The Republican Party Needs a New Core
February 28, 2009 by Steel Phoenix
The Republican party, so strong in its unity that it defeated more numerous Democratic foes, even while saddled with an inferior candidate, has now crumbled into its respective factions. It is the price both of failure and of choosing a leader that did not represent the center of their ideology. By electing Neocons, they tried to appeal to the center of the populace as a whole, to make a new base of the centrists and undecideds; a notoriously wishy-washy group with no sense of loyalty. I found the above video at the always interesting Osterley Times. This kid is one smooth talker. If McCain had chosen Jonathan Krohn instead of Sarah Palin, he might have given Obama a run for his money. It certainly would have put to rest questions of the ticket being too old. The party needs to find its core and rally around it. So who is that base? The kid seems to have nailed it.
The Neocons have failed. They were too far left with their bitter Hillary supporters, military industrialites, and Toyota Republicans.
The people aren’t yet ready for the more Libertarian wing. We methodological individualists and Ron Paul supporters won’t come into power until both major parties crumble simultaneously.
I see the real Republican center as being the Paleocons. Those rabid nationalists with their eyes distant on brighter days, stars and stripes flapping in the wind, when waitresses wore roller skates, and Mexican labor was done in Mexico. They have the kind of intoxicating vision that pulls the center, and the desire for small government that appeals to the more Libertarian minded. How did they lose? The military industrial complex doesn’t like their distaste for foreign wars.
Very insightful post. The Republicans are still in the doldrums. They are proppping up people like Michael Steele, Bobby Jindal, and Sarah Palin to show that they’ve got minorities too. But by doing so, they’re just trying to pander like Democrats. The party needs to figure out that they need to capture the youth vote, or at least do better than they have been. That’s a big reason Obama won. For the Republicans, Ron Paul was the only candidate to achieve any sort of enthusiasm among young people and minorities. They need to take notice of that.
You say that the libertarians won’t come into power until both parties crumble. That might be true, but we might be almost halfway there.
Another alternative might be the paleocon center you describe. The antiwar message would certainly resonate enough among the growing libertarian faction.
We very well may be nearly there. The Republicans already blew it badly. The Democrats have elected a figure of historic potential. He seems to have everything they could possibly ask for. I wish him luck, but the bigger they are, the harder they fall. If he fails within the next couple of years, we may see a strong surge of Libertarianism. It seems to me that it is a lot harder to be a Libertarian if you think the system can be fixed from within. It needs to be stripped down to its very core and then rebuilt with only what is absolutely necessary. Those currently in power would drag their feet and filibuster to keep the status quo.
Ron Paul is also a special case, unfortunately. He has one Achilles heel: he is older than John McCain. As much as he may pull the young people, he will have trouble winning if he would be taking office at the age of 77. A more honest man has ever walked the halls of Congress. I’ll vote for him again, but I’m not sure everyone else will.
I’m still a Republican despite all they do now. I’m not particularly interested in leaving for either the Libertarian or Constitution Parties even though I have more in common with them. The current system is rigged in favor of the two parties. The most realistic chance to effect change is through the system.
Just look at how Ron Paul and his message did in 2008 vs. 1988 when he ran for president as a Libertarian. In 1988 he was barely a blip on the radar while in 2007-08, he was the biggest surprise. His message barely changed in that time and the biggest difference was that he ran in a major party.
6-time Socialist Party nominee Norman Thomas finally stopped running for president because he said the Democrats had eventually adopted his whole platform. It’s more likely that paleocon/libertarian change to this country will come through the GOP.
It’s hard to imagine now, but there was once a time when the Republican Party’s foreign policy was not pro-war by default. That’s why we can even consider how the neocons took control of the GOP. Most of them cast themselves off from the Democrats and worked their way through the conservative movement via the opinion journals and think tanks all the way to administration positions. Now it’s the neocon party. The paleocons and libertarians might, just might, be able to effect the same – it will just take time. It’ll be hard, but it will probably have to be through the system.
I don’t think Ron Paul so much ran for president this time as was put up on the shoulders of his supporters and carried. It is arguable that nearly his entire campaign was waged on an internet that didn’t yet exist in ’88. The major media didn’t want him, the Republican party didn’t want him. They both ended up finding him hard to ignore.
The two party system is part of the problem. Those who will vote within it in order to gain a chance of picking a winner will also succumb to voting for whoever the GOP says has the best chance of beating the Democrat rather than the right man for the job. Ron Paul never had a chance as a Republican.
I have a problem with unity. What you gain in power you lose in control. When it gets to the scale of the two parties, it becomes an uncontrollable force of corruption. The system won’t change until the people lose their affiliations and just demand what they want.
I doubt Ron Paul will ever be the core of the Republican Party. The hope the new leaders will be Jim DeMint and Sarah Palin.
I haven’t looked into DeMint. I’ll do so.
