Will the Election of a Black Man to Head the RNC Return the Republican Party to Power?

In an analysis of the current state of the competition going on in the Republican National Committee between six candidates to pick a chairman, ADAM NAGOURNEY questions whether GOP leaders will choose their new party boss from a list of contenders that includes two black men; Michael Steele, whose last elected position was as Maryland lieutenant governor, or former secretary of state for Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell. With a crushing electoral defeat that caused the GOP to lose the presidency and fall further behind in the number of seats they hold in both the House and the Senate; the new RNC chairman will face a tough task to begin to reassemble a winning strategy that will stave off future electoral losses and party shrinkage. The GOP currently finds itself defined as a party of diminished power with a power base of elected officials primarily confined to a swath of Southern states. With a field that includes four other candidates; all of them white Southerners, and an electoral process determined by secret ballot; it's hard to accurately gauge any of the candidates chances. Despite claims made by party leaders, the race issue has arisen; having gained particularly ignominious attention from one of the white candidates, Tennessee state chairman, Chip Saltsman, who distributed CDs to various Republicans that contained the thinly veiled racial mockery of President-elect Obama entitled “Barack the Magic Negro.” Despite the continued existence of racial bigotry, public white support exists for Mr. Steele, which has been openly expressed by Jim Greer, and is found in the Florida Republican chairman's endorsement and statement: “Race is not a consideration of why a person should become chairman of the R.N.C., but if the nation can celebrate its first African-American president, I would certainly think the Republican Party could celebrate its first African-American chairman,.. There certainly is an advantage of a credible message of inclusion if you have a minority as chairman.” There is no hesitancy for Republicans to voice there party's challenges and current RNC chairman Mike Duncan has commented: “There were other valleys we’ve been in that were worse than this,.. I’m optimistic. I think we can come back from this. We are a center-right country. Only 20 percent of the people consider themselves liberal. That gives us a huge opportunity. We have to get our message refined. We’ll be back.” Whether Mr. Duncan is spinning the party line or truly believes in the resiliency of his party, Republicans have a lot of catching up to do in fund-raising efforts and in assembling greater technological prowess before they can confront the Democrats on more even terms. And while they try to repair the nuts and bolts of their party, they also acknowledge the clear need to grapple with creating a viable message that will attract voters. Joe Gaylord a former top aide to Newt Gingrich sums up the need for a dynamic message: “I haven’t heard a vision,.. If we do not become a future-oriented, solutions-oriented Republican Party, we are going to be in (the) wilderness for a long, long time.” Nagourney makes an astute observation on how low the GOP has sunken as a unified party: "Given the depth of the Republican Party’s difficulties — and the divisions over ideology and region being played out in the contest — party leaders said they did not think race would be a deciding factor in many, if any, votes." Republican strategist and technical adviser Phil Musser agrees that race is not the magic bullet that will return the GOP to power: "I don’t get the sense that race is a driver in the context of this election,... If it is, it’s a narrow minority. People are more interested in the plans for the committee and the ideological perspectives of the candidates running for chairman than they are about ethnicity.” The Republicans have suffered greatly on the race issue because of Obama's ability to overwhelmingly draw from the black vote and the GOP believes; according to Nagourney that: "it was unrealistic to expect the party to make serious gains among black voters, at least for now. Instead, they said, the party should seek to recover its standing, in particular among Hispanic voters, where Republicans lost ground this year." Speaking of the wedge issues that used to power the GOP to electoral victories, Florida chairman, Jim Greer acknowledged: "Those who want to obsess on those issues will continue to lose the American public, which is focusing on the economy and education and national security,... Values and principles are the foundation of our party. But if you are out of a job, or your 401(k) has halved in value, people are looking for leadership in those areas.” The Republicans at this point in time exist as a party in name only; with little political power; confronted by a desperate need for the repair of it's party machinery; suffering from visible fractures among issues; and lacking a stable and inspiring message to draw electoral majorities; hampered by a long struggle created by party divisions that block the GOP's return to power.

Republican Whiners Must Accept the Consequences of Their Many Failures

Paul Krugman comments in the New York Times that: "As the new Democratic majority prepares to take power, Republicans have become, as Phil Gramm might put it, a party of whiners... But most of the whining takes the form of claims that the Bush administration’s failure was simply a matter of bad luck — either the bad luck of President Bush himself, who just happened to have disasters happen on his watch, or the bad luck of the G.O.P., which just happened to send the wrong man to the White House." Its really a matter of the GOP's decision during the Nixon campaign in 1968 to develop a "Southern strategy" that gained electoral dominance by hatching a clutch of wedge issues, including the topic of "racial backlash" that set the party on a forty year course to where it happens to be today - facing the consequences of a "shrinking base." Krugman rightly points out: "If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.” Krugman calls out the Republicans; who then went on to trump their: "Contempt for expertise, (which) in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?" During their four decade run the GOP worked hard to diligently maintain a certain level of discreetness as they advocated the electoral benefits of racism. Anyone who dared to even infer that racism and republicanism formed significant chapters in the GOP's political playbook were shouted down with all the ferocity that the party and its corporate overlords could bring to bare. Even when Republicans were caught in obviously racist remarks or policies they praised their own moral superiority and never, ever admitted any wrong doing; it was that old public relations adage of deflect and deny that kept the GOP on the high moral ground. But now, as the most ideologically committed collection of conservatives attempt to assume control of the Republican National Committee, unapologetically stated, blatant racism is leading the way. It has to do with the efforts of "Chip Saltsman, currently a candidate for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, (who) sent committee members a CD including a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” — and according to some reports, the controversy over his action has actually helped his chances... So the reign of George W. Bush, the first true Southern Republican president since Reconstruction, was the culmination of a long process... That’s why the soon-to-be-gone administration’s failure is bigger than Mr. Bush himself: it represents the end of the line for a political strategy that dominated the scene for more than a generation." The GOP stands today as a party without ideas and dominated by a small group of southerner conservatives who have "lost the rest of the country" because they believe they were not conservative enough. They believe bailouts and public works plans to infuse the economy with capital and jobs represent a turn to socialism that cannot be tolerated. It has come to the point that the conservative-dominated RNC; as demonstrated by a recent resolution penned by conservative constitutional law attorney and national vice chairman of the RNC, James Bopp, is now issuing direct orders warning its elected officials to toe the party platform to the letter by allowing bankruptcies to occur and stand for the free market to return the economy to greater prosperity. In fact, as Krugman explains, the GOP has achieved nothing more than leading itself into a political "cul-de-sac." It is not Krugman's intention to bury the GOP as he observes: "Will the Republicans eventually stage a comeback? Yes, of course. But barring some huge missteps by Mr. Obama, that will not happen until they stop whining and look at what really went wrong. And when they do, they will discover that they need to get in touch with the real “real America,” a country that is more diverse, more tolerant, and more demanding of effective government than is dreamt of in their political philosophy." And I can't argue with the Nobel Laureate's observations.