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On this site we often argue about where the Republican Party needs to go and what sort of political coalition can win again.
This is interesting but I’ve realized it’s backwards. Groups within a party don’t define the personality of a party.
In our history the personality of the parties are defined by their leaders.
In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt defined the New Deal coalition by the groups he reached out to and his rhetorical appeal.
In 1964, the election of Lyndon Johnson defined the Great Society coalition that attempted to rework the New Deal coalition with a different cast.
In 1980, the election of Ronald Reagan defined the conservative coalition that ruled from 1980-1992.
In 1994, the Republican takeover of the House redefined the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan in a Newt Gingrich direction.
During this time various Presidents and Congresses were elected without altering the soul of their party. Their failure to change their party and change our politics relates to specific leaders.
Bill Clinton was supposed to redefine the Democratic Party. He didn’t. In most ways a Democrat from 2008 is a just a more leftist version of the 1990 Democrat.
George Bush was supposed to redefine the Republican Party as a party with wider racial appeal that sold fiscal and economic moderation. By 2008 Republicans agreed on really only one thing.
Whatever our party will be, it won’t run on the rhetoric and policies of George Bush.
Of course it’s important to think about what our party must do and what coalitions we need. However we can’t do that in isolation. We can’t think of our preferred coalition and assume someone with the necessary skills to win and form that coalition will just show up.
I would love to have a party that fit the coalition I think we need. However I have to identify a politician who could actually run, win and succeed in government.
Honestly there isn’t a Republican alive who fits that profile for me. So instead of arguing about where we need to go it’s probably better to identify individuals who could lead a winning coalition even if it’s not the one we want most.
Heck if we can elect a Republican in 2012 that is _pro-life_ and looks able to govern… I wouldn’t honestly care about their stance on other issues.
Our party is in a demographic bind and the longer we stay in the minority, the harder it will be to break single party Democrat rule.
So ask not only what we must do. Ask also who can lead us out of the wilderness and succeed once in government.
For my part I think we absolutely must find a candidate who can appeal to Hispanics and succeed even with America’s entitlement mindset. We need a candidate who has the skills to push policies the public will fight for. We need a candidate who comes across as genuine, trustworthy and sincere. We can no longer appear like politicians shamelessly pandering while hiding what we really support.
January 9th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
Romney, of course. He’s not Reagan, but he has a standard of excellence, achievement, and the particular set of skills that our party and country really need right now, and in which no one else in the GOP comes close.
I’m not sure anyone is going to be able to appeal to Hispanics in a significant way. It’s real problem with no immediate solution.
January 9th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
This is a great post. It really captures a very pragmatic idea: that voters respond to personalities. Have an ideological agenda? Find the right messenger.
I feel the same way as Doug: the right messenger isn’t out there for the message I think the GOP should be expresing. Of course, as diverse a group of Republicans as Gamecock, Adam G, Kavon, Dave G, and Alex K probably feel the same way.
But if everyone of the “grassroot activist” ilk, the folks who spend their leisure hours posting on Race 4 2012 in January 2009, could embrace the idea that we are willing to sublimate our ideological ideal to the platform of a candidate with the leadership qualities and personal magnetism to forge a winning coalition, we’d really be making progress.
January 9th, 2009 at 11:12 pm
Just the “I” was supposed to be bold. Don’t know what happened there.
January 9th, 2009 at 11:21 pm
I knew this was a Doug piece as soon as I saw the first three one-line paragraphs.
And yes, personality counts — big-time. It shouldn’t, but it does.
January 9th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
Alex: “I knew this was a Doug piece as soon as I saw the first three one-line paragraphs.”
HA!
Alex are you still on the Sanford bandwagon?
January 9th, 2009 at 11:38 pm
#2, One thing 2008 taught me is that it does no good to have a great candidate if they can’t get elected or if they can’t succeed once elected.
For at least a few elections I’m really willing to support quality Republican candidates who I may disagree with more than half the time.
January 9th, 2009 at 11:44 pm
5 – I’m very tentatively with Sanford right now. As long as he’s coherent about the need to combat jihadism, I’m with him.
January 10th, 2009 at 12:02 am
“Bill Clinton was supposed to redefine the Democratic Party. He didn’t.”
Thats just not right. Clinton was a founder / leader of the DLC – a faction of the Democratic party that was very explicit in terms of changing the party – and succeeded to a large extent. The notion of a Walter Mondale championing NAFTA, balancing the budget, and saying “the era of big government is over” is not really conceivable. Although the political spectrum is much narrower in the US, the change the Clinton brought to the Dems is similar in direction and nature to the change that Tony Blair brought to the Labor party.
January 10th, 2009 at 12:15 am
“For at least a few elections I’m really willing to support quality Republican candidates who I may disagree with more than half the time.”
More than half the time? Why not vote for a Dem?
Seriously, what is it about voting for a Republican that is so important that you will do it even if you disagree with the candidate more than you agree with him?
January 10th, 2009 at 1:41 am
#9 – Because those percentages are relative. I agreed with McCain only about 50% of the time, but I agreed with Obama about 10% of the time. See? I would hazard a guess that for a huge number of the conservative posters on this site, we’re angry and frustrated with the GOP, but still believe that our party reflects our ideology far more readily than the Democratic party. I respect Obama and admire his abilities and temperament, but at the end of the day, I can’t line up behind his agenda.
