This week’s Southern Republican Leadership Conference included some dramatic moments — many of them aimed at ripping President Barack Obama.<\/p>\n
But the deeper, long-term drama may tell us more about where the GOP is going, as it seeks to reclaim control of a changing nation.<\/p>\n
First a couple of facts. The United States is a society in rapid and dramatic flux.<\/p>\n
Women are moving into positions of real leadership, in corporations, industry, and politics.<\/p>\n
Hispanics will continue to grow sharply as a percentage of the population, regardless of what we do with the southern border.<\/p>\n
Rural whites — a bulwark of the GOP for decades — will continue to shrink as a smaller and smaller minority. <\/p>\n
How was that reflected in New Orleans? <\/p>\n
Consider that one of the Republican Party’s fastest rising stars is Marc Rubio, a Cuban-American from Florida. <\/p>\n
He’s likely to force aside one of that state’s most powerful white-establishment men, Governor Charlie Crist.<\/p>\n
Consider former half-term Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. <\/p>\n
When another powerful white-establishment man (Arizona Sen. John McCain) needed a rescue, he called her in. It’s notable that a woman was the top draw at the SRLC.<\/p>\n
Consider that the National Republican Committee’s leader is Michael Steele, an African American who talks openly (if often clumsily) of the racial debates swirling within his party.<\/p>\n
Consider that another of the GOP’s rock stars is Ron Paul, perhaps the only prominent national politician in the country willing to talk about American “imperialism.”<\/p>\n
He is the Dennis Kucinich of the right — but unlike Kucinich, he enjoys much broader appeal among his party’s faithful. <\/p>\n
Paul came within 1% of winning the SRLC straw poll.<\/p>\n
The winner of that poll, by the way, was Mitt Romney — white man but also a Mormon. <\/p>\n
His faith is distrusted and even outright rejected by many of the evangelical Christians who make up the base of the GOP.<\/p>\n
In policy terms, Romney was also the architect of a health plan very similar to the one enacted by Democrats this spring. <\/p>\n
All of these politicians have strengths and weaknesses. <\/p>\n
But taken together they make a clear statement about a Republican Party that is evolving and growing more complex almost as rapidly as the nation as a whole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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