CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS
Feb. 15, 2009 – 11:53 a.m.
A Party Fractured, GOP Conservatives Regroup
By Shawn Zeller, CQ Staff
It was easy, from looking at the tally sheet for the House’s economic stimulus package vote on Jan. 28, to get the impression the Republican Party forms a unified conservative front in the new Congress. After all, 177 of the chamber’s 178 Republican members voted against the sprawling $819 billion measure — and the other one, Florida’s Ginny Brown-Waite , was committed to joining them until she was called away by a family emergency.
Which is why, even though the Democratic majority pushed the bill through with relative ease, some conservative activists hailed the outcome as a moral victory. “There is general agreement that our folks are finally standing up,” said Brett Littlefield, a spokesman for the American Conservative Union.
On the last weekend of this month, the group will hold its annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, a gathering that Littlefield hopes will capitalize on the fleeting sense of empowerment captured in the stimulus vote. “Conservatives are looking for excitement and a reason to rally,” he said.
But many of the right’s grass-roots activists say the current political landscape offers little for them to get excited about. The political party they call home, of course, is coming off back-to-back devastating electoral losses, of Congress in 2006 and of the White House last fall. Just as grave, the GOP has no leader who’s clearly capable of restoring the magical Reagan alliance of fiscal and social conservatives that fueled the party’s strength for the better part of three decades — a critical task, activists say, when liberal views on social and economic policy are gaining popular appeal and traction in Congress.
Signs of movement disarray were on abundant display in the last campaign, from the top of the ticket on down. Republican presidential nominee John McCain was never a favorite of the social conservatives; indeed, he seized the nomination mainly because neither they nor the business conservatives were willing to give up on their own respective standard-bearers, former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts.
At the same time, the conservative movement has seen several of its leading lights — Jerry Falwell, D. James Kennedy, Paul Weyrich and William F. Buckley Jr. among them — die in recent years, leaving no clear successors. One prominent evangelical who might have stepped into the breach had been Rick Warren, pastor of Orange County’s Saddleback Church. Warren instead helped confer evangelical legitimacy on the new administration by delivering the invocation at Barack Obama ’s inauguration.
Fiscal conservatives are in transition, too. Nowhere is that more apparent than at the American Enterprise Institute, where Christopher DeMuth retired in December after 22 years as the group’s president. In tribute, the conservative National Review noted that “a good case can be made that DeMuth is AEI” and that “without him, the think tank might not even exist anymore.”
Other movement leaders, such as former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, a Texas Republican who now chairs the grass-roots small-government group FreedomWorks, are dismayed over the $700 billion financial industry bailout, pushed last year by President George W. Bush and supported in the end by almost half the Republicans in the House and two out of three from the GOP in the Senate. “It’s a dangerous time for fiscal conservatism,” he said.
Indeed, many conservatives say they have little hope that congressional Republican leaders will carry their standard, said Richard Viguerie, the conservative direct-mail guru who helped stir the Reagan revolution in 1980. “Who in the world is ever going to follow Mitch McConnell ? Who is going to follow John Boehner?” Viguerie asked in reference to the party’s Senate and House floor leaders. “They look weak. They talk weak, and they have no plan or vision.”
This gap was especially apparent when Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska — a popular presidential choice for 2012 among movement conservatives thanks to her red-meat conservative profile as McCain’s running mate — turned down an invitation to speak at the House GOP’s annual retreat in Hot Springs, Va., when she came to Washington in late January to attend the high-profile Alfalfa Club dinner.
Reckoning With the Bush Legacy
It’s true that social and fiscal conservatives are unified in their view of Bush’s presidency, but that appraisal has done little to lighten the mood.
Many fiscal conservatives, citing the financial industry bailout as well as earlier capitulations on big spending initiatives such as the 2003 Medicare prescription drug benefit, say Bush’s tenure forced them to re-evaluate their affiliation with the GOP. “The libertarian voter was anti-Bush in every sense of the word,” says Fred L. Smith Jr., president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Social conservatives such as Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, say Bush was hardly better on their issues. Apart from his down-the-line opposition to abortion rights, Perkins says, Bush was “not a consistent conservative.”
