A.J.Nolte's blog

Amidst all the recent hoopla regarding chairman Michael Steele's television gaffs, one of his more significant statements as party chairman has gotten less press than it perhaps deserves. Steele, when asked how he would punish Senators Specter, Snow and Collins for their stimulous apostasy, stated that opposing their reelection was not out of the question. Patrick has discussed this idea here with regard to troubled and gaff-prone incumbent Jim Bunning, while scandal-prone and perhaps equally trouble incumbent David Vitter dodged a minor bullet when Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, elected not to challenge him in the primary. Still, Vitter faces a potential challenge from popular Secretary of state Jay Dardenne. Meanwhile Specter, who squeaked by Pat Toomey in the 2004 primary, looks to be facing a really tough rematch in which his reelect numbers are already below 50 percent. As someone from the KeyStone state, two facts which have escaped general notice leap out at me regarding the Specter case. First, PA chairman bob Gliesen has hinted that Specter may not get the state party's backing. This is a tectonic shift in PA politics, as the state party is not only deeply establishmentarian but is represented, at it's high eschalons, with southeastern party folk very close to Specter. If even the PA committee, which has a tendency to endorse the insider and incumbent in almost every situation, is considering not backing one of the longest-serving, most well-connected and most politically vindictive incumbents in Pennsylvania history, Specter ought rightfully to be very very concerned. The second and related point is that the firm which conducted the poll in which Specter's numbers were so low is a well-known Republican polling firm respected in PAGOP circles. James Lee, of Susquehannah polling, has been the pollster of choice for PA's Republican legislators for some time now (full disclosure: I met Lee in college, all be it briefly, and was pretty impressed). Given the source, hearing James Lee say that "Specter is toast" can't be helping Arlen's digestion any.

So, in the Specter, Bunning and Vitter cases, the question becomes, would the RSCC and RNC (not to mention the state parties in PA LA and KY) be better off backing primary challenges if these three troubled incumbents were unwilling to withdraw?

First, it's worth pointing out that, in GOP circles, the idea that a retirement is preferable to even a weak and troubled incumbent is a huge paradigmatic shift. yet if we look at the case of Florida, where Mel Martinez's retirement has cleared the way for a number of potentially strong challengers, this conclusion is inescapable. Whatever his motivation, Martinez, in opening the race to a strong field and doing so early, has taken a huge target out of the Democrat's sites for 2010 and quite possibly done the party a huge service (one wonders, hypothetically, whether a Dole retirement in early 2007 might have left room for the GOP to recruit a strong candidate and hold the NC senate seat). Should Specter, Bunning and Vitter announce their retirements, the GOP would almost certainly be in a position to recruit strong challengers in each of these races. These challengers would, as fresh faces untarred by scandal in a year in which the Democrats will have a historically up-hill battle, probably stand a somewhat better chance of holding the seats than the current incumbents.

Given this, how ought the party and campaign committees, and the state paties for that matter, to view primaries. I can see two arguments, from this perspective, not to actively recruit and support primary challengers. First, primaries are expensive and, in theory, damaging to all parties involved. Second, a bruising primary challenge with a well-heeled incumbent might damage a challenger's ability in future contests.

I think both of these arguments fall short. First, with regard to primaries. While they can be damaging, they can also raise the name recognition ofthose involved. Primaries dominate the news cycle, and the winner has already been tested with a tough election battle. His or her negatives have probably gone as high as they are going to go. This may not be the case for a candidate who has been waiting in the wings, struggling to break into the news cycle and who has not faced real opposition research. Second, a strong primary challenger actually endorsed by a state party may cause an incumbent to withdraw. Fighting the state party is a hard enough task when one is the challenger, but there at least one has the outsider image working in one's favor. Not so for a troubled incumbent; how can primary voters be expected to place faith in an incumbent rejected by the party committees? As to the second argument, I think this is unlikely. If anything, a well-fought but closely-lost primary challenge is often a springboard for future electoral success.

At the very least, the RSCC, RNC and state parties should do as little as possible to help weak incumbents, and make it very public that they will not be making primary endorsements or providing primary help to these incumbents. Smart and ambitious politicians in Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Louisiana would almost instantly read the tea leaves correctly. Not only secretary of state Jay Dardenne, but freshman representative Joseph Cao, who faces a very tough reelection bid, might take a shot at an unprotected Vitter. Kentucky has a few very solid prospective candidates, as Patrick has already mentioned. And with party luminaries and the state party not standing in his way, Toomey, who won election and reelection in a Democrat-leaning district and knows economic issues far better than most sitting senators, would have a solid chance of toppling Specter. These younger, fresh faces, who could stand as stark contrasts to the actions and inaction of Washington Democrats, would, in my view, be at least as likely to hold their seats as would the weak and troubled incumbents who hold them now. And such an outcome would tell members of the house and senate that the party will not bail them out when they make disastrous mistakes. Rewarding failure, after all, ought not be a Republican virtue.

