It worked for Newt in 92. He allowed the jovial elder Bob Michel to continue on as Minority Leader while he engineered the revolution from the back benches.

Good call Steve.

The GOP Congress needs all new blood. Time to change all the chairs

I just received a detailed economic analysis of the Obama platform and likely courses of action put out by Credit Suisse, an 11-page document. I think they nailed it with this paragraph:

“Congressional Republicans have lost seats for each of the last two elections, and we expect a period of recriminations and finger pointing before they are well-organized to offer much opposition to the Obama agenda. Republicans in the House that survived the elections will be more conservative, combative groups in 2009 after several of the more moderate members have lost. The conservatives will argue that confrontation rather than cooperation with Obama and Congressional Democrats is the path back to the majority, increasing the prospect that the House Republicans will be marginal players in many legislative debates.”

I could have written those lines myself.

Regrettably, it is indeed possible and perhaps even likely to me that because all but the right wing have abandoned the Republican Party (except the Indiana State Party under Daniels), the National GOP will go even farther to the right, will allow the Democrats under Obama to occupy the center squarely and solidly, and will seal the GOP for a long time into a position of helpless marginalization.

Joel, the country is centrist, not conservative. (Centrist right/centrist left? A shifting shape in the eye of the beholder over time) The Republican Party has become far right.

1. My understanding of the statistical evidence is that overwhelmingly which president people vote for in the age range of 18-25 tends to define their party throughout their life. Reagan had a considerable share of the youth vote… I was one of them…. and he is the reason that so many of my generation remained loyal to the Republican Party.

2. I don’t argue that the Republican Party should go to the center to get elected. While I do argue that it won’t win going any further to the right (as it has demonstrated), mainly I argue that the cognitive dissonance on its theologically-driven stand on gay rights rots at its core and prohibits it from achieving credibility with the educated, whether conservative or liberal.

For example, from this mornings Wall Street Journal, 6 views on the future of the GOP, of which the most conservative could not but catch my eye:

Richard Land: “America must always be more than just a country. She is a cause — and that cause is freedom” Unless you are a gay citizen.

In my opinion, it is Land who cannot have it both ways. He can’t impose his theology on everybody else whose family lives don’t in the least affect him and at the same time claim that the cause of America is freedom. Because the dissonance seems to render his position claptrap, there is little reason to credit any other principle as sincerely or logically held to which he may lay claim.
That has become the fate at present of the Republican Party.

For the moment, it seems utterly that the Party has lost the flinty Yankee Republican emphasis on individualism, liberty, and independence from control on which it was founded, and instead become a Southern Party fearful of any form of progress. The Yankee Republicans have left it. I fear the polls that indicate that the young, educated, and well off have gone Democrat are offering a polite way of saying that the Republican Party has gone old, uneducated, and poor. I hope not.

There has never been any question but that social conservatives also embrace fiscal conservatism. It isn’t the social conservatives responsible for the corruption and the fiscal catastrophe in Washington… it is the politicians regardless of philosophy.

The problem is that free-market conservatives do not and cannot embrace social conservatism, especially with regard to gays, but also with regard to ethnic and religious minorities. Businesses operating and competing internationally (as all must in some way if they are to be successful) have at their core, and formally expressed in their policies, a respect for individuals and their abilities to contribute regardless of their race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. etc. etc. These businesses find it ever more difficult to support a party that disrespects the equality of religious minorities, begrudges immigrants, and campaigns.

In my opinion, “you can’t get there from here”. You won’t ever be able to declare victory over gays rights, because progress I do believe is inevitable, however painful and protracted. Instead, the Party is cursed in the Sisyphean task of battling against progress and in so doing driving business, youth, and educated into the arms of the Democrats.

So I don’t say that by moderating, the Republican Party will win (though I think that is what Governor Daniels and Senator Lugar have always done… and successfully…. ) if the conservatives abandon it. I think the picture at the moment is more hopeless than that, that it will be a long time before conditions return under which a Republican Party can succeed, and that Party will be a more moderate one than it is today. By then, new social conservatives themselves will be more accepting of gays, old ones will have died off, and social conservatives will have moved on to other topics.

As was the case with racial progress.

Josh,

1. I think you are right about Mitch and his not going anywhere… he’s made that perfectly clear, especially with regard to elective office. Perhaps with regard to any office. But I do observe that Lugar and Daniels have both won in Indiana with far greater margins than any state-wide conservative, and that the national icons of the movement conservatism who vied for state-wide office — Coasts and McIntosh — both failed. Pence may climb in the House Republican Caucus, but he will achieve no broader elective office.

2. I fear (and alas believe) you are quite right about the future (as in… next 4? 10? even 20 year?) leadership of the Republican Party nationally. Moderates are gone, it seems to me. They have now contributed to making the Democrats the majority and ruling party. If the Democrats govern in the center, then the Republican Party’s loss of moderates will be long term. Fortunately for the Republican Party and the inevitability of cycles, power corrupts, and so the Democrats will falter and the Republican Party will have its day again. It just won’t be soon.

3. Perhaps you personally can make a play for being a small government Republican, for it seems to me (and I have not lately been a consistent reader, so do please correct me if I am wrong) that you never really pressed the marriage ban cause with the gusto of the conservative movement. But defining how other’s live their lives, when it does’t affect you, is about as intrusive a philosophy as you can have. It reaches way over the public sphere, way over the business sphere, and into our homes and churches.

4. I don’t think you’re winning any converts either. But as it regards the rights of gay citizens, it is remarkable to me how many self-identified young conservatives have expressed to me their desire that government homophobic sub-category learn to mind its own business, and that Republicans desist from obstructing the rights of gays to equality under the law. That’s why I think the day will come when the pendulum shifts back to a Republican Party that has moved beyond the topic to full acceptance of gays. It will be when 20-something young conservatives have become 40-somethings responsible for leading 20-somethings, and Pence, Land, Et al are resting silently in their graves, perhaps having discovered, as I suspect Falwell now has, that their inhumanity toward other beings was not at all well received.

But I’m not sure I any longer discourage folks like Tibbs from making their views known and public. The postings about gays being an abomination, living in destructive sin, and in rebellion against what God has ordained have the same effect on the general population as the gay nuts in Michigan invading the church to prove their point or the straight nut in Indianapolis stalking the Pride celebration carrying a picture depicting the hanging of gays. People look to their friends, their siblings, cousins, classmates, children, and even parents who within the last decade have summoned the courage to identify themselves and their life partners, and then increasingly decide they’ve had about enough of the intolerant making life miserable for the people they love.

1. Josh, Coats wasn’t even winning in his native Fort Wayne.

2. Scott’s sentiments are no different from those of a racist. The anti-miscegenation folks based their arguments ardently on their religious views, but I think the reality was the reverse. They used their religious views to justify their innate prejudice against blacks. So too, religious views, particularly when they are selectively applied, are just as apt to be used for no other purpose than to rationalize homophobic instincts.

3. Most Americans rate the topic of gay marriage incredibly low among their priorities. Put any topic before them on a ballot, and they will respond as with an opinion poll rather than as with a constitutional question with ramifications unexplained to them. Again with a Klan march: “Do you favor a Constitutional measure that would prevent the Ku Klux Klan from marching down Meridian Street?” Today they would probably vote yes, not having thought through the ramifications to free speech and free assembly. It takes the tolerant and the educated to understand what goes around comes around.

We’ve just had our Constitutional guarantees submitted to an opinion poll. (Put your own constitutional guarantees up to a vote some time and see how YOU like it.)