Orthodoxy

I'm not sure I agree with David Brooks' implication that anti-immigrant appeals will be bad short-term politics for the GOP, but his larger point here seems quite correct:

At the moment, Giuliani and fellow moderate Mitt Romney are attacking each other for being insufficiently Tancredo-esque. They are not renouncing the policies they championed as city and state officials, but the emphasis as they run for federal office is all in the other direction. In effect, they are competing to drive away Hispanic votes and make the party unelectable in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Florida and the nation at large.

In this way, they are participating in the greatest blown opportunity in recent political history. At its current nadir, the G.O.P. had been blessed with five heterodox presidential candidates who had the potential to modernize the party on a variety of fronts. They could be competing to do that, but instead they are competing to appeal to the narrowest slice of the old guard and flatter the most rigid orthodoxies of the Beltway interest groups.

It's genuinely strange. You could imagine a Republican primary being dominated by orthodoxies because all the candidates had fairly orthodox records, or because a party riding a favorable political wind saw little need to rethink anything. The Democratic field seems to be experiencing a combination of the two. But the Republicans are in the reverse situation. Their party's generic brand is in terrible shape, they're losing in the early polls and in the fundraising battle, and they have tons of candidates at hand with semi-heterodox records. But they're all compete to adhere ever-more-rigidly to the hard-right line on immigration and on taxes and on the war.

Comments

It is probably because the candidates have such heterodox records that they can't buck the line on immigration. They simply don't have the credibility with the base to do it.

Similarly, it is because all of their other policies have largely been discredited, even within their own party, that anti-immigration rhetoric is the one thing style guaranteed to unite Republicans.

Posted by AJ | November 23, 2007 2:18 PM

Why is this surprising?
The Republican party has been incredibly successful on the national level for a very long time now. One defeat isn't enough to drive its base to the middle.

And while reaching out to moderates wins elections, holding on to your base is necessary to even be in the game. Right now the Republican base isn't willing to let go of its hatred of immigrants and love of Iraq. As such, the candidates' hands are tied.

Posted by WillieStyle | November 23, 2007 2:18 PM

But they're all compete to adhere ever-more-rigidly to the hard-right line on immigration and on taxes and on the war.

Didn't we see how well heterodoxy on immigration worked for McCain and Bush recently? Huckabee's not really having great success with his economic heterodoxy, either. I don't think it's likely the Republican base will tolerate much heterdoxy on any of their key issues until they go through several cycles of defeat. Look at how long it took JFK/LBJ liberalism to re-emerge as Clinton/Gore Third-Way-ism.

Posted by right | November 23, 2007 2:22 PM

I'm surprised Matt lets Brooks get away with the lazy polemical line that Giuliani's neo-restrictionism "flatters the most rigid orthodoxies of the inside the Beltway interest groups." Whether you agree with the lower immigration people or not, it's pretty obvious that they constitute the most populist, outside the beltway political movement around, abhored by the elites of both parties, while pretty popular among the grass roots (of Democrats as much as Republicans, as Democratic constituencies are the most hurt by the immigrant wage competition for working class jobs). But I suspect Matt is correct, the elites will prevail as always, and we'll have millions of more people willing to work here for minimal wages.

Posted by Scott McC | November 23, 2007 2:32 PM

Their party's generic brand is in terrible shape, they're losing in the early polls and in the fundraising battle, and they have tons of candidates at hand with semi-heterodox records. But they're all compete to adhere ever-more-rigidly to the hard-right line on immigration and on taxes and on the war.

It seems likely to me that they simply are confident that hard-line stances will work, or at least will not be much of a problem. I can't say how overconfident they're being.

It's still early for the fundraising to catch up, and some candidates need the money less than others — Giuliani, Thompson and McCain already have great name recognition, and Mitt Romney can self-finance. Some of them aren't as heterodox as they look: Giuliani, for example, is and as far as I know always has been plenty authoritarian and belligerent, and that trumps everything for some wingnuts. Two of the semi-heterodox candidates, Giuliani and Romney, have home field advantages in otherwise reliably left-wing states. Early primaries mean that candidates will have a lot of time to run to the center. And maybe the most important factor, the media is full of people like Chris Matthews, David Brooks and David Broder.

I agree with you that the odds overall are against the Republicans, but they probably are assigning more weight to the above reasons than we are.

Posted by Cyrus | November 23, 2007 2:39 PM

In my view this Republican failure represents a great opportunity for Democrats. We don't really have a problem with immigrants, or even with Mexicans. We have a problem with Mexico. Placing a high priority on addressing things like the effect of dumping subsidized agribusiness corn on poor Mexican farmers; the ongoing exploitation of Mexican refugees by business interests in the US; and the pernicious effects of corruption in Mexico, particularly as related to the appalling War on Drugs, could substantially reduce both the push and the pull that drives illegal immigration.