For some light Christmas reading, I grappled with this post on the main site:

http://www.thenextright.com/kristen-soltis/a-party-in-the-holiday-spirit-365-days-a-year#comment-form

and decided it needed a lengthier response than the comment space could provide. The original post is very good and says some very important things about the need to broaden the ways in which we approach religious people. My big problem with it is the "devoutly Evangelical" for which the GOP is becoming a "club" already do the things Kristen is talking about. Inner city work? If it's not Catholics or African-American churches, it's Evangelicals. Loving our neighbors in the third world? Look at Warren's PEACE plan, Evangelical AIDS prevention organizations, Compassion International, World Vision or, if you're in more of a moral reform mindset, International Justice Mission, which spearheads opposition to sex trafficing almost single-handed.

The average Evangelical under thirty (and this is the set I have the most experience with) only maybe cares about one or two of the "hot-button issues"--abortion and, sometimes, gay marriage. Alongside this is a deep concern for human rights and an often nebulous and ill-defined concept of "social justice". I think that, if we fail to engage these concerns, we're not going to be a club for the devout at all because they're just as likely to vote elsewhere.

Importantly, you've got to educate these folks about economics. Most of them don't understand, for example, that wealth in the first-century context of scripture was essentially horded and not used for wealth creation/creating jobs. As a result, they have a vague feeling that wealth is by it's very nature un-Christian. If you don't have some serious fis-con thinking from a so-con perspective you run the risk of losing these guys. I think it's doable, and the Evangelicals know the non-government sector is more effective than the government, usually from personal experience, but it's up to us to help connect the dots. And like Kristen, I think that this approach will help with non-Evangelicals too.

One way to do this might be to emphsize that we are not only the party of individual empowerment but community empowerment as well. Government tends to suck up power not only from individuals, but communities as well. To get perhaps a bit unnecessarily philosophical, Robert Putnam identifies an individualistic "liberal" and communitarian "republican" tradition within democracies. We've been beating the individualist liberal drum for a long time, and this is a bit uncomfortable for believers concerned about the "autonomous self", but conservatism has room for communitarianism, and liberals and republicans both have very good reason to be wary of stateism, as does religion itself. On the other hand, we don’t want to become just another Christian Democrat party. The Christian Democrats—in virtually every nation where they exist—have failed to stop or even markedly slow the growth of the welfare state, with all the disters for both individuals and communities which this entails. Ultimately, I think this is a very necessary discussion for conservatism, let alone the GOP, to be having right now and for years to come.

Patrick's post on the main site basically urging the right not to attack Obama on the Blagojovich scandal has kicked up a lot of comments from, quite frankly, good-old-fashioned hypocrits.

Now, to use a favorite phrase of the President Elect's,  let me be clear. I've got no problem--personally--with honest progressives who recognize the fact that what's good for me and what's good for thee are the same. I don't think every Progressive is a shallow-thinking political hack and I have no problem being civil over an honest disagreement. What I cannot stand is faux moderates, faux bipartisans and others who were happy to pile onto Bush and the Republicans in congress but quite frankly feel it is their place to wine when a blog concerned with strategy and tactics suggests...strategy and tactics. According to such people, Bush deserves every sneering snide criticism, every deeply personal insult, every single disgusting Nazi comparison, but to even intimate that someone connected to Obama might have known something about Blago's corruption, or argue that Obama has been too passive in his dealings with the dirty governor, is tantamount to treason.

Are you serious? Can you possibly even equate these teppid criticisms with the "general Betray us" add from MoveOn, the constant invocation of Hitler in relation to Bush, the visit of Democrat congressman James McDermott of Washington to Saddam's Iraq just before the war where he publically gave aid and comfort to a man which the previous Democratic president slated for regime change? Can Ruffini's argument that attacking congress is a better tactical idea than attacking Obama possibly be in the same league as Don Fouler's chortling comment that Hurricane Gustav was going to hurt the Republicans over their convention? Is this the honest opinion of even a tiny fragment of the internet-reading public?

