{"id":5629,"date":"2012-03-05T12:47:27","date_gmt":"2012-03-05T17:47:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=5629"},"modified":"2012-03-05T13:02:10","modified_gmt":"2012-03-05T18:02:10","slug":"once-a-referendum-on-obama-2012-now-a-watershed-moment-for-gop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2012\/03\/05\/once-a-referendum-on-obama-2012-now-a-watershed-moment-for-gop\/","title":{"rendered":"Once a referendum on Obama, 2012 now a watershed moment for GOP"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve been wrestling for a while here on the In Box with the crosscurrents that have torn the Republican Party in recent years, from Doug Hoffman’s insurgency in 2009 to the tea party revival in 2010 to the disastrous GOP primary now unfolding.<\/p>\n

At least in the ranks of pundits, a consensus is growing that all this simmering turmoil is leading something profound, a shift in the long-term fortunes of one of America’s two major parties.<\/p>\n

Leading the way is the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza<\/a>, one of the country’s most influential political reporters.\u00a0 He writes that some GOP insiders are actually hoping for a full-scale collapse this year, so they can rebuild their movement with a clean slate.<\/p>\n

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In \u201cBatman Begins<\/a>\u201d \u2014 the 2005 movie about the origins of the caped crusader \u2014 there is a group of villains who believe the city of Gotham is beyond saving and that the only way to fix it is to first destroy it.<\/p>\n

As the Republican presidential race has worn on (and on), there are some within the party wondering \u2014 privately, of course \u2014 whether the only way for the party to face the growing divide between its moderate and conservative wings is for the 2012 election to be its Gotham moment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Conservative writer George Will has been echoing those concerns, comparing this year’s campaign season to 1964<\/a>, a defining moment when Republicans lost by landslide margins.<\/p>\n

Only in 2012, Will warns, the GOP standard-bearer might not be a candidate like Barry Goldwater, a quixotic figure who lost big but planted the seeds for future conservative victories.<\/p>\n

[S]uppose the accumulation of evidence eventually suggests that the nomination of [Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum] would subtract from the long-term project of making conservatism intellectually coherent and politically palatable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Will has also excoriated Republican leaders<\/a> for their response to conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh’s “slut shaming” attack on a young female college student.<\/div>\n
\n
\u201c[House Speaker John] Boehner comes out and says Rush\u2019s language was inappropriate. Using the salad fork for your entr\u00e9e, that\u2019s inappropriate. Not this stuff,\u201d Will said.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\u201cAnd it was depressing because what it indicates is that the Republican leaders are afraid of Rush Limbaugh. They want to bomb Iran, but they\u2019re afraid of Rush Limbaugh.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
This matters because one of the riptides endangering the GOP is the growing clout of voices and leaders over whom the party has no control, from Limbaugh to Beck to Fox News to emerging Super PAC political committees.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Those many factions, argues Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker magazine<\/a>, are tugging Republicans out of the mainstream, into a political territory that is, in his estimation, “suicidal.”<\/div>\n
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Interest groups and partisans, like the ones who organize and attend CPAC<\/small>, care a great deal about policy and ideology, not just about electability, and they decide who gets nominated.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
A growing posse of political observes think those well-funded, well-organized groups are pulling the GOP to the right precisely at the moment when most researchers say that demographic trends favor the Democratic party’s progressive coalition.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Jonathan Chait wrote about this dangerous divergence for New York Magazine<\/a>, in an article called “Why 2012 is the Republican Party’s last chance.”<\/div>\n
\n
The Republican Party had increasingly found itself confined to white voters, especially those lacking a college degree and rural whites who, as Obama awkwardly put it in 2008, tend to \u201ccling to guns or religion.\u201d<\/div>\n
Meanwhile, the Democrats had \u00adincreased their standing among whites with graduate degrees, particularly the growing share of secular whites, and remained dominant among racial minorities.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
In this demographic crisis, the GOP is losing ground most profoundly with Hispanics, as Thomas Schaller wrote this winter in Salon.\u00a0 He began his article by quoting Arizona’s senior Republican Senator<\/a>:<\/div>\n
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\u201cWe have to fix our problems with the Hispanics,\u201d said<\/a> John McCain last week when asked by MSNBC\u2019s Chuck Todd about the Republican Party\u2019s competitiveness in the Southwest in the 2012 election.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
It’s no surprise, perhaps, that two of the strongest voices raising existential questions about the GOP’s straits are pundits widely viewed as moderate conservatives:\u00a0 David Frum and David Brooks.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Last week, Frum\u00a0 argued bluntly in a Newsweek interview that “Republicans have allowed themselves to be pushed to places where they should not be,” even suggesting that conservative voters have displayed “an appetite for extremism.”<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
And Brooks penned a widely read article in the New York Times insisting that “extreme” elements in the conservative movement have hijacked the Republican Party, thanks in part to the silence and complicity of centrists.<\/div>\n
\n

Leaders of a party are supposed to educate the party, to police against its worst indulgences, to guard against insular information loops. They\u2019re supposed to define a creed and establish boundaries. Republican leaders haven\u2019t done that. Now the old pious clich\u00e9 applies:<\/p>\n

First they went after the Rockefeller Republicans, but I was not a Rockefeller Republican. Then they went after the compassionate conservatives, but I was not a compassionate conservative. Then they went after the mainstream conservatives, and there was no one left to speak for me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s a lot of hand-wringing.\u00a0 What does it all add up to?\u00a0 We’ll find out for sure this summer at the GOP convention and then in the November election.<\/p>\n

What’s clear now, though, is that more and more astute political thinkers are viewing 2012 not as a referendum on Barack Obama’s first term, but as a defining moment for the Republican Party<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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