This is the Republican party of today--an increasingly working-class party, dependent for its power on supermajorities of the white working class vote, and a party whose constituents are surprisingly comfortable with bad-but-popular liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, expanding clumsy environmental regulations, or hiking taxes on the wealthy to fund a health care entitlement. To borrow a phrase from Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Republicans are now "the party of Sam's Club, not just the country club."
Therein lies a great political danger for Republicans, because on domestic policy, the party isn't just out of touch with the country as a whole, it's out of touch with its own base. And its majority is hardly unassailable: Despite facing a lackluster Democratic presidential candidate who embodied virtually all the qualities Americans loathe--elitism, aloofness, Europhilia, vacillating weakness--George W. Bush, war president and skilled campaigner, was very nearly defeated in his bid for reelection. GOP operatives boast that their electoral efforts were targeted down to the minutest detail, and that their marketing prowess delivered victory for the incumbent. The trouble is that even such extraordinary efforts delivered only a narrow victory.
There is no reason we should not be able to win over large numbers of these voters in next year's midterms. The "Pro-Government Conservatives" are the most obvious. As Douthat and Salam point out, we Democrats love to remind voters that, as a fundamentally anti-government party, the Republicans are not effective managers of the government. Hurricane Katrina was the best example of this. FEMA was never taken seriously be the administration and was therefore packed with know-nothing cronies Bush owed favors to. This point was punctuated when the Republican talking heads hit the airwaves to gloat about what a bad job FEMA did, especially when compared to private businesses like Wal-Mart. Never did it occur to these numbskulls that maybe the American people weren't so pleased to see a big government agency fail. After all, if FEMA fails during a flood that they expected, how well can Homeland Security possibly be able to cope with a surprise terrorist attack? These "Pro-Government Conservatives" voters are the anti-Norquists. They may want limited government, but they certainly don't want to drown it in a bathtub. Even the most basic understanding of Maslow's hierarchy of needs will tell you conservative ideology is much less important when one is worried about mere survival.
There also seems to be a much better shot than some might realize at pulling in the Social Conservatives. I know you're all rolling your eyes right now, thinking about Joe Lieberman attacking Hollywood and an abandonment of the right to privacy. But those would be ill conceived and transparent attempts at pandering. I'm not talking about winning the endorsement of Jerry Falwell, here. I'm talking about peeling off enough of those voters to make a difference. There are parts of our message that resonate with that group. If we honestly make the pitch to those voters, we may not change everyone's minds, but we'll start to make inroads. Let's stop corporations from commodifying children. Let's work to alleviate poverty both at home and abroad. These are issues social conservatives and progressives can come together on.
Governor Schweitzer's successful campaign last year in Montana is a perfect example of this. There was no pandering. On one of the key issues of the race, he simply sold what he believed -- environmental protection -- as something good for typically conservative constituencies -- hunters and fishermen. Now, I tend to think that the idea of 'reframing' these issues is a bit oversold. There's much more to repositioning Democratic ideas to appeal to moderate to conservative voters than just semantic shifts. But it certainly starts with reframing the issues and I think the failures of Republican leadership make it easier to do so.
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