Can The GOP Get Its Groove Back?

Can the Elephant learn to dance, sing and trample jackasses underfoot again? Maybe. But they're going to figure out what they stand for first.

As far as that goes , I personally could care less if the Republicans ever win another election unless they're willing to embrace the principles that made them worth supporting in the first place - small government, lower taxes, individual liberty, fiscal responsibility, the encouragement of excellence, American exceptionalism and a strong national defense. If they're unwilling to do that and figure on some new whiz bang techno-fart gizmology to revive them or that watering down those basic principles to be Democrat-lite is the way of the future, as far as I'm concerned the GOP elephant can go the way of the mastodon.

The American people will reject that kind of phony stance every time it's presented to them. People line up and pay admission to see the Mona Lisa, but I doubt they're going to do it for a copy. We saw that during the last election, when the crowds and the excitement followed Sarah Palin, while the head of the Republican ticket, 'Maverick' John McCain was so boring. nuanced and off putting that he actually was forced to appear jointly with Palin in order to be able to speak in front a decent sized audience. The dinosaur media followed Palin too, ignoring McCain in favor of doing their best to gun down Palin. They knew where the real danger to Obama lay, and it wasn't in some tired Senatorial creature yammering about how bi-partisan he was or how he'd worked so well with Ted Kennedy.

This takes on particular importance in light of the dinosaur media's exuberance over Arlen Specter's defection from RINO to Donkey.

Specter is an egotistical waterhead who symbolizes precisely why the GOP fell out of favor with the teeming masses. In the end, what he was about was getting re-elected and maintaining his perks, rather than adherence to any kind of principle. He almost symbolizes why the GOP got booted out. But on the other side of the same coin, Maine Senator Susan Collins tersely pointed out that she had won re-election as a Republican in a blue state and nobody from the RNC had ever bothered to come around to ask her how she did it.

And that's exactly the point. Susan Collins understands retail politics and populism in a way a lot of the GOP's leadership has simply lost touch with. And it's cost them. This goes past the labels of 'liberal' and 'conservatism' and back to the Founder's principles.

I might add that President Obama and many of the Democrats don't understand this stuff either. From being the self-announced party of the mythical Little Guy, the Donkeys have morphed into a party beholden to any number of pressure groups and special interests, many with conflicting agendas. They simply have better media coverage, the advantage of having run against a uniquely unpopular incumbent and weak, clueless opposition. All of these factors could very well work against them in 2010 and 2012 - if the opposition changes.

There are a number of voices in the GOP today like Jeb Bush, John McCain, Michael Steele and others who think the problem is that the GOP needs to move beyond the legacy of Ronald Reagan, abandon its base and go more 'big tent'.

In today's New York Times, their 'conservative' columnist, Ross Douthat made the same point in his debut today by going after conservatives:

Watching Dick Cheney defend the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, it’s been hard to escape the impression that both the Republican Party and the country would be better off today if Cheney, rather than John McCain, had been a candidate for president in 2008. {...}

As a candidate, Cheney would have doubtless been as disciplined and ideologically consistent as McCain was feckless. In debates with Barack Obama, he would have been as cuttingly effective as he was in his encounters with Joe Lieberman and John Edwards in 2000 and 2004 respectively. And when he went down to a landslide loss, the conservative movement might – might! – have been jolted into the kind of rethinking that’s necessary if it hopes to regain power.

At the very least, a Cheney-Obama contest would have clarified conservatism’s present political predicament. In the wake of two straight drubbings at the polls, much of the American right has comforted itself with the idea that conservatives lost the country primarily because the Bush-era Republican Party spent too much money on social programs. And John McCain’s defeat has been taken as the vindication of this premise.

We tried running the maverick reformer, the argument goes, and look what it got us. What Americans want is real conservatism, not some crypto-liberal imitation.

“Real conservatism,” in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation.

Let's take a moment to examine Douthat's central premise, that had Dick Cheney been the nominee, Obama would have cleaned his clock and destroyed the evil Right Wingers once and for all.

The fact is, the election turned on two things - the economy coincidentally turning south just before the election when Barack Obama was lagging in the polls, McCain feckless response to it and Obama’s uncritical media coverage versus an all out attack on a marginal candidate at odds with the rank and file of his own party.With all that going for him, Obama beating McCain by 5 points was roughly the equivalent of the Chicago Bears playing a high school team and winning in the fourth quarter by a touchdown.

Based on that, I'm not so sure Cheney would have lost...especially if Sarah Palin had been on the ticket.

For one thing, every time real conservatism based on small government, strong defense, individual liberty and lower taxes with anything like an articulate spokesperson has run against its opposite number, it's won by a landslide - because America remains a center right nation. And for the most part, a Christian one.


To those of you who wonder how Cheney might have fared against a good looking, well spoken charismatic lefty, I can only refer you to the Cheney-Edwards debate or any of Cheney's little sorties against the likes of CNN's Wolf Blitzer. I won't even bother mentioning what he did to Joe Biden. Cheney versus Obama would have been absolutely pitiful as Douthat admits, and there's no way the dinosaur media could have covered it up. The country would have understood that it was a clear choice between a novice and having a grown up in charge. Not only that, but the American people would have seen a very different side of Dick Cheney, one the dinosaur media would have found difficult to distort.

For that matter, I remember watching Cheney and Lieberman debate back in 2000 and saying to myself that the wrong two guys are heading the national tickets.I still feel that way.

Unlike McCain, Dick Cheney would have been unafraid to hit Obama on the issues and would have raised questions about the problems of having someone like Obama as commander-in-chief with his slim resume, questionable associations and stances on the issues. And I doubt Cheney would have made a high profile ass of himself running back to DC in the middle of the campaign to vote for a bailout deeply unpopular with the American people.

With all that, Obama might have still eked out a win, but it would have been razor thin if it happened at all, and it would have been a first in American politics for more than just the fact that one candidate was one third black. It would have been the first time the Left ever defeated a clearly defined, articulate conservative in touch with the bedrock of American values.

Reagan was so effective not so much because he was a by-the-numbers conservative but because he stood for principles, and was able to express them in easily understood terms that resonated with the average American. He wasn't afraid to go out on a limb and present the clear difference between his vision for America and that of his opponents.

Real conservatism always wins out eventually because that's how the rules of life and nations work. All it takes is the ability to speak honestly to the American people and explain that to them.The Left can be counted on to be defeated by history, and moreover to defeat themselves as their arrogance, basic dishonesty and contempt for American values is always shown up by the rising tide of events.

That's the road back for the GOP, if it's going to happen at all - clearly defined, articulately stated principle with the candidates to back it up in word and deed.