Most movement leaders are arguing for a return to what they see as the tried-and-true conservative game plan of limited government and traditional values. Most of all, they want congressional Republicans to stand up to the new president. That’s why Perkins is among the movement leaders taking heart in the House stimulus vote. “It was the first time in the six years I’ve been in Washington that the Republicans have stood with the conservatives,” he said.
And in the Senate last week, it was Republicans who banded together with centrist Democrats and forced a significant reduction in the size and scope of that chamber’s version of the economic recovery legislation.
By contrast, Perkins last month said the performance of GOP senators was “almost nauseating” in allowing “Obama’s most objectionable appointments” — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Education Secretary Arne Duncan among them, in his view — to cruise to confirmation “without so much as a peep from ranking GOP leaders.”
But even as Perkins discerns a resurgent conservative mood in the congressional GOP, his own evangelical movement is speaking in a far less unified conservative voice. If Warren’s inaugural appearance bespeaks a new mood of political reconciliation among evangelical leaders, the forced resignation of the National Association of Evangelicals’ lead lobbyist, Richard Cizik, late last year showed that social conservatives are still prepared to punish those who waver on key issues. Cizik, who already had earned much conservative ire for his efforts to galvanize Protestant denominations behind initiatives to mitigate global warming, told a radio interviewer that he supported civil unions for same-sex couples.
In Cizik’s view, the evangelical world stands to lose a good deal of its clout if it doesn’t adopt more conciliatory views on hot-button social issues. “Smart political leaders find opportunities to solve problems, not simply to take a stand,” he said. “Most evangelicals don’t want more polarization.”
Congressional Republicans could be hamstrung by much the same difficulty, Cizik said, as they weigh the wisdom of compromising on or stonewalling major Obama initiatives. Either approach “may lead them in the same direction, namely decreasing influence and irrelevance,” he said.
Demographics vs. Discipline
Fiscal conservatives are facing internal discord, too, especially since the Bush era that began with a pair of deep tax cuts, ended with the financial bailout, and featured enormous spending on two wars, minimally restrained growth in domestic spending and the first $1 trillion annual federal deficit in history. “What happened is that the fiscal conservatives in power were seduced into focusing on just one element of that, tax policy,” thereby ignoring the need to also cut government spending, said the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Smith. “It doesn’t mater if you run up debt paying cash or credit. You still have to pay for it.”
Most troubling, said Smith, is that congressional Republicans, once known for their ability to generate compelling policy ideas, are now struggling to articulate conservative views. Even in areas where Bush held firm to conservative principles, such as environmental regulation, Smith said, liberals have successfully framed the issues in their favor: “Many conservatives believe the popular wisdom about how to address such issues is wrong, but they haven’t found a good way of articulating an alternative.”
The dyspeptic mood has even reached the American Enterprise Institute, long an incubator of conservative policy solutions, which last week invited a prominent critic, Matt Miller of the Center for American Progress, to address a seminar on whether conservatives are “in the grip of dead ideas.”
Some prominent conservatives are pressing on in campaign mode, echoing the culture-war style appeals from the McCain campaign, even though such tactics proved largely ineffective in the general election. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio, in opposing the House’s stimulus legislation, argued it “could open billions of taxpayer dollars to left-wing groups like the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now” — the group, known as ACORN, does political organizing of poor people and was the focus of last fall’s GOP ire about potential voter-registration fraud. Both the American Conservative Union and FreedomWorks have since echoed Boehner’s line of attack. Similarly, the popular conservative newsletter GOPUSA, last week revived McCain’s campaign one-liner that Obama’s main motivation was to “spread the wealth around.”
Such appeals underscore the divide between those conservatives who believe the GOP just needs to deliver its message more effectively and those who think demographic changes will eventually compel Republicans to moderate their rhetoric.
“I’ve never bought into the post-election analysis that somehow the country has changed,” said Bobby Eberle, GOPUSA’s publisher. “It’s the same country. They just saw Republicans turn away from what got them to power, so they voted them out.”
