More on the GOP “losing the middle”

NR’s Ramesh Ponnuru, in the New York Times, on how the GOP lost more of the middle this past election than it gained on the right:

Based on the exit polls from 2004 and Tuesday, Republicans have lost more ground among self-described moderates than among conservatives. Even if Senator McCain had won the same percentage of conservatives that President Bush did in 2004, he would not have won. Moving right will work only if moderates are given a reason to move right too.

The way to court these moderates is not to abandon social conservatism, which would alienate many of the voters Republicans still have. The party needs to “move to the middle” less than it needs to move to the middle class: to go back to representing the interests of voters in the middle of the income spectrum.

By the end of the campaign, 60 percent of voters did not think that he was “in touch with people like them” — and 79 percent of them voted against him. They thought other Republicans were out of touch, too. To recover, the party will have to prove them wrong, not just return to the conservative program of yesteryear.

For much of the year Senator McCain’s central economic message was that he would restrain federal spending, especially earmarks. At no point did Republicans suggest how these policies would lead to any tangible improvements for average Americans.

David Frum on the GOP’s college-educated voter problem

David Frum’s National Post piece from last week talked about the problem the GOP has with college-educated voters, who went overwhelmingly for Obama last Tuesday

A generation ago, Republicans dominated among college graduates. In 1984 and 1988, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush won states like California, Pennsylvania and Connecticut – states that have been “blue” for a generation. (America’s least educated state, West Virginia, went for Michael Dukakis in 1988.)

Those days are long gone. Since 1988, Democrats have become more conservative on economics – and Republicans have become more conservative on social issues.

College-educated Americans have come to believe that their money is safe with Democrats – but that their values are under threat from Republicans. And there are more and more of these college-educated Americans all the time.

So the question for the GOP is: Will it pursue them? To do so will involve painful change, on issues ranging from the environment to abortion. And it will involve potentially even more painful changes of style and tone: toward a future that is less overtly religious, less negligent with policy, and less polarizing on social issues.

This is the great struggle ahead for the conservative movement.  Undoubtedly, the selection of Sarah Palin and the adoption of a kind of anti-intellectual ethos on the right this past election cost the GOP voters, particularly college-educated ones. Can the movement embrace a new policy-based intellectual energy that draws those voters back in, while keeping something of a focus on the traditional values that have been a backbone of the movement?  In other words, “less overtly religious, less negligent with policy?”

NR’s Rich Lowry on the GOP’s future

In today’s Washington Post, National Review editor Rich Lowry outlines his thoughts for where the GOP needs to go:

Connecting better on the economy and middle-class pocketbook and quality-of-life issues will go a long way toward alleviating the troubles the GOP had in reaching moderates, suburbanites and even Latinos this year. It will require refreshing the conservative policy arsenal with innovative proposals that will look more like McCain’s health-care plan than the old tried and true, and it will mean engaging on concerns such as congestion and college tuition that have traditionally been beneath conservative notice.

There appears to be a consensus developing that the GOP’s message needs to change – more of a focus on “pocketbook issues” is needed.  Can conservatives develop approaches to solving these issues that remain consistent with limited-government conservative values?  That is the big question.

WSJ Op-ed on the collapse of the conservative intellectual movement

For the past couple of weeks, I have been reading, or rather listening to on CD, William F. Buckley Jr.’s autobiographical collection of columns and essays titled “Miles Gone By.”  Among many, many other things, (Buckley was CIA agent!) the book describes both the development of National Review and the exhaustive process by which issues of the magazine were assembled.  One gets a true sense of the vast intellectual power that National Review brought to bear on behalf of advancing the modern conservative movement, of which both National Review and Buckley were irreplaceable components.

The argument that this passion for ideas has been replaced by a kind of anti-intellectualism on the right  became louder after the selection of VP pick Sarah Palin, and has been the subject of a David Brooks column which was heavily criticized by some on the right.

An op-ed in today’s Wall St. Journal makes much the same argument:

For the past 40 years American conservatism has been politically ascendant, in no small part because it was also intellectually ascendant.

Magazines like the Public Interest and Commentary became required reading for anyone seriously concerned about domestic and foreign affairs; conservative research institutes sprang up in Washington and on college campuses, giving a fresh perspective on public policy. Buckley, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Peter Berger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Norman Podhoretz — agree or disagree with their views, these were people one had to take seriously.

So what happened? How, 30 years later, could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against?

They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

Pretty tough stuff from a columnist with little love for conservative ideals, but a point worthy of discussion.  There has been plenty of talk about the shrinking of the Republican coalition, about how liberals have “marched through the institutions” (see Mark Steyn here) – government, academia, the media, Hollywood, etc. – while conservatives have been falling back on a base of lower-income, high school-educated whites.  Can we afford to lose whatever influence we have left among the nation’s intellectual classes?  Don’t we need an new burst of intellectual energy and new ideas, rather than a lot of finger pointing about who is an elitist and who is not?

Snowe and Collins the most powerful Senators in Washington?

Katherine Rizzo’s recent Wall St. Journal blog describes how, with the Democrats “tantalizingly close” to a filibuster-proof sixty-seat majority, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe will have more power and influence than ever:

Susan Collins and the other senator from her state, Republican Olympia Snowe go their own, moderate way so often that when GOP leaders are quizzed about being able to filibuster a bill, they tend to walk through the math by explaining how many votes they expect from core Republicans and what they expect from “the ladies from Maine.”

With Democrats tantalizingly close to the 60 votes they need to cut off filibusters, a lot of what happens in the next two years will depend on two things: the ability of Democrats to keep the majority together, and the willingness of Republican moderates to defect on crucial issues.

If the Democrats want to make another run at President George W. Bush’s restrictions on stem cell research, they’ll start by making sure the ladies from Maine haven’t changed their minds on the subject. Anything to do with habeas corpus rights? Once again – first stop, the ladies from Maine.

It will be fascinating to watch how Snowe and Collins use this “balance of power” position of theirs.  One hopes they can be counted on to keep the Pelosi/Reid wing of the Democratic Congress in check. They may be the only thing between us and “card check” legislation, a return of the “fairness doctrine” and who knows what else…

What’s a Republican to do?

Got an interesting phone call today in response to my most recent column in the Camden Herald, entitled What is a Republican to do? The gentleman that called, a Camden resident, described himself as center-left politically, voting for Democrats, he suspected, about two-thirds of the time.  He volunteered that he had, however, voted for Susan Collins and our newest State Senator-to-be, Chris Rector, and agreed with me that the GOP had botched things in Washington and had lost touch with the working class, and was in dire need of some years in the wilderness to sort out what exactly it is that the party stands for.  He also agreed that their remain a number of questions about coming Obama presidency, including whether Obama would indeed govern as he had campaigned, as a “post-partisan” centrist who would govern from the middle.

My sense is that the caller is one of many that have shifted center-left of late, but who, if convinced the GOP could govern more effectively and more from the center, would come back over to our side, especially if Obama overreaches.  Before us, then, is the great question before the conservative movement – move more to the center or more to the right?