GOP must reconnect with old roots

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By Eric Bradner, November 8, 2008

After losing the presidency and stumbling deeper into minority status in both chambers of Congress, the Republican Party now faces the painful task of revamping itself as it seeks to become a party competitive in a nation that now so clearly votes for its hopes, not against its fears.
 

An uneasy coalition of social conservatives and college-educated fiscal conservatives elected Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Indeed, in 1984 and again in 1988, Republican presidential candidates en route to victory won Democratic states like Connecticut and Pennsylvania, which are among the nation’s best-educated. That fiscal and social conservative coalition used to constitute a winning plurality of the electorate.

However, in recent years, Democrats have outflanked Republicans on fiscal restraint, as Republican administrations have racked up the majority of the national debt while the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, actually balanced the federal budget. Meanwhile, the social stances backed by the GOP’s evangelical base have proven out of step with the majority of the country. As a result, those college-educated fiscal conservatives no longer remain loyal Republicans.
 

The questions now are how will the party reconstruct a winning coalition, and who will lead the way?
 

One choice is the Sarah Palin campaign rally route – appealing to the “Joe the Plumber” crowd, which is mostly white and largely evangelical. That crowd votes on social issues like religion, guns, gay marriage, abortion and flag-burning, and lives almost entirely in the South. That final bit – that they’re located strictly in the South – is why galvanizing the base by moving further to the right is not a viable option, and would be the death knell of the Republican Party.
 

The other choice – the one that comes with better chances at electoral success – is rejecting the politics of appealing to the lowest common denominator and again seeking the vote of the college-educated crowd.
 

Doing that requires a less polarizing message. That means adopting more modern stances on issues like the environment and abortion, and doing so without losing the party’s base. It means revamping the economic message from one that’s negative to one that’s positive.

Falsely crying socialism failed this year and it will fail again. That message instead must be one that’s a positive appeal to Americans’ intuitive sense of liberty and personal responsibility.

The party must find leadership able to articulate that message, and accompanying policy proposals, in a clear, coherent and cohesive manner.
 

That leader surely won’t be Palin, the Alaska governor – a woman whose campaign performance offered no evidence she possesses a sense of intellectual curiosity.
 

Instead, it will be someone in the mold of Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who denounced the Republican social issue of same-sex marriage, going as far as calling it unimportant. Yet due to a keen focus on the state’s economy and taxes and a first term flush with fresh ideas, Daniels won re-election in a landslide, reaching with ease the voters with whom national Republicans so struggled to connect.