Republican Party Must Move to Center, Develop Pragmatist Agenda
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Related subjects: J.E. Robertson, Opinion, U.S. news, U.S. Politics, Vote 2008 Comments (1)
The Republican party has seen virtually every one of its over-arching policy assumptions discredited or rejected, in the 2006 and 2008 elections. It now faces an historic challenge, to reinvent itself in a climate where the other party dominates both houses of Congress and has elected a popular new president by a wide margin. The campaign of Sen. John McCain struggled to overcome the Obama message, in part because it was relying on the assumption that specific Republican party platform planks were the political ideas most en vogue with the electorate, when they were in fact at odds with current economic and political reality.
McCain may have been, until becoming the Republican frontrunner, back in February, the one Republican able to make a viable centrist argument against a progressive pragmatist political innovator, like Obama, who is also near impossible to pigeonhole on ideological grounds. But he put aside his own time-tested maverick mettle and began to pose as the number-one spokesperson for policies he had long opposed, and which closely mirrored the policies vehemently pushed by the Republican Congress, through 2006, and the Bush administration, until the onset of the current financial crisis.
President-elect Obama, throughout the campaign, worked to integrate key tenets of fiscal conservatism into his largely progressive agenda. He did this in a campaign which early on was permeated with the vocabulary of his political philosophy. So while the Republican party now found itself fighting a progressive slide among the electorate generally, the aggressive ground operation of the Democratic party, working to get out the vote and defeat Republican incumbents, it also found itself struggling to find an ideological middle ground with broad appeal.
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The Republican party’s play-to-the-base strategy, which early on ambushed McCain and demanded that he reassure consistent Republican voters that he was a “real” Republican, had the effect of turning the entire Republican electoral strategy into a “small tent” vision of the American political landscape. This allowed Sen. Obama’s overtly “big tent” approach to fill the void and gain momentum. It allowed voters, some self-identified conservatives or consistent Republican voters, to migrate to the Obama vision of what should come next.
For the Republican party, basic assumptions about the American electorate, about “what it takes to win”, about the role citizens see for themselves in our 21st century democracy, even about the nature of “cultural” issues in politics, have come up short, and must be changed. The party will have to reinvent itself in line with broadly popular ideals, including environmental responsibility, access to education and being a human rights leader in the world. These ideas are not at all contrary to conservatism, and the Tory party in Britain has ably taken them up in a gut-wrenching re-branding effort.
Sen. Obama’s disciplined, principled centrism, rooted in progressive approaches to economic and education policy, reset the standard of political discourse in the United States, even before his election. His David vs. Goliath aura, his never hapless, always poised commitment to hope and possibility, has reshaped the expectations of tens of millions of people for the power and meaning of American politics.
Where Ronald Reagan may have brought into fashion for nearly 3 decades a pragmatically-conceived fiscal conservatism, Barack Obama’s election heralds the advent of an era rooted in progressive centrism, effected by disciplined and reasoned pragmatism. Until the Republican party finds a way to relate to the underlying narrative of a political epoch hungry for progressive pragmatist centrism, it will struggle to regain its footing, let alone compete, especially if Democrats continue to exhibit the discipline of Obama’s rise.
While mourning John McCain’s defeat, conservative Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, wrote of Obama that “With him we get a president with the political intelligence of a Bill Clinton harnessed to the steely self-discipline of a Vladimir Putin. (I say this admiringly.) With these qualities, Obama will now bestride the political stage as largely as did Reagan.” This is in part because he sees the broad appeal of a firm occupation of the political middle-ground.
Republicans, like Dick Armey, who insist that the massive repudiation of the Republican agenda witnessed in this campaign was really a rejection of “Republicans who acted like Democrats” —an apparent reference to the wild-eyed inflation of the federal budget brought about by a fully Republican Congress working with Pres. George W. Bush—, need to take a second look at the real political nature of their defeat and stop getting trapped by their own rhetorical distortions.
“Big government” is not a Democratic priority, but rather government that works for the people, and achieving that just happens to be President-elect Obama’s most fervent ambition. Obama has throughout his political career espoused positions that were pragmatic and that allowed him to build consensus, to achieve major changes in policy —Illinois predatory lending legislation, education policy, foreign policy on curbing weapons proliferation, and Congressional ethics reform, a generation in coming—, and he will marshall his resources as chief executive to do the same. Republicans will either share in the work, or not.
Where the choice is to avoid moving to the center, to continue the unfounded character assassination that has been attempted against Obama, they will likely find they have comprehensively surrendered the middle-ground, the political center where most American voters start their reasoning process. To abandon the center-right due to an ill-conceived mortal terror of the center left, will simply exclude the party from a transformative period, where the nation as a whole is pulling for a pragmatist progressive revolution.
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