Republican Woes and the End of Ideology

Stuart Rothenberg of, appropriately enough, the Rothenberg Political Report, wrote the day after the election that "for members of the Grand Old Party, this is a day to celebrate. Your long national nightmare, otherwise known as the Bush administration, is over."

Yet compared to the vastly altered reality they woke up to, Bush's two-term tenure may seem like a flash in the pan and the very least of their chronological problems. Indeed, it might have been but the dozing before their deep sleep, and the real nightmare, electorally speaking, still awaits them.

The reason for that is at least twofold, and possibly three, the last of which I'll get to momentarily. But for starters, as Rothenberg only briefly noted, there are many who justifiably will "consign [the GOP] to minority party status for years because of demographic changes."

And those changes are whoppers. Writing the same day as Rothenberg, the Politico's Jonathan Martin painted the GOP's Dorian Gray portrait: The party, he observed, is "increasingly becoming less grand than old -- and outdated. As reflected in Tuesday’s results and exit polls, it’s a party that is overwhelmingly white, rural and aged in a country that is rapidly becoming racially mixed, suburban and dominated by a post-Baby Boomer generation."

Incredibly, the coalition that Karl Rove once confidently envisioned as a generational platform for a permanent majority was good for only about two seconds. His thinking was static, based on a snapshot frozen in time and utterly oblivious to internal ruptures.

But those ruptures came and they're still coming and they'll continue to come. And just as incredibly, only now are some in the GOP calculating the fallout. Said the fraternal white sheep, Jeb Bush: "I would suggest that conservatives need to do the math of the new demographics of the United States. We can’t be anti-Hispanic, anti-young person, anti-many things and be surprised when we don’t win elections." (Well, Mr. Rove can be.)

But just as problematic as the "new demographics" are for the GOP is their diaspora -- basic geography, fundamental electoral map stuff in which the new Americans are no longer the huddled masses in the urban Northeast or along the West Coast.

Just take a look sometime at a U.S.-county layout of where the GOP vote actually upticked on Election Day. It strings narrowly along the Appalachians, then sweeps down and leftward into the South, forking to Oklahoma and the Gulf. And that's it; the vote stagnated or shrank everywhere else, while confronting an explosion of deep blue.

Again, some of the less faith-based are beginning to grapple with this geographic reckoning. Said, for instance, Gov. Tim Pawlenty at yesterday's Republican Governors' group therapy session: "We cannot be a majority governing party when we essentially cannot compete in the Northeast, we are losing our ability to compete in Great Lakes States, we cannot compete on the West Coast, we are increasingly in danger of competing in the Mid-Atlantic States, and the Democrats are now winning some of the Western States."

Damn, Tim, don't sugarcoat it for them.

But hey, I suppose if Pawlenty had really wanted his auditors to aggressively hit the bourbon and Prozac, he could have invited political scientist Thomas Schaller to speak at the executive hoedown. Because this University of Maryland preeminence recently told the New York Times that in his opinion Republicans "have completely marginalized themselves to a mostly regional party" -- a Southern party, and little more.

The third reason, earlier promised, for long-term Republican woes still lies waiting, however, in the answer to Newt Gingrich's question put yesterday to the Politico's Roger Simon: "Does Barack Obama want to govern from the center, which his Grant Park speech implied, or govern from the left?"

And here's my shot at that: He can do both.

It's a bit gimmicky, but what marketing isn't? Which is to say, if Obama, arm in arm with his Congressional compatriots, insists vocally on hewing to a pragmatic course -- which, I would argue, is virtually indistinguishable from a progressive one -- he'll be Gingrich & Friends' worst nightmare, even worse than the hangover of George W. Bush.

The key, however, will lie in Obama's retention of his pragmatic image -- as the nuts-and-bolts architect of effective government, not big or just activist government for activism's sake.

But above all, heave the ideological labels overboard. They're toxic. And Capitol Hill progressives should join Obama in exploiting the political lure of "American pragmatism." The verbal use of "liberal" or "progressive" too easily bleeds over into a purely partisan characterization of good policies -- and for quite a few years to come, Americans just don't want to hear it. What they want, simply, is whatever works.

I realize I've beat this linguistic horse repeatedly, and the poor old nag of my nagging is by now near death.

But I'm not the only one. And that brings us back to Stuart Rothenberg, who concluded his post-election piece with this, as I will mine: "So now we will find out what kind of president Obama will be. Will he be an idealist or a realist, an ideologue or a pragmatist?… His answers to those questions will likely determine how successful his presidency will be" -- likewise the GOP.