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GOP Slippage Serious But Not Devastating

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By TOM TEEPEN Cox News Service

The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 15, 2008

The presidential election had no sooner been called than the tussling began in largely congruent Republican and conservative circles about the whither question. Should the party and movement shift left or right?

Did the fault for the election's outcome lie with a failure to cleave intimately to doctrinal conservatism or with a bend already too slavish to conservative, especially social conservative, clamors?

The angst is certainly understandable. Just four years ago, Karl Rove and other operatives of movement conservatism seemed at the threshold of their longtime goal: the establishment, through Republican politics, of a conservative dominance so entrenched and abiding that liberals and Democrats would be reduced to petulant irrelevancies for decades, maybe generations.

But Bush's presidency and the Republican fortunes that rode it collapsed within months as the White House tried to begin privatizing Social Security and the GOP Congress jumped into the deeply private matter of the brain-dead Terri Schiavo.

Such rashness and radicalism had become increasingly obvious signs of a party that had come unstuck from its historic roots in caution and practicality.

The prudent multilateralism that had marked the post-World War II GOP soured in recent years into rancid international bullying. We owe wilderness and wildlife preservation and environmental protection to Republican presidents, but the current party has treated the biosphere as a virtual antagonist.

The party's traditional support for business turned into an exuberance for unchecked greed and a concomitant indifference to the lagging incomes and waning livelihoods of laboring and middle-class households.

Not least, the "Southern strategy" that Richard Nixon had devised to take partisan advantage of the white backlash to racial justice has in this long run produced what amounts to a white-people's party, utterly dependent in national elections on the votes and thus the ethos of the states of the old Confederacy.

The party lost this year not only with black but also with Asian and Hispanic voters - in a country where whites will be only a plurality within a generation. It lost, too, among under-30 voters. The Republican Party is on the short end of every growing demographic.

And its adherence to social conservatism's agenda - criminalizing abortion, sexual abstinence until marriage, holding off equal rights for gays - further estranges the GOP from changed attitudes. This year, Catholics, no less, voted by 54 percent for the presidential candidate who supports lawful abortion.

The deepening Republican enthrallment to a fiercely ideological conservatism produced a few flash successes but promises little for the future. Shouldn't the party be trying to find its way, in contemporary terms, back to the instinctive conservatism and prudence and pragmatism that had kept it in the game since Abraham Lincoln?

Not every issue or matter parses left or right.

The Republican slippage this year was serious but not necessarily devastating. The party certainly needn't abandon its general conservatism but, hey, to play real-world politics you do have to keep a grip on the zeitgeist.

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers.

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