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August 08, 2007

What's Wrong With the National Republican Party?

Robert Novak let's us peek into the mind of Karl Rove, the Republic political "whiz":

Karl Rove, President Bush's political lieutenant, told a closed-door meeting of 2008 Republican House candidates and their aides Tuesday that it was less the war in Iraq than corruption in Congress that caused their party's defeat in the 2006 elections.

Rove's clear advice to the candidates is to distance themselves from the culture of Washington. Specifically, Republican candidates are urged to make clear they have no connection with disgraced congressmen such as Duke Cunningham and Mark Foley.
In effect, Rove was rebutting the complaint inside the party that George W. Bush is responsible for Republican miseries by invading Iraq.

This is laughable. More likely, Rove wants corruption to be the issue because it is the lesser of all the GOP's troubles. Which is not to say that the current culture in the Federal City is trifling; rather, of all the messes Bush and his Congressional enablers have gotten us into, corruption is the only one upon which upcoming candidates can offer some credible solutions (and even then, this will be pretty thin stuff). Everything else is intractable, and candidates are better off avoiding anything that will emphasize how painful our problems have become. If this accurately reflects Rove's thinking, then it illustrates just what a weak position the GOP is in.

Another reason why Rove's advice won't work is that it is almost impossible to tease out just one of the Republican worries in isolation. Ross Douthat comments, "The important thing to recognize is that all of the GOP's problems in '06 - Iraq, Katrina, and scandals in DC - reinforced one another, fitting easily into a single overarching narrative of misgovernment, incompetence, fecklessness and corruption." This integration of these shortcomings had been so seamless that it is easy to conclude that Republicans, if not "conservatism" itself, are inherently unfit to govern.

Chris Atwood explains why this is so:

This is the key: the Bush presidency failed in ways that exactly fit the stereotypical image of the Republican party. (And in the mass view, the Republican party=conservatism, just as the Democratic party=liberalism.) It's that congruence of his failure with the perceived failings of the party that makes his failure "stick" to the party. Each party/movement is susceptible to different such besetting sins. Had Bush been a Democrat, his polls would still be in the 20s, but the Democrats would still have a significant chance to win in 2008. Why? Because his failures aren't "Democratic" mistakes, they're "Republican" mistakes.

Read the whole thing for more great insights into the stereotypical policy failings of each party, how they've played in historic realignments, and what the GOP needs to do to escape the trap.

Posted by Zach Wendling at August 8, 2007 06:33 PM

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