But others argue that conservatives ought to be willing to examine their own failings and the marketplace of ideas in order to win national elections again. “The economic circumstances of the present raise serious doubts about whether the Republican Party has served the country well,” Cizik said.
He’s not alone. A desire to reach out to nontraditional Republicans certainly helped Michael Steele, a former lieutenant governor of Maryland who’s a moderate voice in the party, to win election last month as the first African-American chairman of the Republican National Committee. Steele said in his acceptance speech he saw no benefit in obstructionism. “For those who wish to obstruct,” he said, “Get ready to get knocked over.”
A Wobbly Base?
If moderate voices don’t knock over the hard-liners, financial pressures might. Often a shift in power in Washington benefits interest groups of the opposite ideology, as was the case for conservative advocates after Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 and for liberal groups after Bush won in 2000. In each case, fired-up partisans increased their donations to interest groups that pledged to fight the new president. But such donor enthusiasm has yet to materialize for conservatives since Obama’s victory.
For example, two weeks after the November election, Focus on the Family, the Colorado Springs-based conservative group, announced it was cutting a fifth of its workforce, or more than 200 employees. The move followed a staff reduction of nearly 50 in September. Now, Perkins says, the Family Research Council may soon follow suit because its revenues are down 15 percent from the previous year.
In Perkins’ view, Obama deserves credit for assuaging some of the concerns of conservative donors with moderate rhetoric. But Perkins, hopeful for a funding pickup later this year, sees little prospect for the détente lasting. “He made himself look like a moderate, but I think that, as he forces Americans to go places they don’t want to go, people will see how radical his policies are and, sacrificially, step forward.”
Comments
Actually, many libertarians were Pro-Bush contrarty to what Fred Smith says. Bush appointed the first Libertarian Party Chairman ever to serve in a Cabinet Post - Gayle Norton as Interior Secretary. He appointed more Libertarian Party members, than all other previous Presidents combined. Bush also introduced the most radically libertarian proposal ever on Social Security: almost complete privatization. Bush was fiercely opposed to the Military Draft, and balked at Democrat efforts to bring back mandatory service. Pro-Defense Libertarians also respected him for liberating 60 million people from brutal totalitarian repression in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2004, a great many Libertarians disgruntled with the Libertarian Party's extremist pick for President bolted, and formed "Libertarians for Bush." The group included the LP's very first Presidential candidate from 1972 Dr. John Hospers. Radio talk show host Neal Boortz, even credited Libertarians for Bush, with helping to push him over the top in the election. It's incorrect to say that "Libertarians" were not happy with Bush. Leftwing Libertarians were certainly unhappy with him. But those of us on the rightside of libertarian movement were very pleased with his performance, and still are to this day.
Actually, the Bush administrations demonstrably anti-liberty and anti-market agenda exposed those fake libertarians who publicly supported Bush. There is a certain sub-category of apologists for the looting and tyranny of the ruling class that have an incentive to confuse matters, for the defense of a corrupt status quo from the radical challenge of libertarianism can only be carried out by conspiring to hide the meaning of the word "libertarianism". They promulgate corporate subsidies and call it a free market. They wage illegal wars and call it "security". Et cetera. While the Libertarian Party often acts as an unfortunate tool of such opportunists, in fairness to the LP it should (at least) be noted that Mr. Dondero is attempting to smear the Libertarian Party with Bush admin crimes (perhaps under the assumption that shared guilt weighs less heavily) by inaccurately citing former Libertarian Party members such as Gayle Norton as if they were current ones. Generally, there are real libertarians in the LP and then there is also The Revolving Door Caucus of slumming Republican Party operatives looking for a quick buck or gullible followers. The tale grows even sadder when you realize the dishonesty inherent in attempts to paint the Bush Social Security privatization scheme as a libertarian initiative. Mr. Dondero, when challenged on this, typically resorts to a fallacious technique known as "Argument from Authority" in which he cites the involvement of the purportedly "libertarian" Cato Institute in said matter -- thereby attempting to dodge arguments from real libertarians that the Social Security hoax was yet another example of how far Cato has betrayed libertarian ideals. The simple truth of the martter is that libertarianism is essentially anti-statism and opposition to state-granted privilege. The charlatans who have attempted to form a government-created pension cartel as a way to further politically plunder the average productive American may be a lot of things -- but they were never libertarians in any meaningful sense of the word.
