The GOP: Is it headed back to the future?

Having previewed on Friday the first meeting of Eric Cantor's National Council for a New America on Saturday -- held, for that common touch, at a suburban pizzeria -- I felt it incumbent to follow up with a brief, secondhand report, just in case you were either too mentally well to attend (thank you, "Animal House") or to care enough to hunt down this dubious "news" yourself.

First of all, the NCNA -- "a concerted, policy-based forum," according to its Web site, "to listen to, partner with, and empower the American people" -- publicly commenced as a victim of its own sorry Republican-policy past. Saturday's get-together, you see, had on hand only three, middle-aged white guys to "empower the American people," because the one woman invited to join them, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wa.), "couldn’t make it because her child got sick" -- and was thus disempowered by an evident lack of alternative childcare. Oh, the irony of it all.

So the pizzeria "listening tour" endured at the hands of two male multimillionaires and a Newt Gingrich wannabe: Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and, of course, Mr. Cantor. One must wonder, however, how much actual listening was intended:

"From the conservatives," said Bush, "it’s time for us to listen first, to learn a little bit, to upgrade our message a little bit and to not be nostalgic about the past." Yet as the Politico reported, "Questions from the Republican-friendly crowd [contained] conservative softballs"; while the Washington Post related that the featured threesome "sat on stools and lobbed criticism at 'Washington' and 'liberals.' "

Now I ask you, if you had genuinely wanted to listen and learn rather than engage an orgy of antiquated liberal-bashing, would you not have restricted your audience to no more than 21-percent Republican and begged for a critical dose of political reality-checks?

Furthermore, would you have sat there on your little stool and "touted conservative ideas ... while bemoaning initiatives that involved more government intervention"? Well, they did, according to the Post, and that's just peachy for a classic schmooze-in. But why in God's name would they go out of their p.r. way to call it a listening tour? To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, Just what fresh hell was that all about?

Mr. Cantor only amplified the contradictions when he added this bewildering insight: "It's important for us to reengage with the people of this country ... [because] the prescriptions coming out of Washington are not really reflective of the mainstream." Hence in the view of the NCNA boys, elections are meaningless -- although they really need to win the next round, because those elections wouldn't be?

Romney, doing his part, re-reechoed the GOP's old and familiar siren song: "When the capital disappears, the current view of the administration is that we ought to raise taxes on capital, we ought to raise taxes on investment. The right thing to do is to lower taxes or at least hold them down.... That’s one thing we do a little different."

Notwithstanding that President Obama just lowered taxes on the pathetically stagnating capital (courtesy the GOP) of the vast majority of Americans, Romney's observation utterly ignored the democratically unsustainable chasm between rich and poor, as well as their equally imbalanced tax burdens relative to disposable income.

There was, however, one interesting element -- or rather, the lack of one -- at the NCNA's first public forum. "The party leaders," wrote the Politico, "notably avoided any discussion of issues that have motivated the GOP base -- gay marriage, immigration, and abortion." What's more, "when asked if he would be open to supporting pro-choice candidates or those supporting gun control," Cantor responded, "We are, and should be, an inclusive party."

That's big -- and if sincere, then authentically newsworthy, for that's the first semiofficial chink I've seen in the GOP's socially conservative armor.