OPINION:The Republican Party's drift to the right in the US over the last two decades was the source of its downfall, writes NIALL STANAGE
IN POLITICS, as in life, pride comes before a fall. Less than five years ago, a cocky George W Bush walked out to face the media for the first time since his re-election to the American presidency. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he announced. “and now I intend to spend it.”
Hubris was widespread in Bush’s Republican Party at the time. In that November 2004 election, it had boosted its majorities in both houses of Congress as well as copper-fastening its grip on the White House. The Democrats were demoralised.
Karl Rove, Bush’s senior adviser, was hailed as a political mastermind who was well on his way to constructing a conservative majority that could endure for a generation.
It all came to nothing. As Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman turned TV presenter, drily puts it in the latest issue of Time magazine: “the era of Republican supremacy lasted a total of two years”.
Bush spent his political capital with the same wild abandon he brought to the management of his nation’s finances. His second term was characterised by significant missteps, like a botched attempt to reform the social security system, and outright disasters: economic meltdown, deepening chaos in Iraq, and the tragi-farce of the government response to Hurricane Katrina.
No wonder the Democrats have roared back, retaking control of Capitol Hill in the 2006 midterm elections and, last November, celebrating a convincing presidential election victory for Barack Obama.
Conservatives are now enveloped by gloom. According to the polling firm Gallup, 52 per cent of Americans identified themselves as Democrats or Democrat-leaning independents in the first quarter of 2009. Only 39 per cent self-identified as Republicans or Republican-leaning. The 13-point Democratic advantage, the pollsters noted, was among the highest recorded since they began asking an identical question 18 years ago.
Adding one more gradation to Republican misery, Arlen Specter, a veteran moderate senator from Pennsylvania, announced late last month that he was quitting the party and joining the Democrats. Assuming, as is likely, that Democrat Al Franken is eventually confirmed as the winner of a narrow race in Minnesota, Specter’s conversion will bring the number of Democrats in the 100-member Senate to the magic figure of 60. That is enough to thwart attempts by the opposition to filibuster, and thus theoretically enables the party to pass whatever legislation it wishes.
Even dyed-in-the-wool Republicans like Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain’s presidential campaign last year, are horrified when they contemplate the political landscape. Specter’s departure, Schmidt said at the time, was “a pitiful commentary on the state of the party . . . We continue to shrink when we should focus on trying to grow.”.
How has it come to this? Bush’s foibles are partly to blame, of course. But the bigger, deeper failure has been the consistent drift to the right that has characterised the Republican Party for two decades or more.
Ronald Reagan’s sweeping election wins in 1980 and 1984 were taken as evidence by many within the so-called Grand Old Party (GOP) that the loud proclamation of right-wing tenets was a better recipe for success than the more moderate ideology espoused by previous Republican presidents including Gerald Ford, Dwight Eisenhower and even Richard Nixon.
But this elevation of dogmatism into a guiding principle has forced moderates out of the party. Specter quit in part to avoid defeat at the hands of true-blue conservative Pat Toomey in his state’s Republican primary next year. A generation ago, Specter would have felt comfortable in a party that included relatively liberal members, including numerous New England Republicans, a vibrant sub-species united not just by geography but by a patrician, centrist ideology.
The New England Republican is now almost extinct. Today’s House of Representatives includes not a single Republican member from the six states of the region. Last year’s election saw the GOP in retreat everywhere but in its ultra-conservative redoubts in the South and on the Great Plains. A rare contemporary Republican who has made a virtue of pragmatism, Utah governor Jon Huntsman, issued a warning to his more obdurate colleagues in a March interview with the Politico website: “You cannot succeed being a party of the south and a couple of western states. It just . . . isn’t long-term sustainable.”
Other progressive Republican voices – David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, and David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, are among the most notable – also fear that the GOP could be entering the kind of doldrums from which the British Conservative Party is only beginning to emerge.
Like the Tories earlier this decade, the GOP’s shedding of the centre-rightists who were once well-represented in its ranks further diminishes the chance of the party electing a modernising standard-bearer to lead it out of the wilderness. While Britain’s Tories coalesced around colourless Eurosceptics like Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard until desperation finally brought them to David Cameron, conservative Republicans might well elevate a more piquant figure, like 2008 presidential contender and former preacher Mike Huckabee (who memorably indicated during a televised debate last year that he does not believe in evolution), or McCain’s erstwhile running-mate, Sarah Palin.
The same views that make Palin the darling of the right almost certainly doom her to failure in a national election. The most conspicuous example is abortion, which Palin has stated should be illegal, even when a woman has been raped or is a victim of incest. Polls suggest that only around one-fifth of the US population shares that view.
Other GOP politicians appear to have forsaken ideas entirely, preferring to focus only on headlines and sound-bites. In late March, Republicans on Capitol Hill released, with some fanfare, an “alternative budget” that was intended to expose the alleged profligacy of Obama’s real budget plan.
There was one problem: the Republican proposal, running to 19 pages, did not contain any numbers at all. “I think the party of ‘no’ has become the party of ‘no new ideas’,” Obama’s White House press secretary Robert Gibbs responded gleefully.
There is no obvious, quick route out of the morass in which the Republican Party finds itself. Alongside the likes of Palin, Rove and radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh, its current most prominent representatives include Dick Cheney. The former vice-president has been on a nationwide publicity blitz in recent weeks, defending the Bush administration’s backing of “enhanced interrogation techniques”, also known as torture.
Six days ago, Cheney appeared on Face the Nation, one of America’s main political TV talk shows, where he was asked about a spat between Rush Limbaugh and Colin Powell, perhaps the most high-profile moderate Republican left in the country.
Powell had said that “what Rush does . . . diminishes the party”; Limbaugh had shot back that Powell was “just another liberal” who should “become a Democrat”.
Cheney, faced with the choice between backing a former secretary of state or a radio talk show host who once told an African-American caller to “take that bone out of your nose and call me back”, plumped for the latter.
“If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I’d go with Rush Limbaugh,” he said. “My take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican.”
That kind of jibe sends the same message as Limbaugh’s rantings, the numberless budget and the Specter defection: that the Republican Party is characterised not just by an ideological rigidity and meanness of spirit, but by a fundamental lack of seriousness.
Is there any sign of that changing? Apparently not. A special meeting of the national party has been called for Wednesday.
Among the key proposals likely to pass: a resolution that the GOP should henceforth officially refer to its opponents as “the Democrat Socialist Party”.
One of Ronald Reagan’s most effective TV ads, back in 1984, proclaimed the arrival of “morning in America”. Today’s Republicans need to grow up and reach out. If they don’t, they face many dark hours before the dawn.
Niall Stanage is the author of
Redemption Song: Barack Obama – From Hope to Reality
(Liberties Press)
