This is because the party of Lincoln and Reagan has been overrun by a cabal of populist Neanderthals who haven't the slightest idea how politics is supposed to work. Winning elections, particularly when you happen to be the minority party, is about expanding the electorate.
On issue after issue, in race after race, the GOP has done everything it can to contract it. That's fine if you contract the entire electorate through negative campaigning. It makes sense to disgust swing voters and independents enough that the election becomes an exercise in base turn-out. But it's important to shrink the other guy's vote more than you shrink your own.
Republicans haven't done that in years now. In their silly quest for ideological purity, they've driven votes to the Democrats. If supposed "conservatives" want to blame anyone for the Democrats holding the Senate and the White House (and the only managed to hold the House last fall because of gerrymandering,) they should start by looking in the window.
And please don't tell me about "the lessons of Reagan," okay? Those goddamned people don't know the first thing about Reagan or how he won in 1980.
Because John Anderson was a third-party challenger that took almost all of his votes out of Jimmy Carter's hide, Reagan started with a six point advantage in the general election. Give Anderson's votes to Carter and Reagan still wins, especially in the Electoral College, but you have a much closer election than '80 turned out being.
Not only was Carter unpopular with the general electorate, Ted Kennedy's primary challenge hurt him deeply with the Democratic base. The surest way to determine if an incumbent president is going to lose is if he faces a primary challenge. Of the five presidents that lost re-election in the last century, only Hoover didn't have a primary.
After Watergate, the registration advantage Democrats enjoyed over Republicans was even broader than it is today. Given that, Reagan knew that he couldn't win with Republican votes alone. So he went after union households (a trick picked up from Richard Nixon) and made strong inroads with Catholics. If you think that the fabled "Reagan Democrats" were created by Reagan antagonizing everybody in sight, you're wrong. In fact, the Gipper had the added challenge of convincing most voters that he wasn't actually crazy.
Reagan instinctively understood that there's a sweet spot between the requirements of governing and the ideological purity of your electoral base that needs to be found and held onto if you plan on being successful. Tea Partiers and other "Cult of Reagan" conservatives look at Reagan's rhetoric far more than they do his record, which goes a long way in explaining what a mess they are today.
People also forget that the Democrats gave Reagan the greatest gift of all in nominating Walter Mondale, the last of the New Deal Democrats, in 1984. Had Gary Hart won the nomination, '84 might have been very different, and I'm not convinced that Reagan would have won as easily as he did.
Republican fortunes began declining in 1988, which was an unbelievably stupid and mean-spirited campaign that did nothing to expand to GOP's electorate, despite the weakness of Michael Dukakis. While George H.W Bush remains one of my heroes and is the last actual adult to be president of the United States, he never should have made that stupid "Read my lips, no new taxes" promise to placate the Grover Norquists of the world.
The pledge was completely unnecessary. Bush had already won the nomination when he said "Read my lips." Yes, he was 17 points behind Dukakis when the New Orleans convention opened, but taxes was a play for the base, which was already on board. The general electorate never punished Reagan for his eight tax increases - including the largest in American history - so it stands to reason that Bush could have been silent on the issue. The lingering questions over Iran-Contra were a much bigger threat to Bush than marginal tax rates were.
But when Bush the Elder had no option but to renege on the pledge and sign the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, the base went crazy. Pat Buchanan softened Bush up in the primaries and Ross Perot handed the presidency to Bill Clinton in the general election. Buchanan further damaged the party with his base-driven "culture war" speech to the Houston convention and marked the beginning of the end of the GOP as a reliable presidential party.
That happened just as the Democrats were learning the beauty of triangulation. Clinton and his advisers understood that if they could run credibly on traditional Republican issues, such as crime, national security and fiscal responsibility; combined with their own traditional stronghold issues of education and Social Security, they could win forever. The Democrats began creating "Clinton Republicans" out of Reagan Democrats just as the GOP started concerning itself entirely with its own base.
George Walker Bush's campaign was an indication that Republicans were learning how to triangulate. At the end of the Clinton Administration America was relatively prosperous and peaceful, so the campaign was largely about domestic issues that traditionally favor Democrats. Knowing that, Bush and his strategist Karl Rove triangulated what Chris Matthews calls "SHE" issues (Social Security, Health care and education) into his platform to make him appeal more to a centrist electorate.
It can be argued that Bush indeed narrowly lost the popular vote, but without triangulating it is almost certain that he couldn't have won in the Electoral College. If he had run a hard-right campaign in the America of 2000, Bush might very well have been demolished as thoroughly as Barry Goldwater had been in 1964. The fact remains that Bush, alone among post-1992 Republican nominees, ran a mostly non-ideological campaign and won.
The problem arose not from Bush's campaign, but from his presidency. He massively increased discretionary and entitlement spending without cutting anything else to pay for it. Worse, he put the biggest tax cut in human history and two wars on the national credit card. And on top of everything else, he destroyed the GOP's traditional edge on both national security and fiscal responsibility, perhaps forever. And unlike Reagan, he didn't have a Democratic Congress to blame it all on.
Social conservatives and Tea Partiers engage in the most easily disprovable thinking ever when they assert that Republican "moderate" nominees lose presidential elections. The second Bush ran to the centre and won. Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney were all pushed to their right and lost by pretty stunning margins.
The silly assertion that "moderates lose" retains significant traction, both on cable news and the congenitally wrong blogosphere. Worse, those who make it ignore both the history and the politics. Was there a candidate in the Republican primaries who were going to do better than Dole, McCain and Romney did? Does anyone seriously think that Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes, Fred Thompson or Newt Gingrich could have beaten Clinton or Obama? They were the "conservative alternatives" in those elections and they were all born losers. I remain convinced that Jon Huntsman might have beaten Obama, but I harboured no illusions that he was going to be nominated.