Obviously there are lines which should not be crossed, and people on both sides cross them. Like some conservatives, I think Anne Coulter's comments very frequently cross the line into abhorrent (racial slurs on Arabs, homosexual slurs on John Edwards and claims that the Democratic party since the fifties has been "functionally treasonable" are examples), and Jerry Fallwell comparing Hillary Clinton to Lucifer was equally beyond the pale. I think the Obama birth certificate issue is a non-issue and an embarrassing distraction from things which actually matter, and claims that he's a Muslim are justproposterus. It's not that I'm reticent to criticize people on the right who go too far. It's not even that I disagree with a general comment made on the thread that "we win when we're on offense" and not when we're negative. But politics is a rough game in this country, it's always been a rough game, and trying to weaken the other guy's hold on the government is what an opposition does. There are exceptions certainly, there are attacks which are beyond the pale, but Patrick's isn't one of them, and arguing that it is shows a basic lack of mateurity on the part of hypocrits who can dish it out but can't take it. Or put another way; wouldn't a claim that investigating Jack Abramof and any potential ties he had to the Bush administration was unpatriotic have been laughable? So why isn't this equally ludicrous claim that even discussing how the Blagojovich scandal might be used by the GOP doesn't put the country first being laughed off? Did the Democrats use the Abramof scandal? Yep. Was it unpatriotic? Nope. Would it be unpatriotic for the Republicans to use the Blagojovich scandal? Nope. The answer, of course, whether one is Republican or Democrat, is to not pull these corrupt stunts in the first place; it is corrupt officials, not those of the opposition from either party who use their mistakes against them, who are "revolting" "unpatriotic" "more of the same" and, my personal favorite, "don't give a damn about the country".

I agree with Alexander Brunk's main point over on the main site (unfortunately my screen-reading software doesn't cope well with HTML so I can't post the link and make it look pretty). II intended to post this comment in response, but I decided it was long enough to merit a post of it's own.

There is an increasing tendency to hyphenate our conservatism, which I think  is dangerous. In general, I'd describe conservatives as people who, whensome grand new form of social engineering is proposed, stand athwart the train yelling, at the very least, "hold on a minute. Let's think this over shall we?" This is the tendency which unites opponents of redefining marriage with opponents of redefining the role of government; a basic sense that our institutions and liberties have served us well and shouldn't be overturned lightly. Incidentally, I'd argue that defense cons are opposing a redefining of our national interests and defense policy from the common framework we've accepted throughout history. The US has almost never embraced the isolation of the Paulites or the internationalism of the progressive left, and for those who think neoconservatism is some radical form of new foreign policy, I'd recommend a more careful reading of the history of the nineteenth century. Now, this isn't to say that conservatives are lock-step opposed to "change", but we tend to, I think, look for reforming rather than revolutionary change. As Rudi Giuliani brilliantly pointed out in the primary, we should be talking about the kind of change we want, rather than simply talking about change.

This does not mean that every conservative is going to agree about everything all the time. Mike Huckabee and Rudi Giuliani have, policy-wise, fairly little in common. There are also some conservatives who believe that their caution should extend to both fiscal and social issues, but who tend to emphasize one or the other more. However, if we all share this basic caution and skepticism about the social engineering which has fascinated progressives from eugenics to the "new new deal", then we are all conservatives.

I think progressives have a different, more eschatological philosophy. For a progressive (which is a more accurate term than liberal I think), there is always (A) some catastrophic calamity facing society which (B) we have brought on ourselves and which (C) only a radical re-engineering of society can ultimately solve. Eugenicists railed against the polution of "good genes" by hordes of Eastern European immigrants and the handicapped. Their solution was a new, almost unheard of regime of national entry quotas for immigration and the sterilization of those they demed mentally and physically incapable. The recession of 1929, under the progressive presidencies of Herbert Hoover (read Modern Times by Johnson if you disbelieve Hoover was a progressive) and FDR gave birth to the single greatest expansion of the role and scope of government in American history to that point. LBJ fought a war on poverty with yet another such expansion. The calamity of US foreign policy causing all manner of domestic and international ills (the Progressive read not mine) must be met with unilateral nuclear disarmament and a policy of "getting along better" with other nations. Racism could, for progressives, be socialy engineered away by successive government programs from bussing to affirmative action. Finally, in modern times, global warming must be met with another radical reconstruction of our society. Of course, some of these problems (racism) were and are real and others (the fears of eugenicists) were products of progressives' fevered imaginations. Whether real or imagined however, the problems spotted by progressives are almost never solved by them. We need progressives in society, spotting areas which need reform, but we probably ought never actually let them run things.

