Peter Wehner & Michael Gerson: The Path to Republican Revival
[Peter Wehner worked in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Michael Gerson was formerly a speechwriter and policy adviser to President George W. Bush.]
At some point about five years ago, America became a “One-Party Country”—and the party in question was the GOP. Such, at least, was the conclusion of Los Angeles Times reporters Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten in the book they wrote under that title following the 2004 presidential election. Bizarre as their claim may sound today, it stood on solid ground. In November 2004, George W. Bush had won re-election with the largest number of votes up to that point in American history while racking up the seventh Republican win in the previous 10 races for the White House. Republicans, moreover, were in control of the Senate by a margin of 10 seats, and of the House by a margin of 30. To complete the sweep, they also boasted a majority of the nation’s governorships and a plurality of state legislatures.
In short, Republicans had reached their most impregnable point of strength in the modern era, a fact hardly lost on their glum and battered adversaries in the Democratic and liberal camp. As “euphoric” as were Republicans, wrote the New Republic’s Peter Beinart at the time, “the intensity of their happiness can’t match the intensity of our despair.”
But then came the reversal, sudden and swift. Today, after two punishing election losses in 2006 and 2008, in the course of which Democrats gained 15 Senate seats, 54 House seats, and the White House, the GOP is now the minority party, Democrats are rejoicing, and many Republicans have lapsed into a state of near panic. “Are the Republicans going extinct?” Time asked in a dramatic cover story. “And can the death march be stopped?”
It can—though it is indisputably true that the challenges facing Republicans are the stiffest since the years immediately following Watergate.
_____________
Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 was the most sweeping since 1980. He became the first Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson 44 years earlier to garner more than 50.1 percent of the vote. In the process, he took seven states that had twice voted for George W. Bush, including two (Indiana and Virginia) that had not gone Democratic since 1964. In the Senate, Democrats hold a filibuster-proof 60 seats, the largest margin for either party since 1978. In the House, Democrats hold 257 seats to the GOP’s 178. Twenty-nine out of the nation’s 50 governorships are now in Democratic hands.
Democratic electoral dominance is reflected in other numbers as well. In every age group between 18 and 85, Gallup reported in May, Democrats enjoy an advantage over Republicans among those identifying themselves with a political party. In a Pew study earlier this year, self-identified Democrats outran self-identified Republicans by 11 percentage points. “On nearly every dimension,” the study concluded, “the Republican party is at a low ebb—from image, to morale, to demographic vitality.”
The reasons for the vertiginous decline are both proximate and long term. At the top of the list, surely, is the Iraq war—a venture that, at the outset, had garnered the support of more than 70 percent of the public and strong majorities in both the Senate and House. But that support quickly unraveled. The Bush administration never fully recovered from the revelation that Saddam Hussein did not possess stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and many Americans came to believe, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that the administration had “lied” the country into war. Add to this an Iraqi insurgency the White House did not adequately anticipate and an occupation strategy poorly conceived and poorly executed, and one had the makings of massive political erosion. By the time Bush embraced a new and successful counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, it was too late for Republicans. The public had grown bone-weary of the war and blamed both the president and his party.
The GOP was also hurt badly by well-founded charges of congressional corruption. This, arguably, was the most salient factor behind the Democratic gain of more than 30 House seats in the 2006 midterm elections. “Not since the House bank check-kiting scandal of the early 1990s have so many seats been affected by scandals,” an article in the Washington Post put it a few days before the election. Democrats turned the GOP’s “culture of corruption” into a rallying cry of their campaign, and it worked.
Finally, among major proximate causes there was the economic crisis of late 2008. By September, the GOP’s presidential candidate, John McCain, had clawed his way into a statistical dead heat with Obama and was even leading in some polls. But then came the collapse of the investment giants Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers, the freezing of credit markets, wild fluctuations on Wall Street, and fears of an imminent depression. As the party most closely identified with Wall Street, bankers, and capitalism, the GOP was inevitably held accountable. And none of this is to mention the other issues contributing their share to the party’s decline, from the mishandled response to Hurricane Katrina to the failure of efforts to reform immigration policy and the Social Security system.