I laughed as I read about the "magical alliance of fiscal and social consertvatives." Yeah, right. The fiscal conservatives at the time of Reagan seemed to look the other way as HE more than doubled the national debt. And his "social" conservatism was actually quite progressive. He wasn't a one note Ronnie on abortion or affirmative action. How time lies. The Republicans need to get over themselves and their hypocrisy. They are a party constantly in search of a controversy they can spin to show that the sky is falling. The party of perpetual outrage. And the party of perpetual whining. And only one answer -- tax cuts. No one has to pay for government; this is true when you are a party that can't govern. The "conservatives" standing shoulder to shoulder in Washington, and refusing the support anything that helps middle America (just more tax cuts for the rich) are doing more to marginalize themselves and destroy their party, than their opponents could do. Keep it up Republican thugs. We don't need you any more. Follow David Frum, David Brooks and Kathleen Parker into the cold thin air of extinction. You have become a very bad joke and a bedsore all wrapped in one.
The GOP doesn't get it. They have no clue why they lost. I hope they keep thinking it's because they were not conservative enough.
As long as republicans continue confusing "republican" with reactionary, as long as they confuse liberty with licentiousness, as long as they confuse America with servile corporatism, as long as they hate politics, as long as they hate goverment, as long as they follow their gross hypocrisy about government spending, as long as they refuse to listen to their most intelligent critics, the democrats can keep cultivating their corruption, can keep throwing billions around as if they were all drunken sailors on weekend passes, can keep worshipping Obama (pretty much like the republicans worshipped GWBush) as if this were Germany singing praises of Hitler, and the US government will continue concentrating power, consolidating power in the executive, centralizing official authority, rendering the courts obsolete (with astonishing compliance from the judicial clerics), and colonizing the state, counties, cities, and anyone outside the US who will not mightily fight back. It is a shameful disgrace for anyone to remain affiliated with either the democratic party or the republican party. The most prominant thing holding the government together is what the party hacks used to call "the glue of patronage." That was when they still had a faint heart for honesty. A cabal of professional thieves and liars whose most redeeming characteristic is their anarchy rules, and the rest of us act like scared children.
The GOP will find its legs again if it moves in a pro liberty and small government direction. The Bush yrs were like the Reagan yrs: empty promise of small government which became huge expansions in government. Rep Ron Paul is helping to grow a movement of americans back to our prosperous roots of small government, liberty, peace, and self responsiblity. Obama has deceived millions into thinking he will change DC but has done nothing but continue bush policies and put old clinton heads back in the executive branch. if the GOP cared about honesty and justice they would take Rep Paul in with open arms, but they dont and it will lead to their downfall. the gop prefers the authoritarian model it has kept for the past decades. this will fail as people will soon learn the government is the worst problem solver in our great nation. I hope that the party of, but more importantly the ideals of Jefferson and Madison take hold in this nation again. it is necessary if we wish to return to prominance but more importantly liberty.
Republicans are strange - see explanation here http://www.ucubd.com/Index.aspx?id=1072&cid=xd0000
The GOP will subsist on the governorship of a few Southern States for a decade. I just wonder whether a better party will come along to replace the GOP, or will I have to choose between one corporate party vs the other. Obama at least got half his money from non-corporations, so he's got a fighting chance of being decent.
If the Republicans really wanted to save their party they would reach out to Ron Paul and his supporters and try being REAL Conservatives for a change.
Thank you walter smith, could not have said it better myself.
It's easy to stand united when a Democrat is in the White House. They sure got together over the whole Lewinsky thing, and imagine where we'd be today if they hadn't wasted months trying to impeach the President for it... If it wasn't for that scandal, W would have never stolen that first election and driven our debt to an unsustainable level funding a nonsensical war that costs us over $341 million PER DAY going on seven years now. I'm not surprised that Republican leaders are proud of themselves for essentially offering little more than dissent to an extended hand from a powerful majority. Thanks for nothing, guys.