One more thought. I think that, among some fiscal conservatives, there is a fear that "so-cons" are really social engineers in Christian clothing. This may be true in a few cases, but in general I think you've got nothing to worry about. For the most part, so-cons want to be left alone to live and worship in the way they choose, and they feel that the hostility of culture and government makes this problematic. In many cases, so-cons want to change culture, but through persuasion and the open marketplace of ideas by preference. Unfortunately, much of the media and cultural attention lavished on so-cons portrays them as social engineers. Don't believe the hype.

One thing we've all been hearing a lot about is the incredibly effective mobilization of the Barack Obama campaign, which was effective in creating and then mobilizing real and effective online communities. I think the Democrats are going to have two problems converting this mobilization into a permanent thing. First, I think we may be underestimating the pull of Barack Obama's personal charisma. Certainly, the left has built an effective online network, but it's wrong to see Barack Obama's campaign simply as the culmination. In a couple of ways, Obama had unique power to inspire his base which the Democrats may not be able to count on again in 2010, or even in his next election in 2012. Almost of necessity, some of the bloom will wear off the rose with time, as Obama finds himself needing to govern and compromise. Never again will history play the same role--even in another Obama election--that it did in 2008. The second problem is one we need to be aware of ourselves. It seems to me that the Democrats' networks are almost entirely focussed on national elections; senate, house and president. Certainly, this has been effective in winning elections for the party, but it really isn't necessarily the best way to effectively mobilize and keep people engaged. Most issues that effect people in their daily lives are decided by state and local governments, and, to my knowledge, there has been almost no attempt by the "net roots" to mobilize their supprters for these elections.

This is a potentially huge opportunity for the right. There are a total of 89,000 governments within the United States, and almost all the online activism and community building has been focussed on exatly one of them. There are several potential benefits to extending our online mobilization efforts to state and local governments in a systematic way:

1. State and local governments are the "farm team", so it would almost certainly have a huge impact on the national level within five or ten years.

2. Not only the states, but also local towns, counties, cities and other municipalities can be laboratories for conservatism. People considering the relative merits of the flat and fair tax would possibly have real-world examples to sight if a number of states were to adopt these two tax plans. County government would be a good place to start cutting government spending, balancing budgets and, in particular, testing the effectiveness of Libertarian policies (could this be a means to reach out to the Ron Paul folks, or will the revolutionaries balk at focussing this small?). What better place to develop innovative education solutions than at the local school distric level? And where can social conservatism's policies be better tested than at the level of the local community?

3. Increasing our local focus would make mobilization of conservative communities permanent. There are elections every year, and those in odd years typically have extremely light turn-out. This is most often because voters know very little about the candidates, and the proposals at issue. Now imagine the impact that a vigilant conservative community networked over the web, exchanging information and organizing to advance our agenda in these elections might have. From such a permanent conservative community, we would then have the ability to vastly increase our influence on the larger congressional, senatorial, gubernatorial or, ultimately, presidential elections. We should also not neglect the importance of Republican primaries, not only in national and state elections but also in the all-important elections for state and local Republican party committee members.

The question is, how? how can we effectively mobilize conservative activists at the local level? I would be inclined to suggest a social networking portal, hypothetically called "my conservatism" or even "my right". What features would be important for such a project? Can social networking be used to help empower conservatives to "act locally"?

Comments welcome, and I appologize for the somewhat rambling nature of the post.

I always here about the great pool of fiscally conservative socially liberal voters and it makes me laugh just a little bit. The reason for this is simple; they don't exist. In John’s post over on the home page, David Bose of the Cato Institute sights a poll indicating that 59 percent of the population describes themselves as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal”.  Putting aside the fact that this number almost certainly under-performs other indicators (such as the Pugh Hispanic Study) which deal with minority communities, experience indicates that this polling basically means that people like the "idea" of fiscal conservatism, so long as their taxes and other people's spending gets cut. Nobody really wants less money coming to their district to build playgrounds, community theaters and even, in one district in Iowa, rain forests. It should not be surprising that these "social moderate" tend to elect congressmen who vote for tax increases and big spending bills.