If Palin is ever going to move up in the world, she is going to have to do it the hard way. She tried to walk the Obama easy street and was crushed. How much of what she got from the media was deserved, I don’t know, but her campaign was an absolute disaster from around day two until months after it was supposedly over. I mostly refrained from comment during that train wreck, but she appeared to lack understanding of the issues, the ability to handle a negotiation or work with others, and the ethics we desire in a public servant.
I realize that neither the party nor MSM wanted Paul, but I don’t think it can be denied that being in a major party is what gave him the attention he got. Ron Paul said he reluctantly entered the race to spread his liberty message and was astonished at the reception he got among the people. The internet can do a lot but if Paul had been a libertarian and not a Republican, he would not have been able to get one iota of the attention he got. He may not have had much of a chance as a Republican, but he had absolutely zero chance as anything else.
Just look at Bob Barr. Barr, a former Republican, had a moderate internet following but could not really get his campaign off the ground, in large part because the system is rigged against third parties. The two candidates from 2008 whose campaigns were helped the most by the internet were Obama and Paul. Only Obama had more videoes about him than Ron Paul. I find it hard to believe that anyone in a third party could have received that much attention via the internet. Bob Barr and Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin both had messages very similar to Paul, but they were stuck in third parties. It’s more than simply Ron Paul’s supporters lifting him up. Being in the GOP is what, first and foremost, that gave him national attention.
Ron Paul first got major national attention in May 2007 when he challenged Giuliani on the motivation of the 9/11 attackers. He never would have been able to get attention if it was not for his place on the stage with Republicans. The media finally had to pay attention to him because he was a growing force in a major party. As much as I hate the system, and as much as I can tell that you hate the system, it is probably the only realistic avenue through which real change can be effected, short of a real revolution.
But you also bring up a good point about what happens after making it through the system. It brings up a whole new problem: corruption. Corruption is a terrible temptation once you’ve found yourself in power. Then we could really be back at square one.
“It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.” ~ Samuel Adams
It was a tough election. We had so many candidates that were solidly better than that pathetic Bush vs. Kerry contest. I don’t know how things would have gone if Ron Paul had run Libertarian. I think he could have had similar internet support, and been a kingmaker in the general. Unfortunately, being a kingmaker between the big 2 doesn’t get us anywhere as Nader has shown repeatedly. He certainly didn’t make the country any greener by getting Bush elected.
If I may, I would also like to interject into the Palin discussion.
Sarah Palin has some serious baggage, but not all of it is her fault. She certainly fumbled her interviews with the mainstream media over the ambiguously defined Bush Doctrine, but those fumbles were also overblown (just consider Joe Biden’s statement about the stock market crash and how President Roosevelt got on TV to talk to the nation about the crisis – a statement with 3 historical bloopers in it).
She was also misused in the McCain campaign. By misused, I mean that she was presented as a folksy lady from the rural parts of Alaska with an “Aw shucks” attitude toward life. Because of that image the campaign crafted for her, people began to think she was dumb and that is what made Tina Fey’s impersonation of her stick. Something’s gone wrong when a person once nicknamed “Sarah Barracuda” for her feistiness was turned into someone who was a backwards hick from Alaska.
The campaign also misused her by the way she was used in the campaign during those final, interminable weeks. After McCain voted for the Wall Street bailout, she could not honestly talk about free market economics, as she was compelled to defend McCain’s actions and agenda, which reduced her to nothing but the attack dog. She ended up invoking Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, and flagspins so often and in such a low-brow manner that she began to sound loony.
I don’t think it’s fair that her image was reduced to that, but that is the perception that I would guess a majority of the country holds of her and that’s why it matters. In the world of politics, perceptions are reality.
The pre-vice presidential campaign Sarah Palin is indisputably different from the vice presidential campaign Sarah Palin. If she declares for president in 2012, will she have to face the troubles of having to be viewed as a McCain Republican to many people. If she tries to run as a conservative, she will have a lot of ground to make up for having supported such a liberal Republican in McCain.
All that aside, she still has promise in the GOP. As the original post suggested, the party needs a new core. The Republicans have no real leader to look to, not for the party and not for the conservative movement. Palin might be the person to fill that void. McCain was able to get the nomination because there was no clear front-runner, only a huddled mass of “top tier candidates.” Anything could happen in 2012. And that can be either good news or bad news.
I concur, but if Sarah can’t even handle a few gotcha softballs from Katie, what chance does she have against Putin? I don’t think any of the other serious contenders would have been tripped up by any of the questions she was asked.
It looks like you and I are neck and neck in public opinion, IR. Palin and Paul both came in at 13% in the straw poll. Jindal beat them both, which just shows how screwed the party is. I think he may have done as well as he did because he didn’t run in the last election. By the standards being thrown at Obama right now, Jindal isn’t a natural born citizen either.
Straw polls don’t mean much right now, even though I am pleased that Ron Paul did rather well. Romney won his 3rd straw poll in a row but don’t forget that that’s never gotten him very much in terms of actual electoral success. The party is still without a center of gravity and is still in a lot of trouble. All of the efforts of talk radio pesonalities to promote Palin and Romney and Jindal don’t matter for much. So far, those people only represent personalities themselves.