_____________
Behind and beyond all these difficulties, the GOP has been facing even more fundamental problems. The first might be called the curse of policy success. Thanks in large part to a series of conservative achievements, the major domestic challenges facing Americans a generation ago—runaway welfare statistics, crime, drug use, high marginal tax rates—have been significantly ameliorated even if not yet fully overcome. This, ironically, has deprived Republicans of some of their more time-tested talking points in partisan conflict.
A second problem is demographic. Obama took the presidency with the help of a “coalition of the ascendant” (the phrase is the analyst Ronald Brownstein’s): young people, Hispanics, and other growing elements of American society. One of those elements is white voters with college or postgraduate degrees, among whom Obama prevailed handily. By contrast, McCain enjoyed a decisive plurality among -non-college-educated whites—a segment that accounted for 53 percent of the overall electorate as recently as 1992 but that now stands at only 39 percent.
A third long-term challenge is geographical. Over the past five presidential elections, Brownstein writes, Democrats have built a “blue wall” consisting of 18 states and the District of Columbia; these account for fully 90 percent of the electoral votes needed to win the presidency. In addition, Democrats control most of the Senate seats from those same 18 states, as well as more than 70 percent of the House seats, two-thirds of the governorships, every state House chamber, and all but two of the state Senates. In the Northeast, Republicans now hold just 18 percent of U.S. House seats and only one-seventh of U.S. Senate seats. Some parts of the country are nearly devoid of Republican -representation.
Is it any wonder that many observers are now prepared to consign the GOP to the dustbin of history? “Today,” proclaims the Democratic strategist James Carville, “a Democratic majority is emerging, and it’s my hypothesis, one I share with a great many others, that this majority will guarantee the Democrats remain in power for the next 40 years.” In the judgment of Sidney Blumenthal, author of The Strange Death of Republican America, “no one can even envision when the Republicans will control the presidency and both houses of the Congress as they did as recently as 2006.” Adds Michael Lind: “The election of Barack Obama to the presidency may signal more than the end of an era of Republican presidential dominance and conservative ideology. It may mark the beginning of a Fourth Republic of the United States.”
Now who’s “euphoric”?..
Read entire article at Commentary
At some point about five years ago, America became a “One-Party Country”—and the party in question was the GOP. Such, at least, was the conclusion of Los Angeles Times reporters Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten in the book they wrote under that title following the 2004 presidential election. Bizarre as their claim may sound today, it stood on solid ground. In November 2004, George W. Bush had won re-election with the largest number of votes up to that point in American history while racking up the seventh Republican win in the previous 10 races for the White House. Republicans, moreover, were in control of the Senate by a margin of 10 seats, and of the House by a margin of 30. To complete the sweep, they also boasted a majority of the nation’s governorships and a plurality of state legislatures.
In short, Republicans had reached their most impregnable point of strength in the modern era, a fact hardly lost on their glum and battered adversaries in the Democratic and liberal camp. As “euphoric” as were Republicans, wrote the New Republic’s Peter Beinart at the time, “the intensity of their happiness can’t match the intensity of our despair.”
But then came the reversal, sudden and swift. Today, after two punishing election losses in 2006 and 2008, in the course of which Democrats gained 15 Senate seats, 54 House seats, and the White House, the GOP is now the minority party, Democrats are rejoicing, and many Republicans have lapsed into a state of near panic. “Are the Republicans going extinct?” Time asked in a dramatic cover story. “And can the death march be stopped?”
It can—though it is indisputably true that the challenges facing Republicans are the stiffest since the years immediately following Watergate.
_____________
Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 was the most sweeping since 1980. He became the first Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson 44 years earlier to garner more than 50.1 percent of the vote. In the process, he took seven states that had twice voted for George W. Bush, including two (Indiana and Virginia) that had not gone Democratic since 1964. In the Senate, Democrats hold a filibuster-proof 60 seats, the largest margin for either party since 1978. In the House, Democrats hold 257 seats to the GOP’s 178. Twenty-nine out of the nation’s 50 governorships are now in Democratic hands.