However, you can make a very well supported case that as the Republican platform has drifted further and further toward the fantasist right since 1992, their electoral map has largely vanished. The southwest and Mountain states are all reliably blue and New Hampshire, Virginia and North Carolina have joined Ohio and Florida as swing states. Even Georgia is becoming closer than it has any business being. By 2020, Texas will become purple and it will be mathematically impossible for the GOP to win a presidential election.
The Tea Party learned all the wrong lessons from their successes in 2009 and '10, beginning with the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts. Massachusetts hadn't elected a Republican senator since Edward Brooke in the early 1970s, so it was something of a big deal and something that the Tea Party was eager to take credit for.
But they never seemed to understand that Brown campaigned without once describing himself as a Republican or considered what would be necessary for him to stay in office. For reasons that still escape me, they honestly believed that Brown could vote in lockstep with knuckleheads like Jim DiMinit and win re-election. When Senator Brown disabused them of that notion, they started muttering about challenging him in the next primary.
And they did that over and over throughout 2010. Thinking that the entire country was Mississippi or Utah, they took out credible candidates and incumbents in states like Delaware, Nevada and Colorado, essentially surrendering easy seats to the Democrats. They won the House, but lost any chance of reclaiming the Senate or the presidency in the process.
Not having learned any lessons at all from the last few years, now they're targeting New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
I'm not entirely convinced that Christie can win the presidency, but I can't pretend that he's anything but one of the very best national candidates the GOP has. His approval ratings in New Jersey are almost unprecedented for a Republican and that at least suggests that he can be competitive in states where few other Republicans can. And being competitive in improbable states is about the only realistic way left for the party to win in the Electoral College.
If the Republicans want to wage the 2016 campaign solely in Ohio, Florida, Virginia and North Carolina, they should save themselves the money and not bother nominating a candidate at all because they'll lose again. But if they have a strong candidate who puts New Jersey, Michigan and Pennsylvania in play, that consumes time and resources that the Democrats can't throw into the swing states. He has roughly the same path to 270 that I thought Mitch Daniels would have had last year.
If Republicans insist on continuing to run populist campaigns, they probably won't have anyone more credible doing it than Christie. He's not a career politician, like John McCain, or a zillionaire plutocrat, like Mitt Romney. He's plain-spoken and has a record that appeals to the Rust Belt, which the GOP absolutely has to do well in of they have any chance of surviving at all. More importantly still, he's been largely silent on issues that have alienated women and Latinos from the Republican Party.
Chris Christie has probably the best shot of winning the presidency of any Republican, so the Tea Party is trying to kill him off.
There's no shortage of Republicans who are running for the pin-up of innumerable idiot radio talk-show hosts, like Mark Levin and Laura Ingram. God knows that both McCain and Romney courted them to the exclusion of almost everyone else, and where did that get them? The GOP still doesn't seem to have figured out having Sean Hannity love you is maybe the single best indicator that you're about to get your ass kicked in a national election.
Here's the thing about Tea Party populism: it isn't as populist as they would like you to believe it is. The very same people who piss and moan about "the Republican Establishment" have been busying themselves creating their own establishment of functional retards like Sarah Palin, talk-show jackals and lobbyist swine. And don't start me on the wrongheaded bloggers that any candidate has to suck up to if they want to go anywhere.
But what exactly has that gotten them, other than the honor of losing badly to Barack Obama? How many presidents have those dopes elected?
In my opinion, Christie is uniquely positioned to not only bypass them on the way to the nomination, but run against them to victory. If he wins re-election by as big a margin as I think he will this fall, the governor can build a counter-base of sane people who like winning. We all know that Christie won't be a mealy-mouth sycophant to conservatism's worst caricatures, like McCain and Romney turned out to be. And it's been a good long time since a Republican has had a "Sister Soljah moment."
Sure, he'll lose Iowa that way, but he won't win there under almost any circumstances. However, it does give him a respectable chance at winning primaries in New Hampshire, Michigan and Florida. If he places second or third in South Carolina, it becomes almost impossible to stop him from winning the nomination.
And why is the idiot wing of the party so pissed at Christie? Well, he wouldn't leave his disaster-plagued state to enable Romney's delusion that he could win Pennsylvania. Then he said reasonably nice things about a president that he was trying to get tens of billions of dollars from. And he called out the Tea Party fanatics for changing the rules of disaster relief in a way that they didn't for the Gulf states or the Carolinas. He's also unwilling to hug the NRA real tight as it sets itself on fire.
The only way Chris Christie was ever going to win the approval of the Tea Party was by destroying himself in New Jersey. And keep in mind that the only thing the Tea Party controls outside of AM radio is the House of Representatives, which currently has a lower approval rating that genital herpes, date rape and school shootings. If nothing else, those three things at least have the potential of building character and Congress can only be realistically expected to destroy it.
I like Rand Paul a great deal more than I expected to, but his chances of winning the Republican nomination are only slightly better than mine are. When your life's ambition is to win an election in Kentucky, you have the luxury of pandering to simpleton deejays and moron bloggers. But as the last two cycles have taught us, that isn't true in national politics. At least not anymore.
There aren't very many people that I think are capable of preventing the American conservative movement from committing collective suicide, but Chris Christie is one of them. But these people are so determined to make themselves an endangered species that they'll do whatever they can to stop him.
Populist conservatism is not unlike Nancy Spungen and there isn't much anyone can do to keep them away from their Sid Vicious. And that love story is almost guaranteed to end the same way.
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