January 10th, 2009 at 1:43 am
#9 – Also, I have a hunch that for many of us, the choice would be between a Republican and a third party candidate. For myself, at least, it was always a question of whether to vote for McCain or Barr; Obama was never in the picture.
January 10th, 2009 at 1:45 am
“We need a candidate who comes across as genuine, trustworthy and sincere.”
I totally agree. And this eliminates Romney, at least until he achieves a major image overhaul.
It’s really a shame Jeb Bush has the last name he does; he’s one of the very, very few people in the GOP who fits Doug’s bill. (And I think Doug is completely spot-on.)
January 10th, 2009 at 1:59 am
I totally agree. And this eliminates Romney, at least until he achieves a major image overhaul.
Another one?
January 10th, 2009 at 2:01 am
Win M.
Romney is genuine, trustworthy and sincere. I think it’s a real shame that people bought the Huck garbage about Romney. Anyone who knows the man will tell you that he is the real deal.
Anyway, there’s a lot of people who know what kind of man he is, and that’s why he came from nowhere and almost won the nomination.
January 10th, 2009 at 2:03 am
Alex, you need to talk to some people who know Romney personally. You’ll change your mind about him. Better go find someone because he’s most likely to be the nominee.
You can do it, I’ve got faith in you because quite often you really make some sense.
January 10th, 2009 at 4:35 am
I have no doubt that the man is very intelligent and competent.
But so is Barack Obama.
I trust neither man.
January 10th, 2009 at 7:12 am
Doug Forrester, excellent article. Our local radio host (I still like him the best despite the fact that he backed Mr. Romney) says ‘vote your favorite person in the primary and vote your the least evil in the general.’ Not bad advice. If I actually do vote for my very favorite candidate, I doubt it will be Mr. Romney. However, since being out of power, I do not have the luxury of voting for my favorite candidate and I am thus open to a variety of camps. A lot can change in a few years, but it does look like Mr. Romney has a slight advantage over other candidate. The playing field is moving in his direction. Since a few states like Ohio will lose one or two electoral points, Ohio will all of a sudden not be as relevant and the fact that Mr. Romney is not quite as popular in Ohio as the average state will no longer be a problem. It remains to be seem exactly which states will be crucial and we thus do not know the exact number of swing states where Hispanics will decide the outcome, but Mr. Romney will most likely have to improve him numbers among Hispanics. If by chance he can do that, it will become more difficult to argue against Mr. Romney for strategic reasons. Still, we now not for sure which people Mr. Obama will hack off and thus who will be the best to beat him.
January 10th, 2009 at 7:42 am
We should run a book on when Romney wins over Alex.
I’ll go October 2011, when he’s the prohibitive favorite.
January 10th, 2009 at 8:46 am
Great observation, Doug, and an important one. Personality matters more than ideology, and our personality preferences are driven by our emotions more than by our intellect.
This factor is one that I have often criticized as too superficial. But if I try to hang back and read the ongoing fights between the proponents and detractors of Huckabee, Palin, and Romney here (alphabetical order, BTW), it appears that these potential candidates generate the most emotional responses.
An aspect of emotional response is that we by nature quickly either like or dislike another person within the first moments of introduction. So I would assume, by extension, that the initial roll-out of a political candidate in the media matters at the gut level of emotional appeal. Palin and Huckabee are thus national “damaged goods” because they were defined by the media, rightly or wrongly, as religious zealots. Even many religious folks, I believe, would reject zealotry. Who would ever think of describing him- or herself as a “zealot”?
But the point remains. Personality matters, and the more of a personality a politician has, the greater is the immediate initial emotional response.
I’ve never felt that the Bushes had much personality that could be conveyed through the media. People like Obama, Clinton, and Reagan have/had personality by the boatload.
January 10th, 2009 at 8:51 am
Tano:
True, but the DLC did not set the policy agenda during the Clinton administration — neither during the first two years under a Dem majority, nor after the Gingrich Revolution, when the other party set the agenda, wrote laws, and made policy.
The DLC has withered and died since Bill left. It had hardly achieved any policy victories, other than siding with the Republicans in passing NAFTA, a policy launched by Bush 41.
January 10th, 2009 at 9:00 am
Alex:
There’s a rule of thumb in publishing/typesetting that there is an ideal line width for the fastest reading. IIRC, it is about 50 characters or so. You’ll notice that newspapers, magazines, and books are within the acknowledged comfort range.
Having shorter paragraphs can be helpful for the readability of electronic publishing, which often ignores the publishers’ rule of thumb.
This is one of those silly bits of trivia you learn by having a professor who will only accept papers with the expected formatting. This guy went beyond setting margins and line spacing to include indentation tabstops, fonts, point size, and character line width — proportional characters, of course!
January 10th, 2009 at 10:29 am
Very good post Doug. I believe that the profile of the leader who could bring the Republicans back electorally and demographically will have to be one or more of the following things:
1. Catholic
2. Midwestern or Western (or from Florida).
3. a woman.
4. a minority or religious minority (Mitt).
5. Hispanic or having Hispanic support.
I believe that if Governor Palin (or Mitt or Michael Steele) does not win in 2012 then our best hope for revitalization of the Party and restoration is JEB BUSH. He is the perfect candidate on paper at this time as far as unifying the Party and reaching out to the middle.
January 10th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
I cannot disagree JA Pruce.