No Imagination
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There has been a good deal of discussion about Michael Steele’s election as RNC Chairman. Even though this is a job he actively sought, I have to say I feel sorry for the man. Supposing for a moment that he proved to be as effective in his role as Howard Dean has been at the DNC, Steele is faced with an electorate so much more hostile to his party that his task is the thankless one of a coach who labors in obscurity rebuilding an absolutely decimated and humiliated franchise. Jim Schwartz, the unfortunate new head coach of the Detroit Lions, comes to mind as an example of what I mean. It is not going to be Schwartz’s fault that the Lions will continue to be terrible for the next several years; the flaws of the organization and the legacy of years of poor management would drag down the most successful and talented of coaches. Schwartz is by all accounts an excellent defensive coordinator, and the Titans’ defense has been outstanding during his tenure, but he is not a magician. Steele reportedly has been successful as a political operator, albeit not as a candidate, which is how he has maneuvered himself into the current position, so one imagines that he has some instincts for political tactics that may prove valuable. Regardless, his talent is not going to be all that important. The flaws of the party and the legacy of the last eight years will drag Steele down despite his best efforts, at which time everyone will hold forth on what it means that Steele, who we will continually be reminded is the GOP’s first black chairman, “failed” to work miracles. Like Schwartz, he is inheriting a team that has little talent. Unlike Schwartz, he isn’t going to get the opportunity to recruit the best new talent, because these are the people (i.e., degree-holding and young voters) who are fleeing from the GOP the fastest. Among these groups of voters, it is more and more as if the GOP held a draft and no one bothered to enter.
Curious to see what Steele had to say, I watched the interview he gave on FoxNews, and I can’t say I was all that impressed. To what did he attribute the GOP’s political decline over the last two cycles? Naturally, it was spending. That was it. Spending. It’s not just that he didn’t address the GOP’s failures in foreign policy and its errors in anti-terrorism, which I would have been interested to hear, but that this was the only reason he gave, which suggests that he thinks the main solution to GOP woes is to come out against spending (unless, of course, it relates to “defense”).
Steele refers to Republicans’ “value for a sound economy,” and this did not seem to be a joke. He said quite seriously that the election results had nothing to do with “our value for a sound economy.” I don’t know quite how to take that claim. One wonders where this “value” was over the last few years–no doubt being inflated by loose monetary policy along with the housing market. Then, when asked for a new idea, Steele invoked school choice! I can’t really blame Steele. He has become the national chairman of a party whose Congressional leadership has believed for years that the only thing it ever did wrong was to vote for too much spending, and he has become the public face of the GOP at a time when it has zero fresh ideas, which is why he had to keep returning to lines referring back to debates from the ’90s that could have been delivered in the ’90s without changing a syllable. The problem is not so much that Steele’s answers lack imagination, but that if he had shown an inkling of imagination much of his party probably would turn on him.
Filed under: politics
I think there is a better NFL analogy to describe the GOP. They’re the Oakland Raiders. After an era of great success, total incompetency and stale tactics has led them to be a laughing stock. But the Raiders is ultimately a good coaching job to have, because if you win, you’re declared a genius for a turnaround. If you fail, the incompetent management is blamed. I see the same thing here. If Michael Steele can make the GOP relavent again, he’ll be hailed. If he fails, I think the media will ultimately blame a lack of high profile candidates and other factors for continual failures.
Have high-ranking GOP figures really pushed for school choice before? I thought it was mostly pointy-headed intellectuals from think-tanks.
Bush and McCain both trotted out vouchers during their presidential campaigns, and Jack Kemp was all for it and various other “empowerment zone”-type policies before that. It is a pointy-headed intellectual proposal that the politicians, ever desperate for “outreach” ideas, embraced as their own. It is, of course, quite unpopular with actual GOP voters, whose schools for the most part are relatively successful.
Please blog about the last season of BSG.
Mr. Larison’s predictions for the end of BSG? I wonder if the dying leader mentioned in the prophecy may actually turn out to be Bill Adama.
