CSotD: The new, improved elephant in the room
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Boswell: "So, sir, you laugh at schemes of political improvement?"
Johnson: "Why, sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things."
The Republican Party got a large dose of bad news this week, and Mike Luckovich is one of several cartoonists to comment on it.
The GOP actually got a large dose of bad news in November, when they were trounced in the presidential election and also hammered pretty good in the Senate, though they got some satisfaction in the House elections, results that many observers credited more to gerrymandering rather than to popularity.
The development this past week was the release of a report stating that, apparently, as it turns out, upon further review and closer inspection, it was indeed more than a flesh wound.
The report, by a committee of fairly intelligent and non-insane Republicans, is long but comes with a compact opening chapter that delivers the basics: The party needs to change or not simply continue to lose but continue to lose by increasingly large margins until it will have isolated itself into complete irrelevance.
It is well worth reading, or, at least, it's worth reading the first part and skimming the rest.
There seems little doubt but that they got it right.
The question is, in today's political climate and given where the GOP has put its energies over the past several decades, can this:
outweigh this:
Stuart Carlson, mind you, puts it perhaps more sharply than Drew Sheneman:
But, however gently or rudely your critics may frame things, the issue remains: When you've built up your power base by pandering to ignorance, fear and extremism, how do you step back?
And I won't ask why four dead in Benghazi are a greater intelligence failure than 3,000 dead in New York City, because that's a large part of the problem: That kind of question simply touches off a pointless, endless link war over who knew what and when they knew it and what they did instead of paying attention or what they did or didn't see or hear or read or intuit.
Besides, it's not necessary to dig that deeply. Simpler questions are quite good enough, like:
Why didn't Republican leadership move to quash the ridiculous birther movement?
Or the ignorance of those who accepted his birthplace but not his roots? McCain famously stepped in to correct a woman who thought Obama was an "Arab," but it shouldn't have been "famous" that he did so. It would have happened every time the subject came up, if they were not pandering to paranoia and fantasy.
And what is the organizational capacity of a party that would allow a celebrity — especially a celebrity who had been drinking — to deliver an unscripted monologue on national television at a key moment in their nominating convention?
The report doesn't raise those questions, but it does carry their unmistakable whiff in accusing the party of being out of touch, insensitive and more prone to talk about policies than about people, and of clinging to Ronald Reagan at the expense of alienating voters not old enough to remember him.
And whether or not Tea Party extremists and their astroturf instigators will like it, the report raises the question of who is to be in charge, and it acknowledges a troubling Frankenstein element therein:
The current campaign finance environment has led to a handful of friends and allied groups dominating our side’s efforts. This is not healthy. A lot of centralized authority in the hands of a few people at these outside organizations is dangerous for our Party. This report pushes hard for campaign finance reform that would help the RNC return to its rightful position as the national Party leader, but we also believe the growth of more third-party groups would encourage more innovation and spread the resources beyond a handful of Washington, D.C.-based consultants. It’s not that these consultants are not capable, but there will continue to be a huge risk of a 2012 repeat if we move forward with the same model.
On the other hand, the report also calls for elimination of public campaign funding, which sounds a lot like letting the fat cats drive. This seems at odds with their prominent quoting of Jack Kemp's dictum, “No one cares what you know until they know you care,” and this recommendation:
We have to blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attack corporate welfare. We should speak out when a company liquidates itself and its executives receive bonuses but rank-and-file workers are left unemployed. We should speak out when CEOs receive tens of millions of dollars in retirement packages but middle-class workers have not had a meaningful raise in years.
I also had a problem with their repeated use of the term "surrogate" to mean people who travel around the country speaking on behalf of the party, particularly in their discussions of reaching out to women and minorities, which they acknowledge as a critical need.
While "surrogate" can simply mean a deputy, even then, it still suggests someone substituting for the actual person in charge.
As long as the party needs "surrogates" in order to put a woman's face or a minority face on their message, they're opening themselves up to the sort of criticism Ben Sargent offers:
It will be interesting to watch the next year or so. The report is sensible and pragmatic, but it is already being mocked on the left by those who reflexively despise and distrust the GOP, and it's also being attacked by the extreme right to whom the Republican Party has been so welcoming.
Bob Gorrell, for example, scorns reachout to the Latino community as pointless and even counterproductive, despite the report's even quoting Tea Party darling Dick Armey in that regard: “You can’t call someone ugly and expect them to go to the prom with you. We’ve chased the Hispanic voter out of his natural home.”
Perhaps this will be a Cronkite moment, that sudden flash when the GOP faithful, content to shrug off the sniping of commentators like Luckovich, Sargent, Sheneman and Carlson, say to themselves, "If we're lost Gorrell …"
But, while I was impressed with the pragmatic reasoning and recommendations of the report, I kept waiting for Steve Martin to deliver the conclusion:
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