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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