A House Divided Cannot Hold. The GOP as we knew it is no more. What kept them together in the past, much to the chagrin of those in opposition, was their near lockstep approach to governing with the White House. Today that lockstep has been decoupled. The house is divided. It's every man for himself. 1. Some in the GOP stood for fiscal responsibility. After eight years in the white house, most of those in the congressional majorities, however, with trillion dollar deficit, such argument is mute. 2. Some in the party used to advocate for government staying out of individuals' lives. After the Terry Schiavo debacle, that is also mute. Agreement on what to do in opposition today is now only a pipe dream. With no new ideas on what to do to move forward, I say the party needs to shut down and reboot. Good luck with that.
The GOP activists who insist the country has not changed do so at their own detriment. When your party is losing 70% of the under 30 vote, you have a major message problem. That generational gap is caused entirely by a disconnect on social issues. Those numbers are a building tsunami that threaten to completely wipe out the Republican Party if they do not moderate their message.
"Right Wing Libertarian" So that means you're libertarian on the economy, but not on social issues... How exactly does that seperate you from a Republican/Conservative?
The GOP is fractured because, for the past 8 years, it has focused on two exclusive groups: Big Business and Christian Fundamentalists. While these groups are important, the majority of our nation are neither Big Businessmen nor Christian Fundamentalists. Within the party, the interests of Big Businessmen have overshadowed the interests of Small Businessmen and the interests of Christian Fundamentalists have overshadowed the interests of Non-Christian Faithfuls. Because of this, all those Small Businessmen and Non-Christian Faithfuls voted Democrat this election cycle. If the Republican Party wants to keep relevant, it had better start being more inclusive of its membership. Otherwise, there's no way in hell it'll get the votes needed to have an impact in the government. Unfortunately, I have no idea if the GOP will make those ideological sacrifices or not.
The GOP got completely hijacked by the social conservative wing. There is more to running a country than mismanaging Iraq, denying global warming & outlawing abortion and gay marriage!!! Last year's GOP primary was a joke - Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, Rudy Guiliani? None of them demonstrated integrity or leadership. They were all trying to LOOK like leaders. The only ones that were authentic and honest were Huckabee, Brownback and Paul. (I would not trust Huckabee to run this country, but at least he was real) The only salvation for the GOP is to drop their (not really) conservative leaders - Dobson is scum, Limbaugh is scum, Haggard was twisted inside, etc. Seek new leadership - not a public standard-bearer that "looks" like Reagan, but the voices on the weekly conference calls. THOSE are the ones who have to go.
This article is symptomatic of why the GOP is flailing about like a ship without a rudder. How could someone possibly write an article about Conservatism in the Republican Party, social and/or fiscal, without mentioning Ron Paul? Swimming upstream against the tide of patronizing neglect and hostility from the media, and from the party itself, "Dr. No" created one of the most extraordinary political phenomena of the decade - raising more money in a single day than any of the other candidates, coming in first place in the voting in some of the Primary debates, raising more money among our troops in Iraq than all other candidates combined, to name a few. Not to mention that Ron was the only one of the candidates that even talked about the hard issues, like the criminality if the Fed, the looming catastrophic collapse of the currency, etc. If the author is not aligned with Dr. Paul's outlook that's fine, but not to MENTION him? To use one of Dr. Paul's favorite phrases, "What's going on here?"
Conservatives distrust, even abhor government. So, WHY would we elect a conservative to...government? I need oral surgery; do I hire a surgeon who abhors looking into my mouth?
Conservatism and "free market capitalism" have led us to: 1) two wars, simultaneously; 2) 20% of the world's population living in near death conditions; 3) global climate change; 4) etc, etc, etc. We NEED governance and PUBLIC oversight over economic behaviour. Remember, the MAJOR maxim of capitalism is to "maximize profits". Inherent PROBLEMS!. Free market capitalism destroys OUR natural resource base, and the most vital needs of a citizenry - health care, education and security (home, food, etc). Europeans discovered this LONG, LONG time ago. Thanks to libertarians and conservatives, now Americans are discovering this. Conservatism will go the route of communism in the annals of history.
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