The party that's willing to acknowledge the real-world problems for working class Americans of the importation of an illiterate underclass, and address it with humane but effective institutional solutions, will gain an enormous electoral advantage for years to come. Nation-building is at least as important in Mexico as it is in Iraq.

Posted by Robert Powell | November 23, 2007 2:51 PM

The GOP is stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, the tight fifty/fifty death match they're engaged in with the Democrats obviously underscores the need to broaden the base. Bush understood this, as did Rove (the latter's 51%ism isn't going to get the job done much longer, after all). On the other hand, the very tightness of the national political divide means locking up your base -- and for the GOP this largely means white Protestants more often than not in the south -- is more critical than ever before. Every vote is sacred, as it were.

The Democrats face a similar dilemma with one obvious but huge difference: their base is growing as a percentage of the electorate. They don't have to widen their appeal to increase the take of the vote. Anything's possible, but it's hard to see how, in another five years, we will not have moved from 50/50 to something more along the lines of 60/40 in favor of the Democrats.

Posted by Jasper | November 23, 2007 2:53 PM

The Republicans cannot lose the Hispanic because you cannot lose something that you never had. There is no amount of pandering that will ever get a majority of Hispanics to vote Republican. For ever pander that President Bush did to try to get more Hispanic votes he lost many more white voters and drove down contributions.

The changing demographics of the U.S. will eventually render the Republican Party irrelevant to politics in the U.S. The real question is what will politics in the U.S. be like with only one political party.

Posted by superdestroyer | November 23, 2007 2:55 PM

As the estimable Stirling Newberry has written, the main trick in politics is to form a successful alliance of the sane against the insane.

Right now, in American politics, that main trick has been made far more desperate a business than usual, by the degeneration of the Republican coalition under the weight of their authoritarians, and the senility displayed by the corrupt pundit class in the face of this increasingly desperate business.

As with the War in Iraq, the general view of the American People on the Presidential candidates must be formed with no substantive help from the pundits. No mainstream t.v. pundit has said the obvious: that Republican chances in 2008 are between slim and none, because of the stupendous failure of Bush, and that the Republicans seeking the nomination of their Party are all political risk-takers, taking an outside chance -- everyone hoping, against practical wisdom, for a Hail Mary pass in the last 4 minutes of the game.

And, no mainsteam t.v. pundit will say, outright, that the Republicans all appear crazy or untrustworthy or both.

Luckily, it is a long campaign, and the American People will have plenty of time to figure it out. And, the election in 2008 will still be amazingly close, if only because the Republicans have been successful in continuing voter suppression efforts.

Posted by Bruce Wilder | November 23, 2007 3:13 PM

Re: It is probably because the candidates have such heterodox records that they can't buck the line on immigration.

Excuse me, but what "line" on immigration? There is no official Republican position there (apart from a lot of generic platitudes not too dissimilar from those the Democrats swear by). The GOP establishment in particular has been immigrant-friendly, and even winked at illgeal immigration, as a favor to the business wing of the party. On immigration, Tancredo is not the GOP norm-- Bush is.

Posted by Jonf | November 23, 2007 3:23 PM

The Republicans cannot lose the Hispanic because you cannot lose something that you never had. There is no amount of pandering that will ever get a majority of Hispanics to vote Republican.

Maybe so, but the GOP doesn't necessarily need a majority of the Hispanic vote. Having 42%, however, is a lot better for them than the 13% they're going to get in 2008.

Posted by Jasper | November 23, 2007 3:31 PM

Jasper,

That 40% number that President Bush supposedly received was discredited long ago. The real number for the 2004 presidential election is 35%.

Also, the real number to look at is over 90% of elected Hispanics are Democrats. If it were not for Cubans in Florida, there are probably almost no elected Hispanic Republicans.

Posted by superdestroyer | November 23, 2007 3:42 PM

Brooks is either displaying a talent for missing the obvious or is simply being disingenuous: The Bush/Rove experience tells candidates such as Giuliani and Romney that, with the assistance of corporate media, the American electorate will have a difficult time recalling what positions they adopted to win the nomination -- throwing red meat to the right-wing base now is what is required to gain that victory -- and what the electorate will hear when the general election arrives will be different; there is little risk of losing the right-wing base in the process because febrile libertarian fantasies will not alter their innate impulse to obey.

The Democratic candidates may trust the electorate more and/or corporate media less but so far at least it seems probable the stories they are telling now will be readily recognizable during the general.

Posted by RW | November 23, 2007 3:44 PM

they have tons of candidates at hand with semi-heterodox records. But they're all compete to adhere ever-more-rigidly to the hard-right line on immigration and on taxes and on the war.

I think the reason for this is precisely because there are so many semi-heterodox candidates.

If Mitt Romney, say, had decided to run for president faced with a different set of opponents, he might well have run as a "socially moderate, fiscally conservative" candidate, arguing that only that type of candidate could win a difficult general election. But when he surveyed the field, he saw that there was no credible "true conservative" in it, and saw an opening to position himself as such.

