Republicans all at sea as party sinks

Republicans all at sea as party sinks
By Clive Crook
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Published: May 3 2009 19:29 | Last updated: May 3 2009 19:29
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/deed710a-380e-11de-9211-00144feabdc0.html


How much trouble is the Republican party in? Plenty. Compounding its recent miseries, too numerous to mention, Arlen Specter, the independent-minded senator for Pennsylvania, has gone over to the other side.

If the Democrats win the still-disputed vote in Minnesota, they will have 60 Senate seats – the supermajority they need to overcome filibusters and force measures to a vote. They already have a commanding majority in the House of Representatives. In short, power in Washington has just shifted further, and perhaps decisively, in Barack Obama’s direction.

True, Mr Specter is an unpredictable fellow, and nobody’s rubber stamp. As a Republican, he often joined Democrats on big votes, most notably on the fiscal stimulus, where he was one of only three Republicans in House and Senate combined to vote in favour. In the same way, as a Democrat, he will be no automatic party-line man – and in this he will not be alone. Mr Specter has already joined other Democratic dissidents in voting against the budget resolution sought by the administration. (It passed regardless.)

The supermajority is therefore far from guaranteed. But the switch will certainly alter the political balance.

Mr Specter has jumped across the aisle to improve his chances of getting re-elected next year. As a Republican these were slim to none, because he faced a primary-election challenge from a conservative more popular with Republicans. As a Democrat with Mr Obama’s backing, he might get a clear run in his new party’s primary. Running against said conservative in the general election, he can expect an easy win.

Up to now Mr Specter has had to worry about what conservatives in the Republican party think of him. Henceforth he will care more about the good opinion of liberal Democrats. Independent-minded as he may be, Mr Specter needs the support of his new party, so it would be strange if his defection did not push him to the left. That, combined with the prospect of the magic 60 votes, makes efforts to play down his defection look desperate.

Many Republicans, however, even affect to welcome his choice – and here lies the real significance of Mr Specter’s decision. Newt Gingrich, former leader of Republicans in the House and still one of the party’s leading thinkers, believes that the Democrats will overreach and that it is better, when they do, that the blame is all theirs. This makes some sense. What makes no sense at all is the even more prevalent view in the party that fence-sitters such as Mr Specter should have been purged already – that the path back to power lies in ideological purity and a re-energised conservative base.

One thinks of the British Labour party’s reaction to Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979. Labour lost because it had not been socialist enough, was the party’s diagnosis: it needed to be truer to itself. Having forgotten how you win elections – namely, by occupying the middle ground – the party then lost its desire to win them. Better to be true to your principles and out of power than to compromise. True to its principles, it was out of power for nearly 20 years, and the Thatcher revolution transformed the country.

The Republicans’ emulation of this proven model of political failure takes on an even more farcical aspect when you consider the conservative ideas to which party purists say they want to return. Labour under Michael Foot at least had an alternative programme of policy and a leader – almost any is better than none – to enunciate it. Republicans have neither. Their platform, if you can call it that, is a compendium of slogans and prejudices, bound together by disgust at the Obama administration. With the economy in its present state, this is no time to be saying “government is the problem” – especially if you have nothing further to add and the economy’s troubles are universally understood to be the legacy of a Republican president.

The party needs to frame practical, coherent, and above all centrist alternatives to what Mr Obama and his congressional allies are doing. Instead, it wants to shore up its base, chant its slogans and purge its moderates. You have to laugh. Yet this gleeful suicidal tendency is sad as well as funny. There is plenty of scope for calm, centrist criticism of Mr Obama’s bold progressive agenda. The country needs exactly this.

First, Republicans must be less tone-deaf. They need to notice that for the moment the country admires Mr Obama and sees him as a man of integrity. Ad hominem attacks and a posture of “just say no” will get them nowhere. They must keep their criticism constructive and pragmatic, rather than abstract and absolutist.

If they can do that, they have plenty of material to work with. As Pietro Nivola of the Brookings Institution notes in an interesting new essay*, the country’s shift to the centre-left, which many commentators regard as an established fact, needs to be seen with some scepticism. Voters admire Mr Obama but they have doubts about his policies. More specifically, though they warmly approve of his goals – for instance, widen access to health care, do more to fight climate change – they are not so keen on their own taxes going up to pay for them, as in the end they will have to.

The opportunity for well-grounded and politically effective opposition is obvious. The Republican party is blind to it, and strives to worsen its own predicament. If Republicans want to be out of power for years, they are going the right way about it.

clive.crook@gmail.com

Read and post comments at Clive Crook’s Washington Blog

* Center-Left America? www.brookings.edu

More columns at www.ft.com/clivecrook