My third post of this blog is two more than I ever planned on doing, but the last of what I anticipate for quite some time. The first, Define Loyalty, was my rationale for not supporting my party's candidate in 2008, and really marked the beginning of what I consider to be a long term strategy to correct the course of aimless and wayward Republicanism that has become unidentifiable and, to a degree, coreless. The second, It Is Us, served as my pre-results Election Day call and a tribute to the historic victory of now President-Elect Obama, paying hommage to the egalitarian principles our founding framework provided mankind along the way. This entry is to address the state of and direction for the GOP.
2008 marks the second consecutive election where the Republicans got hammered for their inadequacies, misdeeds, and failures; this time giving up the White House along with the Senate, while the Democrat tail lights in the House of Representatives have gotten even further away. It's no mystery what went wrong. While it remains categorically true that President Bush has gotten a bad wrap, it also remains true that he came to power by running on popular unity, smaller, more efficient government (low taxes, fiscal restraint), and anti-nation-building, yet presided over the largest expanse of government and chalked up it's highest expense report also, with menu items being things like nation-building, bank bailouts galore, creation of a new, redundant bureaucracy, and new entitlements at a time when entitlement reform is what's needed. In other words (George Will's), Bush came into the Oval Office a social conservative and left as conservative socialist. We are where we are--totally out of national power--simply because we governed the opposite of what we were elected to do.
The task now is to assemble a sound recovery. Looking solely at our party, we have a bit of a rift between two important factions. The Fiscal Wing and the Culturalist Wing have clashed before, and this year's primary reintroduced their friction for all to see. The cultural conservative validty of an Fiscal candidate was questioned by a Culturalist, whose fiscal record was anything but conservative. Obviously I'm talking about Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. Romney's mormon religion was repeatedly brought up in some covert ways and amplified by some overt media coverage. In the horserace days of the Republican primary, no candidate got as many negative stories about himself or as many attacking DNC press releases than Mitt Romney. Clearly he was the most feared candidate we had. Well, the perfect storm of Mike Huckabee dividing social conservatives from Romney diluted him enough to stick us with John McCain, who we denied as our candidate so many times before, thanks also in part to crossover voters in open primaries.
All Repulblicans must ask how to solve this divide amongst us. We cannot be a party at odds with one another, or else we'll have a re-run of this year. We cannot also be hypocritical like we have been the past 5 years, and most importantly we cannot be exclusionary and derisive with each other when we're locked in a 2-party struggle for the hearts and minds of people who may have opinions that differ far greatly than what ours do. How can we expect to grow our ranks if outsiders and fence-sitters observe all this in-fighting at such personal and fundamental levels?
We need a return of pragmatism. Obama wasn't the most pragmatic candidate of 2008, but he sold it best, and honestly, he is more pragmatic than John McCain--he's emotional and ruled pretty much by his id. But nevermind this. We should be focused on actually sticking beside our principles. That is, achieving peace & prosperity by way of promoting free trade; maintaining the strongest military yet adhering to a non-interventionalist foreign policy; and yes, upholding the highest moral standards and ethical behavior but by example and reason, not claim, cultural identity, and certainly not by preaching down to others who have fallen short, or who are different. The point of any political or philosophical debate is to win converts to your viewpoint. To convince. Persuasion doesn't work by being abrasive and combative. Especially when the loudest family values voices have shortcomings and failures in their own households. Nothing will turn peole off and tune them out more than a simple display of grand hypocrisy.
If Obama can govern as a pragmatic centrist, then he should be hard to defeat in four years. It's hard enough to defeat an incumbent, and Obama would have to do pretty bad in order to be yanked off the stage given the state of affairs the nation is experiencing presently, and I'm not so sure he could pull that off. The potential to exacerbate our problems is there given his ideology and campaign promises, but odds are he will stay middle-of-the-road since that is the only way he can be popular, and being popular is the best way to win a second term, and winning the second term is the only way to parlay his historic election into being a historical figure. That said, we will waste 4 years and lose even more embarassingly if all we do is advance the exclusionary, emotional Culturalist voices of our party to the forefront in a society and planet that is increasingly diverse yet collegial.
The Republicans did well under Reagan by being inclusive and talking about opportunity for all. Obama has used opportunity (hope/change) to correct the Democrats' problem of turning off sensible voters by catering to all sorts of fringe groups, and so now it looks inclusive. We all know that Democrats will always end up being exclusionary in vision, in that if you disagree with their principles, you're either intolerant or something else, but you're not a Democrat. Republicans are a coaltion party too, but one built on commonalities of value-oriented people and fiscal conservatives. The Moral Majority is a great example of a religious or cultural effort to unite value voters regardless of their religious affiliation. In 2008, Mike Huckabee wielded religious bigotry to undo the good work the Moral Majority had been achieving. If that's what we're going to be doing again for the next four years, to ourselves, then there's no way we're going to win, no way we're going to be as close to Obama as McCain was despite his being so far away. Because if value voters are at odds within the party with which they have so much in common, then why would other voters even take a look?
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