The Republican Party (the GOP) woke up on Wednesday not only to the certainty of an Barack Obama presidency, but to a US in which the electoral map had been redrawn and the political alliance that has been at the core of the conservative movement for the last 30 years blown to pieces.
The results leave the heartland of the US, until Tuesday colored solidly red for the Republican party, with huge chunks now blue, from Florida in the southeast, to Ohio and Iowa in the midwest and Colorado and New Mexico in the southwest. The strength of the Republicans in both houses of Congress has also been sharply depleted.
The party is now searching for a new leader and identity.
“It’s time for the losing to stop. And my commitment to you is that it will,” House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio told his rank and file after the party lost at least 19 congressional seats on Tuesday — on his watch.
Saying the party’s image has been tainted by “scandals and broken promises,” Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina declared: “We have got to clean up, reform and rebuild the Republican Party before we can ask Americans to trust us again.”
He called for party leaders to “embrace a bold new direction” or hit the road.
Indeed, a leadership fight brewed in the House. Boehner announced he would seek two more years as Republican leader. But Representative Adam Putnam of Florida, the No. 3 Republican, was “reluctantly” stepping down from his post. And a Republican official said Virginia Representative Eric Cantor intends to run for the second-ranking spot now held by Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri.
Blunt was considering his options but did not immediately announce a bid to keep his job, a sign that he will likely step aside.
Plenty of Republicans from the conservative to the liberal wings agree the party is in shambles as the Bush presidency comes to a close, leaving them without a titular leader when the president’s term ends in January.
A fight for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee is expected; several state party chiefs are maneuvering for the top national job even though Mike Duncan is said to want to stay on.
More seriously for the longer term, the Republican ship has been left with nobody at the helm, without a map or navigational tools to indicate the way ahead, and facing perilous new demographic icebergs.
“It’s going to be very ugly on the Republican side,” said Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the right-leaning think tank the Cato Institute. “The Republicans are split into clear factions who will blame each other for the second defeat in two years and try to seize dominance of the party.”
Conservatives now face a possibly prolonged period of trauma, equivalent to the wilderness years of the Democrats between 1980 and 1992. In that case, the Democratic party embarked on a major overhaul of its structures and policies only after its third successive defeat.
Modern Republicans may not want to wait so long. Debate on the way forward began almost immediately, with senior conservatives gathering yesterday at the weekend home in Virginia of one of their number to discuss how to rebuild a national grassroots movement akin to Obama’s mobilization of Democratic supporters.
The annual meeting of Republican governors, which convenes in Miami next week, will be another opportunity for post-election blood-letting and early power wrangling.
Voices are likely to call for a swift move back towards the center, to prevent further draining away from the party of independent and moderate voters.
But Tanner thinks the battle will go much deeper than the traditional tussle between moderate and right-wing factions and embrace a fundamental look at the definition of conservatism in the 21st century.
Such a crucial fight over the soul of the party would in itself be a reflection of the strain that its central premise is coming under. Modern conservatism has been conceived as a “big tent” of disparate elements, encapsulated in the 1950s concept of “fusionism” popularized by the founder of The National Review, the late William Buckley, and put into practice by former president Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Since then the party has somehow held together as the sum of its respective parts, which Tanner breaks down into three main factions.
First there are the “small government” conservatives, who blame US President George W. Bush for radically increasing government spending and powers.
Then there are so-called “Sam’s Club” conservatives who argue that many struggling US families rely on government services and will not vote for a privatizing administration.
Finally, there are the populists, the anti-brigade in the mould of firebrand Pat Buchanan, who bang the drums of anti-immigration, anti-trade and anti-big business.
That last group could be heard in the crowd in Phoenix, Arizona, booing whenever Senator John McCain mentioned Obama or vice president-elect Joe Biden, in his concession speech, much to McCain’s discomfort.
The cracks within the Reagan-assembled alliance were already close to the surface before this year’s elections. McCain unwittingly opened up the divisions by trying to please all three factions and failing to give a clear lead.
“That helped perhaps to quell infighting during the campaign, but it did nothing to give a sense of direction now that the election is over,” Tanner said.
Over the next few months a semblance of leadership will be provided by Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, the Republican chiefs in the Senate and House of Representatives respectively.
But the party is in essence at sea without a skipper, and may remain so until the 2012 presidential election throws up an undisputed leader.
Names to watch include Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee following their strong showings in the this year’s primaries; and younger generation Republicans such as Indiana Representative Mike Pence and governors Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota.
But the name that is attracting most interest — favorable and unfavorable — within the party is that of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. She has proven herself to be a singularly divisive figure, both within the country and within the conservative movement, but she already has powerful backers among think tanks and rightwing media outlets who are unlikely to let her slope back to Alaska in obscurity for long.
Hanging over the debate and further exacerbating the gulf between factions is the critical state of the US economy, which more than any other factor cost McCain the election. Republicans are also waking up this week to the realization that their assumed superiority on economic issues can no longer be relied upon.
“For the first time in many years, Democrats are more trusted by voters on the economy. This was the first election since the early 1990s that the economy was the top priority for voters and Republicans found it very uncomfortable,” said Dan Schnur, a Republican strategist who worked with the McCain presidential campaign in 2000.
As if that list of challenges was not enough, two other critically important problems lie ahead.
The Republican Party, which for most of the past three decades has enjoyed a technical and organizational superiority over its rivals, was trounced this time round by Obama’s bottom-up campaign. The conservative movement has fallen behind in its use of innovation, particularly relating to the Internet.
Second, seismic demographic shifts are starting to eat into GOP strongholds and the results could be seen on election night. The Democratic sweep of the southwest reflected rapidly growing populations of young Hispanics, while the expansion of suburbs occupied by well-educated high-income families has broken down the walls of conservative fortresses such as Virginia.
Duncan said it would be wrong to view the election as “the death rattle of American conservatism,” pointing to a roster of rising stars that includes Palin, Jindal, Cantor and Senator John Thune.
Republicans, Duncan said, “are going to take a deep breath and listen to the American people.”
The party is creating a new online forum, called Republican for a Reason, that will allow people to explain “how we let them down” and “what we can do to restore confidence in our party,” he said.
In 2001, Bush set up shop in the White House with Republicans firmly in control of both the House and Senate. His chief strategist, Karl Rove, envisioned building a long-term Republican majority by broadening the party’s base in part by building support among women, labor groups and Hispanics.
Two years later, Rove said: “Political parties kill themselves, or are killed, not by the other political party but by their failure to adapt to new circumstances.” That turned out to be true — for the Republicans.
“The party just simply lost its way,” said Republican Dick Armey, the former House majority leader. “It was no longer about small government and individual liberties ... and the party became enormously unattractive to the American people.”
Many point to the Iraq war — and anger over how it was handled — as just the start of the troubles.
“Try as it might, the party has been unable to get it off its back,” said Frank Fahrenkopf, a former Republican National Committee chairman.
He also pointed to Hurricane Katrina and a spate of scandals, including the leak of a CIA operative’s identity, as kindling that fueled distrust of government and disgust with the party.
By 2006, the country issued a double repudiation of Bush and the party, giving Democrats control of both the House and the Senate. Two year later, the Republicans lost the White House in Obama’s barrier-breaking election as the first black president.
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