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Three conservatives plot the future of the GOP, and handicap the chances of Sarah Palin and other 2012 contenders.
Editor's note: Listen to a podcast of this round table here.
By Thomas Schaller
Read more: Republican Party, John McCain, Politics, News, Mike Huckabee, 2008 election, Mitt Romney, Salon Conversations, Thomas F. Schaller, Bobby Jindal, Sarah Palin
Listen to the roundtable with Tom Schaller, Alex Castellanos, Ron Christie and Reihan Salam
Nov. 14, 2008 | The Republican Party is now licking the wounds from its second consecutive electoral "thumpin'," to use the outgoing president's memorable morning-after phrase from November 2006. Just three years ago, the GOP controlled the presidency, the House and the Senate; come January Democrats will control the White House and both chambers of Congress for the first time since 1993. The Republican brand is in tatters. Can it be saved?
Salon asked three experts with a vested interest in the future of the party, two Republican strategists and one conservative intellectual, for their take on where the GOP goes from here. Alex Castellanos, Ron Christie and Reihan Salam offered their thoughts about whether the Republican Party's core principles remain intact, whether Reaganism applies to the 21st century, and who the front-runners might be for the GOP's 2012 presidential nomination.
Castellanos has been a media consultant to seven presidential campaigns, and was an in-studio analyst on CNN throughout the 2008 election cycle. This cycle he volunteered as an advisor to John McCain's campaign after serving as senior strategist for Mitt Romney. Christie, founder and president of Christie Strategies, is a veteran senior advisor to Republicans in both the White House and Congress, an adjunct professor at George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management, and author of the book "Black in the White House" about his stint as an aide to George W. Bush. Salam, who blogs at the American Scene, is an associate editor at the Atlantic. He was previously a junior editor at the New York Times and a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the co-author of "Grand New Party: How Conservatives Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream." Salon contributing writer Tom Schaller spoke to them by phone.
Salon: Let's start out by trying to find some historical context. Is there an analogue for where the Republican Party finds itself as of last week? Is it something like the post-LBJ '64 landslide or after the Watergate '74 elections or maybe just 1993 with Clinton and the Democrats controlling the White House and the Congress? Or is it none of these?
Alex Castellanos: I think there are some parallels to all of them. Certainly some parallels to the Watergate election in the sense that we have a fairly discredited Republican Party. But the difference, of course, is that technically we still knew what a Republican was or should be in those days and I'm not so sure we do now. I think this is most like the Clinton era in the sense that we're still there. Once Bill Clinton declared that the era of big government is over, he moved Democrats, certainly new Democrats, toward the center. And Republicans at that point were left wandering in the desert, unable to draw clear distinctions with the Democrats. I think today, we're in a little bit of the same situation. It's hard for a Republican to tell you what a Republican is.
Ron Christie: I pretty much agree with Alex. Having worked on Capitol Hill right when Clinton came into office, and having worked in the minority, I can tell you that while the Republicans were dispirited, certainly after the Clinton election, the Republicans at that juncture had more of a sense of purpose of we understand we're for limited government. We [wrote] a document which later became the Contract With America that formulated our conservative principles and values. Right now, I see the Republican Party, candidly, as being just the inverse of that. It doesn't seem that we have any party platform, any coherent strategy right now other than that we're not the Democrats. At least in 1992, the Republicans had a sense of purpose. Now the Republican Party is sitting around asking the question, "How do we move on from here and who are the leaders to get us there?"
Reihan Salam: The composition of the electorate right now is so different in the United States than it was in any of those periods, including 1992, that it's very hard for me to see a very good analogue. We're also living in a country that for a lot of very structural reasons is going to be more inclined to consume government services, and I think there is a real danger there for the conservative movement. If you look at conservative parties in Britain and Sweden where you have much larger public-sector workforces, they are far to the left of our conservative party, the Republican Party. And I do wonder if we have the right strategies for this environment -- whether we're going to be able to fight back against the ratchet effect of creating a much bigger government that is going to increase dependency. And I don't mean to say that in any sort of polemical way. I think the center left wants to increase the federal government for reasons that are very admirable in a lot of ways. But when you look at 1996, Bill Clinton's reelection, he won on a platform of "M 2, E 2" -- Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment. These are enduringly popular institutions. The same Americans who characterize themselves as believers in small government also wanted to increase the size and the influence and reach of the federal government in all of those areas.
It's very thorny. I think for a Republican Party that is firmly committed to, for example, citing pork-barrel spending to fight waste and inefficiency in government, you have a hard time finding a better candidate than John McCain, who in each one of his presidential debates talked about 10 minutes about those issues. In the final phase of the campaign, he made a really, really strong case against redistribution and what some in the campaign referred to as socialism, somewhat idiosyncratically in my view. So it's not obvious to me that that's going to be the way forward for the party. I think that 1974 looks like a decent analogue, in part because you saw the Republicans coming back in six years because there was a stirring within the party. You saw people who in the supply-side movement were creating a non-zero sum ideological answer that was responding to the particular challenges and conditions of that period -- the period of stagflation and the end of crude Keynesian economics. I think that hopefully this period that is starting in 2008 will be like the period between 1974 and 1980, a period of ideological rethinking, and that it's responsive to the actual conditions of the country.
Salon: I want to get a sense of the magnitude of the problem here. Alex, you wrote in the Washington Post just last week that a lot of what happened on Election Day was the economic meltdown. You said, "Let's not be Chicken Little." On the same day and in the same paper, Republican strategist Ed Rogers said, "Let's understand the legitimacy of the party defeat." How bad are things?
Christie: I think people are overreacting in the short term, given that the sting of the electoral defeat is still very much in the forefront of our minds. But I don't think the solution is that difficult. The solution that is going to get us back on track to be the majority party is the same solution that Ronald Reagan rode into power after losing in '76 and gaining elective office in 1980. The Republican Party has been and needs to be the party of limited government, strong fiscal policy and strong national defense and homeland security. Unfortunately, over the past 10 years or so, the Republicans have lost their way when it comes to fiscal responsibility. When you look to distinguish between what it means to be a Republican and what it means to be a Democrat, the last several years, the Republicans haven't vetoed onerous spending measures, the Republicans have acquiesced to some of the big expansions of the federal government that we've seen. Our way out of the wilderness is to go back to where we were with Ronald Reagan and the principles that he stood for and to reenact those very winning strategies and those platforms.
The Republican Party, in order to grow and in order to thrive, also has to continue to reach out to a diverse group of constituencies. I'm talking African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, women, a broad coalition across the country. It's no longer the party of white evangelicals and those who would like to perceive the Republican Party that way. We must make significant inroads with individuals of color and others.
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