‘Less than the sum of its parts’

December 16, 2007

It’s hardly a secret that the Republican presidential field is surprisingly weak and unimpressive, which has contributed to a GOP malaise. Poll after poll has shown Democratic voters enthusiastic about their choices, while Republican voters generally feel the opposite.

But it’s worth pausing, from time to time, to realize just how feeble this field really is.

It is hard to think of another campaign when Republicans have seemed less excited about their choices. That was the unmistakable lesson of the rapid ascension in recent polls of Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, the latest in a line of Republican flavors of the month. A New York Times/CBS News poll last week found that none of the Republican candidates — not even the suddenly hot Mr. Huckabee — was viewed favorably by even half of Republican voters. […]

[W]hat is worrying Republicans these days is that this tepid rank-and-file reception to the best the party has to offer suggests that the Republican Party is hitting a wall after dominating American politics for most of the last 35 years. Republican voters are reacting to — or rather, not reacting to — a field of presidential candidates who have defined their candidacies with familiar, even musty, Republican promises, slogans and policies.

“Our party generally has grown stale in its message and we’re not as tuned in as we once were,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican who sought his party’s presidential nomination in 1996 and 2000. “We’re repeating words and phrases that were from the 1980s, rather than looking ahead to 2008. We haven’t been as original and fresh in our presentation as we ought to be. We have been applying our old principles to new circumstances. The world is new.”

Richard Lowry, the editor of the conservative magazine National Review, said the field “has been less than the sum of its parts.”

To be sure, this is likely to change. Once each party has a nominee, the GOP base will probably rally both behind their candidate — and in strident opposition to the Dem.

But in the meantime, considering the Republican landscape, “none of the above” is surprisingly appealing.

“The debate among these guys has been so unedifying and so backward looking,” [Lowry] said. “It’s all, ‘who did what wrong seven years ago.’ They are also not talking about the future, which is a sign of a deeper Republican malaise. The Republican Party has run out of intellectual steam and good ideas.”

This is an inverse of the way things normally are in presidential campaigns. George H. Nash, a conservative historian, said there had not been an election since 1940 — the year Republicans ultimately nominated Wendell Willkie of New York to take on Roosevelt — when the party seemed so uninspired by the field.

“It seems like there’s a broader amount of concern and a greater degree of reservation about this field than I can recall,” Mr. Nash said. “The only year that in some ways parallels this is 1940.”

President Bush was nothing short of a rock star for Republican audiences when he ran in 2000 and 2004. That really hasn’t changed, even today: 71 percent of Republican voters said in the Times/CBS News poll last week that they approved of Mr. Bush’s performance, an endorsement those Republicans coveting his job could only envy. (This compared with the 28 percent of the general public who approves of the job he is doing.)

Ronald Reagan stirred Republicans in 1980 with a charismatic presence and clear vision — his fierce anti-Soviet stance, his call for rolling back government and cutting welfare — that has continued to define conservative Republican Party policies since he left. “There was no feeling in 1980 that Republicans needed another Ike,” said Peter Robinson, a fellow at the Hoover Institute who served as a speech writer for Mr. Reagan. “There is something very unusual going on here.”

To quantify this a bit, Richard Bond, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, noted data that showed a 17-point “intensity gap” between the Republicans and the Democrats looking ahead to the ’08 campaign.

“That is a monster number,” Bond said. “It shows that the Republicans are not fired up and it’s going to take a nominee who can clearly articulate a post-Bush vision for the country.”

Sure, as Adam Nagourney notes, the Democratic nominee might fire up the GOP before voters head to the polls, but what does it say about the modern Republican Party that they need a Dem to save their electoral chances?

President Bush was nothing short of a rock star for Republican audiences when he ran in 2000 and 2004. That really hasn’t changed, even today: 71 percent of Republican voters said in the Times/CBS News poll last week that they approved of Mr. Bush’s performance

This really tells you all that you need to know about the Republican party’s problems: their rank and file have lost their freakin’ minds.

  • Look at the number of Democratic Congressmen who are running unopposed. the malaise goes down the entire ballot. Also, no one who worked in the Bush Administration or who worked in Capital Hill for the former Republican majority has any credibility in running for office.

    It is just a matter of time until the Republican party collapses and the U.S. will be a one party state. The long range pundits should be writing about what the U.S. will be like as a one party state. Is Mass., California, Maryland, DC, or Chicago the model that the U.S. will follow as a one party state.

  • “President Bush was nothing short of a rock star for Republican audiences when he ran in 2000 and 2004. That really hasn’t changed, even today: 71 percent of Republican voters said in the Times/CBS News poll last week that they approved of Mr. Bush’s performance”

    Then you should let them have what they want. Tell your Congressmen that you want a vote on the ammendment limiting Presidents to two terms and the country can have the cathartic pleasure of seeing George Bush going head to head with Bill Clinton for the 2008 election.

