped 28 percent. Households in the wealthiest 1 percent of the U.S. population have 288 times the wealth of the average middle-class family.

Middle-class core values of work, fairness and optimism have been replaced with desperation and hopelessness.

Virtually all Americans are united in their belief that the government in Washington has failed them, while it serves itself. Both political parties in Washington, especially the Democrats, attempt to convince voters that their party is the champion of the middle class. They both lie. They both lack the courage and/or the brains to do what needs to be done. And therein lurks an opportunity for the rebirth of the moribund Republican Party.

I find that Republican opportunity in a most unusual place — the thinking of economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. Stiglitz was the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Clinton Administration. He's a professor at Columbia University and was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2011. I suspect he's a Democrat and a liberal. So what? Good ideas are good ideas. And God knows, the GOP needs good ideas.

Thomas Edsall, in a review of Stiglitz's book, "The Price of Inequality," calls it "the most comprehensive counterargument to both Democratic neoliberalism and Republican laissez-faire theories." Edsall argues in effect that Stiglitz offers a "defiant rejection" of the inevitability of the economic mess America finds itself in.

Imbedded in Stiglitz's thinking are ideas that would enable the Republican Party to not only offer viable policy alternatives to the Democrats but also to win national elections.

Stiglitz sees America as a land of inequality of opportunity, a yawing chasm between the 1 percent and everybody else. He argues that the U.S. has less equality of opportunity than most all industrialized nations. According to the Brookings Institution, only 58 percent of Americans born into the bottom fifth of income earners ever escape that category. Only 6 percent make it to the top. Economic mobility here is less than in most of Europe and all of Scandinavia.

The most important reason for the inequality of opportunity is education. Since 1980, the poor have grown poorer, the middle has stagnated, and the top did better and better. The achievement gap between rich and poor children at the turn of this century was 40 percent larger than it was 25 years earlier.

Stiglitz argues that our "cherished narrative of social and economic mobility is a myth." He believes we have both moral and economic interest to open access to better education for those in the middle and at the bottom. Doing so would spur innovation, make the economy more robust, increase job opportunity and result in higher incomes that would increase the tax base.

Stiglitz argues that those in the middle class have been hollowed out, making them unable to invest in their or their children's future. He argues that the middle class has become too weak to support the consumer spending that drives the economy's growth. Ninety-three percent of income growth in 2010 went to the top 1 percent of income earners.

For most Americans, their home has been their principal asset. But today many Americans now have negative net worth as their home prices have plummeted. In addition, student debt now is more than $1 trillion, can't be canceled by bankruptcy and exceeds credit-card debt.

What all of this means is that we need a new way to think about the ways in which all of these forces intersect. Stiglitz is suggesting that the fundamental problem we face is political — the oversized effect of moneyed interest on the legislative and regulatory processes. He believes those political forces can and should be changed. It's a political calculus that changes everything. That's what Joseph Stiglitz's thinking serves up on a silver platter for either party to exploit.

His thinking offers a way to reframe the sterile and deadlocked political debate in Washington. Were a Republican to bring it forward, the national political landscape would be altered overnight. When you give the American middle class a reason for hope that is real, you will win their vote.

The Shadow's not holding his breath, but Goldman can be reached at Email Me. 

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Republican tinkering won't work

If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. That’s the most generous face I can put on the current state of the Republican Party nationally.

Its nominees for president were trounced in 2008 and 2012. In 2010 and 2012, the GOP nominated more than a half-dozen certain losers for Senate seats they could have otherwise won to give them control of the Senate. Last year, the Republicans saw their majority in the House of Representatives narrowed to only 17 votes.

In 2008, no Republican could have been elected president. President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, profligate spending by Bush and his Republican allies on the Hill, and the beginning of the economic meltdown in 2008 sealed the deal for the GOP.

But 2012 was a different story. President Barack Obama’s re-election was not inevitable. He was vulnerable. Yet he defeated Mitt Romney handily — by 5 million votes, while crushing him in the Electoral College. Hiding in plain sight in the rubble of Romney’s defeat are the lessons the GOP needs to learn, and learn quickly, or it will have traded in its elephant for a dinosaur.

A quick look at the rogues’ gallery of the Republicans who sought the nomination last year is an insightful point of departure. Think about the folks Romney struggled to dispatch through the course of the primaries. Have you given thought to how disastrously Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann or Herman Cain would have fared against Obama? It takes less than a nanosecond to know with certainty that all of them would have lost to the president more convincingly than did Romney. They were a collective joke!

Only the delusional or the doctrinally cocooned can escape the reality that the party is in a death spiral that it has yet to figure out how to reverse. Last month, Jim Worth blogged on the Huffington Post, “The Republican Party lacks a soul.” He believes the GOP is “weak and vulnerable to the forces of democracy — the forces of demography.”

In The Washington Post recently, columnist Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, stated, “At the national level, Republicans have a winning message for a nation that no longer exists.” Gerson correctly concludes that the GOP “will need to do more than rebrand existing policy approaches or translate them into Spanish.”

Let’s be crystal clear about what this means. If the GOP thinks it can reclaim its ability to govern the nation by simply voting for an immigration reform bill in Congress later this year or nominating a Hispanic for president in 2016, it will remain in the electoral wilderness. Gimmickry like that won’t work. It will be perceived for what it is: a sleight of hand that it falsely presumes voters will buy. They won’t, because they are smart enough to know when they are being patronized.

Worth sums up the desperation of the GOP without mincing words. He wrote, “Trying to renew their tired and insipid ideas, hoping that somehow they’ll become more palatable if repackaged and restated, is not the answer. Vacuous ideologies lack the substance needed to become a party that can be embraced by more than the old white people that currently make up the party’s base. Republicans defy the morality their religious bent would imply. They continually batter those they claim to support — the poor, our children, the elderly, veterans, the homeless and the downtrodden.”

“Morning Joe” Scarborough addressed the descent of the GOP into oblivion recently by saying, “What conservatives must do instead is to dare to think differently, apply eternal truths to current realities. ... Two decades of losing should be evidence enough that simply talking to ourselves is not a winning strategy.”

The pathway out of this mess has been illuminated in a recent commentary by Gerson and Peter Wehner. Gerson was named by Time as one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America. Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the past three Republican administrations.

They believe the GOP needs to take five steps to reclaim its mandate to govern. First, it must focus on the middle and working class in America rather than being perceived as the handmaiden of millionaires and billionaires. Second, they believe the GOP must welcome rising immigrant groups. Third, they argue that the Republican Party needs to return to a commitment to the common good as contrasted to a worldview that is “hyper-individualistic.” Fourth, they urge the party to engage social issues in a manner that is aspirational rather than alienating. And fifth, they urge the GOP to harness its policy views to the findings of science.

Unlike those in the GOP who are foolhardy enough to believe tinkering will lead the party back to prominence, Gerson and Wehner have got it right. Next Sunday, my column will take their suggestions and link them to the thinking of economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz in a way that puts the GOP back onto the field of play.

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