Are the Republican Party, and the two-party system, still headed for disaster?
Last April, I speculated about what the political landscape might look like after the dust has settled from battle within the Republican Party. I didn’t lay down any sort of time frame, but this seems as good an opportunity as any to take a look back at the last eight months and see how things are playing out.
The Democrats
While the Party’s leadership has managed to corral its members well enough to pass some form of health care legislation (though the conference committee still lies ahead), it failed to hold the Senate membership together well enough to preserve a number of President Obama’s campaign promises. Whether or not this experience will turn into a “teachable moment” for the Administration remains to be seen. What is evident at this point is the effect the process has had on the electorate. According to Gallup, the largest segment of the population is made up of those identifying themselves as Independent. This has been a consistent trend since July (with the exception of a single poll in late November in which the Democrats briefly achieved parity with Independents), suggesting that, at present, a plurality of Americans lack confidence in either party’s ability to effectively govern. What happens to these trend lines as we near the 2010 midterm elections will be very telling. A heavier hand from Obama on issues like climate change and economic recovery could go a long way to retaining those independents who helped catapult him into the Presidency.
The Republicans
Small government types (both of the business and ’survivalist’ varieties) will have swelled the ranks of the Libertarian Party, possibly placing it on par with the GOP in state and local elections. The real winner at this point, though, will be the Democratic Party. The winner-take-all system is as American as baseball and apple pie and, like those other pillars of American tradition, it’s not going anywhere. This means that, with the political right split between the socio-religious and the libertarians, Democrats will win far and away more elections then their two competitors combined.
Dede Scozzafava, defeated by conservative hubris.
While I may have been a bit off on the details (the greatest threat to Republican candidates has not been the Libertarians but rather the ‘Tea Party’ conservatives) the general thread of the quote above has proven to be accurate. As the special elections on November 3rd demonstrated, the Republican Party still faces an existential threat from it’s right. The defeat of Dede Scozzafava (R) and Doug Hoffman (T) by the Democrat Bill Owens is a textbook example of how to split a party. And rather than learn from this lesson, the Tea Party contingent pivoted instantly to the 2010 elections, vowing to fight RINOs (that’s “Republicans in Name Only”) wherever they find them.
The highest-profile candidate they’ve found to cut down in the 2010 cycle is Florida’s Charlie Crist. Marco Rubio’s campaign will do its level best to paint Florida’s popular, moderate governor as a pinko-commie-socialist-anarchist trying to put our babies in debt. Expect to see plenty of ads with this image from Obama’s campaign to build support for the stimulus package:
Charlie Crist embracing the President
Rubio’s camp has already turned up the heat under Florida GOP chair Jim Greer (not to be confused with James Earl Jones’ character in The Hunt for Red October), a Crist pick, painting him as a poor financial manager and criticizing his public endorsement of Crist’s Senate bid. The Party’s right wing seems to be winning the battles so far, with Crist’s numbers falling. He’s now tied with Rubio at 43% in a Rasmussen poll. He was at 49% in October. If this trend continues, and repeats itself in other races, the conservative wing may find themselves solidly in control of a severely marginalized party.
The growth in self-identified independents isn’t because the Democrats are too liberal. On the contrary, many of the abandoned aspects of health care reform were hugely popular. The problem is in the abandoning. Not the policy. The better response than running to the right and obstructing popular policy is demonstrating an ability to govern. Doug Hoffman had two problems: being too far right and being incredibly open about the fact that he was an empty shirt.
An Existential Problem
The real problem both parties face right now is one of governing. The Republicans have too recently proven themselves incapable of it. The Democrats are at risk of doing the same. Partisan politics has crowded out the real reason the parties exist in the first place. The Democrats have a momentary advantage in that they are in the majority for the next year. If they can turn the ability to hold together some sort of a coalition into an ability to use that coalition effectively, the voters will thank them for it in 2010 and ‘12. If they don’t, 2010 will be a wash. I don’t think voters are ready to hand power back to a Republican Party that, if not the same as it was in the Bush Years, is even further right.
If both parties have stumbled so far into the partisan minefield that they can’t find their way back to doing the will of the people, then those independents that both sides are fighting so hard to win over will find someone else. Ideology cannot govern and the electorate will reward candidates who are looking for the best solutions, no matter what style of governing that solution might lean toward. There are problems for which more government is the answer and problems for which it is not. And smaller government rarely actually means more freedom. (A government of one, for instance, is a dictatorship.)
The Democrats have an inkling of this, but they may have acquiesced too much in the hopes of getting something accomplished. Whether or not they will learn how to stand their ground more effectively in upcoming legislative fights is an open question. Whether or not the Republicans will more past pure obstructionism is less open to debate. Don’t hold your breath.