The same thing holds true for the other candidates: McCain, Rudy, and Fred Thompson and even perhaps Huckabee all might have decided to run as moderate-but-electable candidates if faced with a different field of opponents, but each one of them saw an opportunity to get to the right of everybody else, along with a lack of a real opportunity to run as a moderate without ending up pretty far to the "left" relative to GOP voters.

Posted by Jason C. | November 23, 2007 3:56 PM

the narrowest slice of the old guard

Brooks isn't entirely correct. It isn't so narrow a slice. George Will said recently that 38% of Republican voters were in the South. Romney and Giuliani, particularly, need to make inroads with those voters. And their rhetoric doesn't seem to be hurting them much: they're the front-runners.

I would be surprised if Brooks is confused about any of this.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | November 23, 2007 4:07 PM

MattY once again reveals his ignorance. There are no "anti-immigrant appeals" from the GOP candidates, and supporting our laws - rather than trying to subvert them as the Democratic Party does - is not the "hard-right line on immigration". Since MattY seems "confused" about our laws, let me suggest a side business should this punditry thing not work out.

Posted by TLB | November 23, 2007 4:52 PM

Re: There are no "anti-immigrant appeals" from the GOP candidates, and supporting our laws - rather than trying to subvert them as the Democratic Party does - is not the "hard-right line on immigration".

You obviously are paying zero attention to how the GOP actually governs on this issue. Bush has been president for almost seven years, and the illegals problem has gotten much worse on his watch. The Clinton admninistration actually made some (admittedly ineffective) attempts at enforcement. The Bush adminstration might as well have posted a neon sign blinking "Bienvenidos a Todos!" on the Rio Grande.

Posted by JonF | November 23, 2007 5:33 PM

JonF: Thanks for your input. But, if you clicked my name's link you'd find literally thousands of posts about this topic and you'd find out that I'm quite well aware of who's doing what.

Posted by TLB | November 23, 2007 6:45 PM

The GOP doesn't have much of a choice, since their hardcore base is a bunch of xenophobic lunatics that thinks Jeezus would have said "nucular." The eventual nominee will most likely moderate his tone for the general election, but you can't win the GOP nod unless you pander openly to bigots.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | November 23, 2007 11:30 PM

I remember when Clifford Case was a highly respected, politically moderate, Senator from New Jersey. His Senate career ended when the he was defeated in the primary election by Jeffry Bell, a right winger. Most of the voters in the Republican primary must have understood that Bell didn't stand a chance of winning the general election, but slightly more than half of them voted for Bell anyway.

The political right has fought very hard to take control of the Republican party, and they won't let go easily. Better to own a losing political party than to not have a political party at all.

Posted by Kenneth Almquist | November 24, 2007 3:31 AM

Any candidate who departs from the Republican party line will get hit with a shitstorm of abuse. See Ron Paul and his views on Iraq.

Posted by Jose Padilla | November 24, 2007 9:06 AM

Look at how long it took JFK/LBJ liberalism to re-emerge as Clinton/Gore Third-Way-ism.

The only problem with that analysis is that JFK wasn't a liberal. Indeed, he wasn't even as liberal as either the Republican President who preceded him or the Republican candidate that ran against him.

The Democrats moving to the right isn't some new phenomenon. The only reason it seems that way is because the right has succeeded in labeling every Democrat as a far-left liberal.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 24, 2007 3:17 PM

Uh, guys, George W. Bush was the most pro-illegal immigration President in decades. And look at his approval ratings.

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 24, 2007 5:02 PM

Each of these candidates believes that the electorate is significantly more conservative than they are.

Posted by mickslam | November 24, 2007 5:10 PM

Their party's generic brand is in terrible shape, they're losing in the early polls and in the fundraising battle, and they have tons of candidates at hand with semi-heterodox records. But they're all compete to adhere ever-more-rigidly to the hard-right line on immigration and on taxes and on the war.

Try replacing the "but" with a "because" up there. It will start to make more sense.

As for the reasons why, they're engaging in a classic self-destructive competition thing where what's rational at an individual level (nail the crazy wingnut base, by now the vast majority of republican primary voters) is destroying them as a group (wingnut policies scare sane people.) The more they scare away the sane people, the wingnuttier they will have to become...

(That said, I'd still bet on a Republican president in 2008. Giuliani. How do I go about betting on this anyway? Do I have to just walk into a bookie and ask them what odds they'll give me? I don't normally gamble.)

Posted by kali | November 24, 2007 6:13 PM

Illegal immigration is the only issue that a Republican candidate has a prayer of pulling away a significant number of Democratic voters with. There are quite a few Democrats who realize that they're earning less now because of illegal immigration, are vulnerable to higher crime rates, worse schools, etc these days, and they're just about the only ones who could conceivably get over their revulsion to the party of Bush.

Posted by Sideways | November 24, 2007 7:23 PM