National Republican Party May Finally Becoming Cognizant that they may be too Negative

"Richard N. Bond, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee," recently stated: “Some days you’re rolling the barrel, and some days you’re rolling in the barrel. The fact is that right now, Republicans are rolling in the barrel.” The former chairman's observation was intended to provide some context to the recent hard times being faced by the GOP.

Adam Nagourney has observed that: "The latest round of intramural debate came on Sunday when Dick Cheney,"

"the former vice president, assailed not only President Obama, but also Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, a Republican who endorsed Mr. Obama.

"Mr. Cheney said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program that he would prefer Rush Limbaugh,"

"the conservative radio commentator, to Mr. Powell, a member of the shrinking class of moderate Republicans, as spokesman for his party. Within hours, the Democratic National Committee had used video from that interview — along with other Sunday morning appearances by Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, last year’s Republican presidential nominee — to produce a mocking Web advertisement that sought to portray Republicans as negative, out-of-touch and mired in the past.

President Obama and his administration have successfully keep the GOP off balance with well coordinated attacks since last November's presidential election. At first, the Democrats pointed out the Republicans complete failure to come up with a plan; any plan, that was "forward-looking" to challenge the Democrat's agenda. Now the GOP is in a quandary regarding: "How to say it."

"A party that has over the years been the home of a series of optimistic figures in American politics — from Ronald Reagan"

"to Jack Kemp, who died last week, to (at times) George W. Bush — is increasingly coming across as downbeat or angry. And it is something that has Republicans increasingly worried."

Nagourney asks: "How important is this? Certainly, the Republican party’s first task obstacle is finding compelling leaders to make the case against the Democrats, as it builds itself back up for the elections of 2010 and 2012. And of course it has to hone an agenda that offers specific alternatives to Mr. Obama’s far-reaching shifts in economic, social and national security policy.

"Yet tone matters, Nagourney explains. Time and time again, Americans have responded to optimism, delivered even in — indeed, particularly in — the most dire times, and even when that sunny message cloaked an attack. In many ways, Reagan’s presidency was symbolized by one 1984 reelection advertisement, “It’s morning again in America,” just as Bill Clinton’s was by his choice of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” as a musical reminder that he was “thinking about tomorrow.”

"Mike Murphy, a one-time senior adviser to Mr. McCain, argued that Mr. McCain’s hopes of winning the presidency were doomed when he lost the “Happy Warrior” stance that had defined his political persona for so long, and simply went on the attack last year. “Tone is important,” he said.P

“Ultimately, the message has to be about big things,” said Mr. Murphy. “But tone is how you wrap it.”

"The Republicans’ task would not be an easy one even in the best of times. In Mr. Obama,"

"they face a very popular president who, benefiting from big legislative majorities, has generally not needed to spend much time attacking Republicans himself, leaving that job to aides and surrogates. It is certainly not lost on Republicans that there has been a sharp uptick in the number of Americans who think the country is headed in the right direction — the best measure of optimism — since Mr. Obama has taken office.

"By contrast, the Republican Party in general — and leaders like Mr. Cheney in particular — are viewed unfavorably by a significant majority of Americans. That makes for a tough environment to break through and get a hearing. And it can become a spiral: going on the attack typically has the effect of making Americans sour on the attacker as well.

"Mr. Bond said that to return to power, Republicans have “to play error-free ball” and hope for what he described as the inevitable overreach by a party now so firmly in control of government. The real complication, he said, is coming up with “strong public alternatives” to make the case against Democratic policies, without appearing to be obstreperous or angry, or feeding the Democrats’ attempt to paint Republicans as “the party of ‘no.’

“They have to avoid being stigmatized as a bad bunch of people,” he said of the Republicans.

Nagourney explains: "The Democrats took obvious delight in the new round of attention paid to Mr. Cheney, Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Limbaugh, none of whom, it seems fair to say, are graduates of the Happy Warrior school of politics. Mr. Murphy said the influence of people like Mr. Limbaugh is overrated — “He doesn’t have that much power; he has the power to make a lot of noise” — and that over time, less-known leaders are going to develop the voice the party needs.

Nagourney uses Mike Murphy's observations to sum up: “We have a mix of the same old party dogma, but then you see new people popping up: Huntsman, Cantor, Jeb Bush,” said Mr. Murphy, referring to Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah, and Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the Republican Whip, and Mr. Bush, the former governor of Florida. “You have to pick through all of that to hear the right ideas.”

But it is not only figures from the party’s past. For many Republicans, the party struck the wrong tone when Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina — who also is frequently mentioned as a potential presidential candidate in 2012 — refused a portion of the stimulus money authorized for his state as part of the economic recovery package.

"That high-profile act of defiance drew Mr. Sanford national attention, as well as sharp attack by many people in his own state, including Republicans. It was a reminder, if Republicans needed one, of the challenges the party faces in the months ahead.

“It’s definitely going to be a work in progress,” Mr. Bond said.

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.

The Keynsian Return

Scot Lehigh in the Boston Globe paraphrases John Maynard Keynes prescient observation "that recessions weren't necessarily self-correcting, as economic conventional wisdom assumed, and that governments needed to intercede to boost economic activity in troubled times. Keynes view on economics took root in America during the struggle against the Great Depression and helped to form the dominant economic outlook of the nation. With the "conservative ascendancy" of Ronald Reagan, Keynesianism was supplanted by supply side economics. An economic theory that was first mentioned by conservative commentator Jude Wanniski in 1975 and was based on the work of Robert Mundell and Arthur Laffer. Commonly referred to as "trickle down economics," Supply Side adherents ridiculed "Keynesian notions of government intervention, and particularly deficit spending to spur economic activity." Although GOP presidents amassed "large budget deficits created by tax cuts" conservative ideologues ignored the debt and "put their rhetorical faith in untrammeled free market economics, (while preaching) the importance of fiscal discipline." With the rush to deregulate the financial markets in the 1990s under President Clinton and a Republican Congress, actions were taken that set the stage for the economic crisis we are currently experiencing. Luckily, Keynesianism has made a return as a viable method to achieving economic recovery. Even George Bush 43, the MBA president, has "been a deficit-spender for almost his entire presidency,.. has now gone further, arguing that the prospect of calamity necessitates wide-ranging government intervention to stabilize the economy. Bush, the Ronald Reagan-inspired conservative free marketer and supply sider, has chosen to take a Keynesian approach to get us out of our current mess. "Meanwhile, amid a growing consensus that only more government spending can stave off a deep recession, President-elect Barack Obama is planning a major stimulus program to inject more demand into the economy ... All in all, it's quite a vindication, one that would both gratify and amuse John Maynard Keynes." We are not quite out of the woods yet, however. We face many uncertainties and better days are years away. The economic policies foisted upon America over the last 30 years by the conservative Reagan Revolution have created conditions that could surpass the damage inflicted by the Great Depression and we can only hope that Keynes return can relieve our economic misery. If we are lucky and Obama's recovery plan succeeds, let us gain from our experience and never allow Keynesian policies to be shoved aside again.