Democratic electoral dominance is reflected in other numbers as well. In every age group between 18 and 85, Gallup reported in May, Democrats enjoy an advantage over Republicans among those identifying themselves with a political party. In a Pew study earlier this year, self-identified Democrats outran self-identified Republicans by 11 percentage points. “On nearly every dimension,” the study concluded, “the Republican party is at a low ebb—from image, to morale, to demographic vitality.”
The reasons for the vertiginous decline are both proximate and long term. At the top of the list, surely, is the Iraq war—a venture that, at the outset, had garnered the support of more than 70 percent of the public and strong majorities in both the Senate and House. But that support quickly unraveled. The Bush administration never fully recovered from the revelation that Saddam Hussein did not possess stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and many Americans came to believe, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that the administration had “lied” the country into war. Add to this an Iraqi insurgency the White House did not adequately anticipate and an occupation strategy poorly conceived and poorly executed, and one had the makings of massive political erosion. By the time Bush embraced a new and successful counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, it was too late for Republicans. The public had grown bone-weary of the war and blamed both the president and his party.
The GOP was also hurt badly by well-founded charges of congressional corruption. This, arguably, was the most salient factor behind the Democratic gain of more than 30 House seats in the 2006 midterm elections. “Not since the House bank check-kiting scandal of the early 1990s have so many seats been affected by scandals,” an article in the Washington Post put it a few days before the election. Democrats turned the GOP’s “culture of corruption” into a rallying cry of their campaign, and it worked.
Finally, among major proximate causes there was the economic crisis of late 2008. By September, the GOP’s presidential candidate, John McCain, had clawed his way into a statistical dead heat with Obama and was even leading in some polls. But then came the collapse of the investment giants Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers, the freezing of credit markets, wild fluctuations on Wall Street, and fears of an imminent depression. As the party most closely identified with Wall Street, bankers, and capitalism, the GOP was inevitably held accountable. And none of this is to mention the other issues contributing their share to the party’s decline, from the mishandled response to Hurricane Katrina to the failure of efforts to reform immigration policy and the Social Security system.
_____________
Behind and beyond all these difficulties, the GOP has been facing even more fundamental problems. The first might be called the curse of policy success. Thanks in large part to a series of conservative achievements, the major domestic challenges facing Americans a generation ago—runaway welfare statistics, crime, drug use, high marginal tax rates—have been significantly ameliorated even if not yet fully overcome. This, ironically, has deprived Republicans of some of their more time-tested talking points in partisan conflict.
A second problem is demographic. Obama took the presidency with the help of a “coalition of the ascendant” (the phrase is the analyst Ronald Brownstein’s): young people, Hispanics, and other growing elements of American society. One of those elements is white voters with college or postgraduate degrees, among whom Obama prevailed handily. By contrast, McCain enjoyed a decisive plurality among -non-college-educated whites—a segment that accounted for 53 percent of the overall electorate as recently as 1992 but that now stands at only 39 percent.
A third long-term challenge is geographical. Over the past five presidential elections, Brownstein writes, Democrats have built a “blue wall” consisting of 18 states and the District of Columbia; these account for fully 90 percent of the electoral votes needed to win the presidency. In addition, Democrats control most of the Senate seats from those same 18 states, as well as more than 70 percent of the House seats, two-thirds of the governorships, every state House chamber, and all but two of the state Senates. In the Northeast, Republicans now hold just 18 percent of U.S. House seats and only one-seventh of U.S. Senate seats. Some parts of the country are nearly devoid of Republican -representation.
Is it any wonder that many observers are now prepared to consign the GOP to the dustbin of history? “Today,” proclaims the Democratic strategist James Carville, “a Democratic majority is emerging, and it’s my hypothesis, one I share with a great many others, that this majority will guarantee the Democrats remain in power for the next 40 years.” In the judgment of Sidney Blumenthal, author of The Strange Death of Republican America, “no one can even envision when the Republicans will control the presidency and both houses of the Congress as they did as recently as 2006.” Adds Michael Lind: “The election of Barack Obama to the presidency may signal more than the end of an era of Republican presidential dominance and conservative ideology. It may mark the beginning of a Fourth Republic of the United States.”
Now who’s “euphoric”?..