Republican change to what?

Republican change to what?



Jules Witcover
Syndicated Columnist
Publication Date: 05/12/09

At a meeting of Republican leaders last week, former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida counseled his party that "it's time or us to listen first, upgrade our message a bit, not be nostalgic about the old days."

But the questions are: listen to whom, how to upgrade what, and what old days about which not to be nostalgic?

After last year's political calamity for Republicans, in which the party lost the White House and more seats in the House and Senate, who's left to give useful advice about the message?

It certainly will be easy for the GOP faithful to discard any nostalgia about the eight years under George W. Bush. That fact is particularly unfortunate for Jeb Bush, whose governorship of Florida would ordinarily recommend him for higher office except for the albatross his brother has become.

Doing without nostalgia for the supposedly good old days of Ronald Reagan will be harder. The man both in life and in death achieved icon stature in the party, and his mantras of smaller government and lower taxes remain core elements in Republican gospel -- no matter that under Reagan both the size of the federal government and taxes grew over his eight-year tenure.

The meeting was called by a party up-and-comer, Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House Republican Whip behind Minority Leader John Boehner, who despite disclaimers seems already qualified as leader of the Party of No, along with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

But Cantor is not yet a national figure and the House of Representatives seldom is the breeding ground for one. The last Republican to blossom into national prominence and power was Newt Gingrich, who rose to the House speakership on the strength of that ambitious basket of promises called the Contract With America.

Gingrich got much of it through the House but no farther, and he himself crashed under the weight of his own hubris and ethical stumbles that led to his resignation. Now he is busily rehabilitating himself as an outside-the-box thinker who may favor the GOP with a presidential candidacy if circumstances force that personal sacrifice.

There's a certain poignancy at this time in the passing, at age 73, of another Republican alumnus of the House, Jack Kemp of New York. Kemp offered the kind of vitality and intellectual stimulus that his party badly needs, though without Kemp's mistaken embrace and marketing of the supply-side economics that he championed in the Reagan years. Its notion that all problems at home could be solved simply by cutting taxes and producing an imaginary bounty of prosperity for all proved to be the bane of the party long afterward.

Kemp liked to cite John F. Kennedy's line that a rising tide lifts all boats, but the end problem with attempting to do it with tax cuts is that it mostly lifted the yachts and sunk the rowboats. This clearly was not the enthusiastic upstate New Yorker's intent, because he simultaneously and intensely addressed the plight of the poor, and especially of African-Americans anchored in poverty.

He championed the notion of the Republican big tent that would reach out and welcome in blacks and other minorities, an idea that seemed to be embraced in Texas by George W. Bush, but got left behind when the celebrated compassionate conservative moved into the White House.

That open-door effort crumbled under the appeal and policies of Bill Clinton, which kept most minorities in the Democratic fold, and has been cemented with Barack Obama in the Oval Office.

So where is the Republican to lead this new group called the National Council for a New America to which Jeb Bush delivered his advice to listen before proposing, to upgrade the party message, and turn a deaf ear to nostalgia about the old days?

The party is in such a state that Sarah Palin is seriously mentioned by some, and the boyishly unimpressive Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana is the closest thing the GOP seems to have to the currently magical Obama. Right now, the quest is akin to sifting through a pile of manure with the hope there's a Derby winner in there somewhere.

Click here to return to story:
http://staugustine.com/stories/051209/opinions_051209_022.shtml

© The St. Augustine Record