This brings me to the chief irony around which this post is based: the most fiscally conservative congressman and senators tend to also be the most socially conservative. I challenge you Libertarian types to go find a solid fiscal conservative congressman who's also a social moderate. Better yet, find a whole caucus of them elected by Libertarians. But we'll start with a simple test; how many of the members of the house and senate who voted against the Medicare proscription drug benefit were pro-choice or pro-gay marriage? I'm waiting...  In the meantime, the fiscally conservative heroes in the senate (Tom Cobern, Jim DeMint) and house (Jeff Flake, Paul Rian, Jeb Henserling and, at one point, Pat Toomey) all, to the best of my knowledge, have pretty solid socially conservative voting records.
How can this be? Isn’t social conservatism the attempt to impose 1950s-style morality on the country, to force women to get back-alley abortions and brainwash your kids not to believe in dinosaurs? Um… not so much. The truth that social liberal activists don’t want anyone to recognize, let alone make political hay about, is that Even on social issues there is a broad natural consensus between limited government advocates and traditional so-cons. How is a court decision which federalizes abortion law and violates the tenth amendment at all in line with either limited government or "choice"? How is government redefinition of a sacramental institution (marriage) in any way limited? How is it "imposing big government" to let local school districts determine their science curriculum (for the record I'm a Christian who believes in evolution, but since I actually, ya know, also believe in limited government and all, I've got no problem if a local school district wants to teachID in science classes, though I might consider sending my kids, if I had them, to a different school). Limited government means local choices; this is the essence of Libertarianism. Unfortunately, many modern Libertarians have conflated liberty with Libertinism, advocating for a government big enough to force all local communities to conform to their absolute notion of choice. This has nothing to do with John Locke, Adam Smith, Frederick Hayeck or any other giant of libertarian history. Indeed, the one thing which has always unified fiscal and social conservatives is our opposition to social engineering. Despite the media hype about so-cons imposing their views on people, social conservatism is, by definition, an attempt to protect the local community from social engineering. Perhaps this explains why, when it comes to voting in congress, the so-con fis-con divide is nearly non-existent.
 

As we think about the future of the party in 2010 and beyond, it's worth looking at some demographic realities:

1. By the year 2020, Hispanic/Latinos will be approximately 18 percent of the US population, while African-Americans will remain at 13 percent. Assuming  the GOP gets 30 percent of the Hispanic/Latino vote and 10 percent of the African-American vote in the presidential election of 2020, we will obtain a total of 6.7 percent of the vote in these two minority groups, while the democrats will garner 24.3 percent (these are both slight exagerations, since their may be a difference between these two groups' share of the voting population and their share of the actual population, but it'll do for now). This essentially means the Democrats will start with almost half of the votes they need to reach 50 plus 1 already locked up for the 2020 election.

2. If we look at birthrates today, Hispanics in theUS have the highest at 3.1 births per woman. Among Hispanic/Latinos, the highest birth rate is among Mexicans at 2.95 births per woman. The two lowest groups are Asian/Pacific Islanders an non-Hispanic whites. This indicates that, regardless of immigration trends, the percentage of the population which is Hispanic/Latino will continue to increase well into the future, while the white population shrinks. (Actually Mexican immigration to the US at it's current rate is virtually unsustainable, as the Mexican birthrate within Mexico continues to decline. Should the Mexican economy improve, we can expect dramatic decreases in the Mexican immigration rate to the US within ten to twenty years regardless of US government policies).

3. By 2050, whites will be 47 percent of the US population, the first time in the nation's history that whites are not an absolute majority.

When we talk about the need for minority outreach not only in the GOP but generally among conservatives, it's not simply a matter of political corretness folks, but a demographic necessity.

It has been an unfortunate fact of the GOP's recent past that, by and large, we have remained uncompetitive in urban areas. Strategically, Republicans, and conservative republicans in specific, have viewed urban outreach as superfluous at best, believing that a coalition of rural and suburban voters would be sufficient to maintain electoral majorities. If this was ever true before, it is certainly less so now, and if demographics continue to change, will continue to grow less true in coming decades. Now, as we are reeling in response to Democrats capturing deep red districts, the GOP must start thinking about turning the tables, and this begins with candidate-building in America's cities. Some of the countries' largest cities--New York, L.A. and Atlanta just to name a few, will have mayoral and city council elections in 2009. I think it is imperative for state parties, and even the RNC, to target these races, setting measurable goals particularly in city council races. Before we leap-frog into 2010, let's ask--and try to answer--the following questions about 2009:

1. What positive steps can we take immediately to begin building party infrastructure and recruiting activists in urban areas?

2. What measurable goals can we set for local city parties in 2009?

3. What percentage of city council races in 2009 can the GOP reasonably hope to contest?

4. Can the RNC help create a national "contract with urban America" which proposes free-market solutions to urban problems and onto which city council and mayoral candidates can sign? What would such a contract look like?

5. How can the GOP compete with corrupt, one-party rule in the cities? Can we bring shady Democratic practices in such places as Philadelphia and Chicago to light in 2009 and other off-year elections, and if so, how?

I welcome comments and suggestions on these important questions. I don't think there are easy answers, but we need to start the discussion, and do it now.