    It won’t ever happen, of course, but simply contemplating the level of crazy that would hit the wingnut fan when Bubba won by a landslide and invalidated everything they’ve been saying about what America really wants out of a President makes me all warm inside.

  • California has a Republican governor and elected Reagon. It’s not as one-party as I would like.

    So when Huck and Mitt expressed their Bush-love they were appealing to 71% of Republicans?

  • the post above says specifically 71% of Republican voters.
    it is not clear if that means those with a past record of voting, or those saying they will vote in 2008. either way, it is a smaller group than all Republicans, and it is the group most likely to have had their cups runneth over with Kool-Aid.

  • I love it…your title just “sums” it all up so well:

    “less than the sum of its parts”

  • Defy the government, cut taxes, enrich the wealthy, trumpet individual rights (“deserving” individuals) — the Republican song and dance has remained essentially the same for over a century. Of course it’s stale. Attempts to rejuvenate the party with an infusion of fundamentalist religion after the fall of communism only served to further define a Republican ideology that is as much a shallow religion as it is a political belief. They’ll need to wait until the political pendulum swings back to their core values of greed and unenlightened self-interest before they’re dominant again. —And if the religious-right doesn’t destroy the party.

  • There is another place where the tepid support translates into hard numbers. According to the CBS poll last week, 40% of likely Democratic primary voters are confident in their choice. This may sound low, but it’s not a bad number in this stage of the campaign. And most voters don’t solidify their support until the field is whittled down a bit through the first round of primaries. This year, the timescale may be shorter, but the dynamics are the same.

    But, if 40% is a reasonable number, take a look at the Republican voters–the firm support here is at 23%! When one could argue that the Dem number is relatively low because the field is strong–and one has to wonder how much of the firm support is in opposition to Clinton–the same cannot be said of the Republican field. There’s no firm commitment because there’s hardly anyone to commit to. And how much of that 23% belongs to the Ron Paul supporters, which is basically a big FU to the GOP?

    As the San Diego elections (Duke replacement, I believe) showed a couple of years ago, a single dumb comment from a Dem can polarize the conservative electorate and push them back toward the nutcases on the Right. But how likely is it the Dem nominee that emerges will make the same kind of mistake? At the moment, it seems that it’s the Republicans who find themselves on the defensive against other Republicans–just witness this morning’s Romney attack on Huck. What are the chances that the Republican eventual nominee will emerge stronger from this campaign? Given the fact that each of them has to backtrack and defend his earlier remarks, it seems that the eventual “winner” will be greatly weakened by all the inconsistencies, not to mention the necessity do defend the current regime.

  • The Republican Party has run out of intellectual steam and good ideas.

    No jackass, the ReThuglican Party could still get by on the same tired old ideas, it’s that people are seeing up close and personal how those “ideas” work once you let them run free in the real world. Perpetual war, crappy economy (unless you’re a CEO or trust fund baby), enough corruption to choke a vulture, compassionate conservative = Terri Schiavo and Heckuvajob Brownie.

    But of course it isn’t the actions of your party, it’s the ideas. The ReThugs still think that if they can come up with some pretty new ideas (or give the old ones a make over) and people will forget about their actions.

    And this is why the Grand Old Pachyderm is floundering around in the tar pit. Someone throw the poor thing the anchor from the Titanic.

  • I just wish my pleasure at seeing a becalmed and rudderless RepubCo, (I won’t say sunk, this country is accepting way too much B.S. to go there), was matched by a confidence that there was an opposing party that was chomping at the bit to take advantage of such an opening and jam it down their throats. I thought ’06 would be much more energizing and clarifying than it has been. Dems don’t seem at all anxious to grab the reins and change direction.

    If anything, clues are constantly dropped that Dem pols have other masters and simply because RepubCo may be out of favor, that doesn’t mean that we are entering a new age of enlightenment. Rather than pushing against RepubCo obstruction, Dems have been hiding behind it.

    Whether they like what they are doing or not I can’t tell. Sometimes they act embarrassed. Sometimes they act whipped. But they never act sincerely pissed off with the intention to keep trying until they get what they were asked to at least try hard for.

    If this country really does pull a Dem president out of the hat next go around, that person is going to have to be a force of nature to get his/her own damn congress to perk up and push back against their CorpCo/WarCo masters and start exhibiting some imagination and courage.

    Regardless of what RepubCo does, I see the Dems as a very mysterious, undisciplined and unreliable group of people.

  • The Republican Party has run out of intellectual steam and good ideas.

    No jackass, . . .

    Wait a second; that’s an entirely fair statement by Rich Lowry. Give credit where credit is due.

    Of course it happened around 1865 . . .

  • That’s why the Rethugs want to run against Hillary. She polarizes everyone, and would fire up the GOP-dead-enders to vote for whichever loser they finally come up with. If the Dems nomnate Hillary there will definitely be an independent candidacy, which could easily give the Rethugs the election. It is going to be an unusual year.

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