The problem with school choice isn’t that it’s a bad policy. It’s actually quite a good policy idea, but it doesn’t get votes. It’s pointless to push it from a tactical perspective. The problem is, the people it would most help (minorities in poor neighborhoods with failing schools) are so deep in the Democrats’ hip pockets that it doesn’t really matter. It’s pointless to try to appeal to them. They’ve been voting against their own well-being for decades, no matter how severely liberal policies have destroyed their families and increased their misery, so why would they stop now?
The problem with the “new ideas” mantra is that there aren’t that many fundamentally new ideas out there to be had as far as policy goes. Policy-wise, the Democrats are pushing the same stuff they always have: more abortion, more spending, more regulation, harsher anti-growth environmental policies, more thought policing, socialized medicine, more union power, etc, etc. What has primarily changed is just the way they’re mobilizing and presenting their same old message.
While spending was a huge failure over the past 8 years, I’d say that the biggest failure was one of communication. The Bush White House was nearly mute, seeing no need for PR at all. Meanwhile, the Democrats were mobilizing and building up an extensive communications structure. And then to top it off, they found a candidate capable of inspiring a huge cult of personality.
What the GOP primarily needs is new tactics, rather than new policies. Like the Democrats, they need some attractive, eloquent faces to front the organization, and they need to update their communications. They also need to find ways to disrupt the Democrats’ means of communication. In that they have a disadvantage, because liberals are far more enthusiastic about using government coercion to curtail the speech of opponents. But the GOP could find ways if they were smart. One example would be to campaign on tuition caps for universities receiving government money. It could be presented from a populist standpoint: “to help struggling families afford educations in an economic downturn” or something to that effect. But the real goal would be to starve and marginalize the universities.
Policy-wise, the Democrats are pushing the same stuff they always have: more abortion, more spending, more regulation, harsher anti-growth environmental policies, more thought policing, socialized medicine, more union power, etc, etc.
Not really. Are these these the things being pushed by Jim Webb and all the other democrats elected over the past 6 years. Some of them, like more regulation are widely supported by the public now.
I’d say that the biggest failure was one of communication
Every losing candidate and cause claims this. While it is always possible the dressing was the problem, more often than not it is the package itself.
And then to top it off, they found a candidate capable of inspiring a huge cult of personality.
This is more of a right wing invention. It certainly speaks of the relationship of many on the right with Sarah Palin. People that supported Obama generally did so because they supported what they believed he could accomplish, at least to the extent they had done so for any other candidate. Part of what is seen of Obama worship is the product of incredulity that anyone person could support his positions or think them superior to McCain.
Like the Democrats, they need some attractive, eloquent faces to front the organization
Are you seeing the same Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Howard Dean I’ve seen?
Wow, Deuce, that’s like a Liberal’s parody of an out-of-touch Republican. So, the big Republican failure over the last 8 years is not Iraq, or a lackluster economy (cf. Frum), or Presidential/GOP incompetence to the point that the 2008 Republican Presidential nominee campaigned on a platform of “change”, or presiding over the run-up to the current economic nightmare, or that the Republican party has, to a large extent, abandoned the middle-class in favor of the rich and corporate interests, or any number of other substantive things that Republicans did (or didn’t do). The big problem, according to you, is bad PR. And the solution, according to you, does not involve changes such as having policies that might have more appeal to working-class voters (cf. Douthat & Salam for some examples), but tactics such as tuition caps to “starve and marginalize” universities, along with better PR.
In Praise of No Imagination:
Sometimes small ball is the way to go. I’d love to see the GOP in sackcloth denouncing neocon interventionism. I’d love to see Kristol, Krauthammer, Perle, Gaffney, Cheney, Wolfowitze et. al, processing through the streets of DC like flagellantes, yelling “Mea Culpa! Mea Maxima Culpa!” Hannity and Limbaugh could make appearances in hairshirts. Lord knows it would be a beautiful sight.
But, we know this isn’t going to happen, so the best tact to take for the next few years until the reality dawns is to stick with good negative criticisms of the ruling party’s package. There wont’ be any turnover in power soon, but it’ll bide time, allowing the party to put some emotional distance between itself and its huge boners of the past eight years, so it can start reevaluating its governing philosophy.