The GOP: Frozen in time and tactics

What a week for the GOP. First the party was heaved onto a gurney and declared conspicuously brain dead by Gallup, and then one of its leading strategists wheeled it into a cryonics chamber.

Wrote Gallup, via Susan Page of USA Today: the Republican Party is "finding even the most basic questions hard to answer," having effectively been lobotomized and thus rendered speechless; and writes Republican strategist Mike Murphy, in the June 22 edition of Time: "A GOP ice age is on the way," although his substantiating findings are more current than futuristic.

"Who speaks for the GOP?" That's all Gallup asked. Pretty simple. Just pick a name, any name. Yet a majority could not. A majority, wrote Page, were "flummoxe[d]."

As for those who did dare to name names, the results were Voldemortian: in descending order of recognition, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, John McCain, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush. Oh my, a gallery of rogues, demagogues, nitwits and has-beens, or, as Page put it with a bit more dignity, "all men, all white, all conservative and all old enough to join AARP."

"It's a problem," mused former McCain-adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin in a spectacular display of radiant understatement. "We need," he continued, "the perceived leadership of the party to be those who are the future" -- which Mr. Murphy, as noted, has already declared a long and wrenching geological deep freeze, which I would designate, quite fittingly I think, the Bushtocene era.

God knows he had plenty of help -- some of it, appallingly, Democratic -- but for eight years George W. Bush swaggered and stumbled and boasted his way to a cataclysmic end, whose enduring consequences we'll all pay for in exponential time. And when the GOP's obituary is finally written, which may be sooner than we think, it'll be cross-referenced under "B": the party's death and Bush's contributions will be indistinguishable.

For now, however, the party's unperceived nonleadership is intent on whacking away at its funereal image and digging the party out. How does it smartly begin? Why of course. It takes its annual fundraising dinner, an event prominently covered by every media outlet in the cosmos, and makes of it an opportunity for one of its more detested Voldemorts to stand up and bellow that President Obama's economic recovery plan has "already failed."

Now I ask you: Is that really what most Americans want to hear in the fitful grips of the Great Recession? That all is lost? That we're doomed? The GOP tried that nearly 80 years ago, and all it earned them was four terms of FDR and about eight years of Truman -- hence it's only your tactics, Newt, that have "already failed."

A new way, a third way, any different way for the GOP is vividly indicated in Gallup: "A majority of those surveyed said the party should make changes to draw moderates." But ah, here's the rub, or so believe the post-Bush stumblers either eyeing the crucible of presidential primaries or merely congressional reelection: "Among Republicans ... nearly two-thirds said the party would be better off by holding a conservative line and advocating it more effectively -- as Limbaugh advocates."

And there it is, their death warrant. If they possessed any demographic maneuverability, that would be one thing. But they don't. The all male, all white, all conservative and all old enough to join AARP ideology isn't just dying; it's already, practically speaking, dead.

Observes Murphy: "I've made a career out of counting votes, and the numbers tell a clear story; the demographics of America are changing in a way that is deadly for the Republican Party as it exists today." Chimes former RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie, with Holtz-Eakinesque if wry understatement, "I was not a math major, but I know that getting an increasing share of a decreasing percentage of the overall vote is not a good thing."

Bingo, Ed, which your party should have collectively screamed years ago. But of course it didn't -- so what now?

Murphy's prescription appears to hunker down in two essential apostasies: "Young voters need to see a GOP that is more socially libertarian, particularly toward gay rights," plus "the overall GOP view on abortion must aggressively embrace the big tent"; and "Latinos need to see a quick end to the Republican congressional jihad on immigration."

Valid and wise points both. Where it misses the mark, however, is in its failure to comprehend and accept a far, far broader and sweeping historical undercurrent (brilliantly analyzed in such groundbreaking histories as Lizabeth Cohen's Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939) since FDR's founding of modern progressivism. And the undercurrent is this: For decades the average American has come to see government as a potentially positive force in his or her life -- which is to say, the average American wants government, in fact demands government; and as long as it's a competent government, size doesn't matter.

Until the GOP and its flummoxed followers learn to appreciate that unshakable reality, they shall, indeed, remain in the cryonics chamber.