Pointing to this article in the UK’s The Telegraph, blogger Ann Althouse wonders, “If there is an Obama landslide, how will the GOP retool?”
My thoughts, expanded slightly from my comments there:
Although the circumstances surrounding it meant that the 2008 presidential election was and remains the Democrats to lose, this was an opportune year for the Republican Party to retool.
In fact, if they were to have any chance of victory in November, retooling was essential.
And John McCain was the ideal candidate to do that retooling, moving the GOP back to more conventional conservative positions like limited government and responsible spending, all of it wed to his long-standing penchant for pragmatic compromise.
But McCain made the mistake of playing too much to a “base” that would not have abandoned him this fall anyway. The result: The genuine maverick presenting himself as a neocon to an electorate dismayed with the neocon orthodoxies of the Laffer Curve and Wilsonian interventionism. And even many evangelical Christians are sickened by the identification of their faith with the Republican Party’s fire-breathing wing.
But the number one cause of failure is success. Politicians tend to ride one winning set of talking points and strategies until their increasing irrelevance leads to defeat.
Parties seem to lack the agility or the common sense to apply their principles in new, creative ways to new circumstances. They’re like generals fighting the last war.
The GOP has been aping Ronald Reagan with no apparent notion that things have changed in the nearly twenty years since he left Washington. And McCain has allowed himself to be seduced by the idea that, in spite of Iraq and what has happened with the economy, parroting the same conventions that won in 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, and 2004, will work again.
The result is predictable. Just as Democrats who insisted on being the party of the New Deal for decades after FDR’s death and eventually lost their formerly unquestioned domination of US national politics, the Republicans are about to lose the White House and the Congress.
If McCain had been McCain, the losses he and his party are about to suffer might have been avoided.
The GOP will be forced, in Althouse’s terms, to “retool” after November 4. There will be a new battle for the soul of the party, pitting the neoconservatives against what will be a newly emboldened “Republican wing of the Republican Party.”
The neocons will argue that, had one of their own been nominated, they could have beaten Obama. But wounded by an electorate overwhelmingly rejecting the Bush economic and foreign policies, probably even more fiercely down the ballot than at the top, that argument may not carry the day.
Then people like those who are part of the Republican Leadership Council, who claim to know how to expand the Republican base, may gain greater say over the identity and platform of the Republican Party. It wouldn’t surprise me.
Nor would I be surprised if those who have pretended to be neocons in the past, people like Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, suddenly undergo conversion experiences, becoming more like traditional, mainstream Republicans of the Eisenhower-Theodore Roosevelt-Gerald Ford ilk. If Romney or Bush start to change their tunes, especially the chameleon-like Romney, you’ll know that the Republican Party is retooling for a post-neoconservative future.
[I didn’t post this on my personal blog, although I’ve talked about the 2008 presidential campaign 112 times over there. Some of what I’ve written on the topic there has even proven to be correct.]