Ronald Reagan’s biggest mistake was not picking Jack Kemp for vice president in 1980 instead of choosing the patrician from Texas via Connecticut who will not be named.
by Rich Lowry
The harsh assessment of the RNC “autopsy” committee would be that it talked to 2,600 people, yet one of its top proposals is reviving a minority inclusion council from the 1990s. It takes months of research to come up with this stuff?
But that would be too harsh. The autopsy is a good faith effort to stare the Republican predicament straight in the face and begin to come up with solutions.
It’s just that there are inherent limits to any such exercise. The party is not going to be saved by committee. The autopsy inevitably reflects the lowest common denominator of establishment Republican thinking on policy, recommending comprehensive immigration reform and hinting at surrender on gay marriage.
It is more interesting and useful when suggesting process changes that are the RNC’s core competency, especially fewer primary debates.
There were more than 20 of them last time. Can’t every Republican agree that two debates moderated by Diane Sawyer are two debates too many? By all means, the party should have enough debates so dark horses can emerge and the flashes-in-the-pan can be exposed. Any candidate who needs more than 20 of them, though, has a problem. It wasn’t, for instance, that Newt Gingrich relied on the debates to catch fire. His entire campaign was the debates.
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One facet of that ongoing debate is the fight between the grass roots and establishment over Senate primaries, which has been raging for months and got more fuel when speakers at CPAC savaged the Republican consultant class. Rarely has so much heat been generated with so little light.
Some of the same grass-roots conservative leaders banging on the consultants believed, or (in some cases, I suspect) pretended to believe, that Christine O’Donnell would sweep to victory in the Delaware Senate race in 2010. Every time they are about to congratulate themselves on their electoral acuity, they should have to listen to three hours of Chris Coons floor speeches on their iPods.
On the other hand, the establishment was eager to deliver a Florida Senate seat to Charlie Crist, who is as real as a spray-on tan and as appealing as a cheesy billboard for legal services (which he appeared on after Marco Rubio unceremoniously dispatched him back to legal practice).
The important question isn’t so much establishment or grass roots as who and where? Mike Lee isn’t Christine O’Donnell and Utah isn’t Delaware, and that makes all the difference.
Consider Ted Cruz, whose smarts and fearlessness are quickly making him the most dangerous man in the U.S. Senate. He proves that you can be anti-establishment — he ran a grass-roots insurgency in the Republican primary against the well-funded Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst — and yet talented and electable.
So much depends on political horseflesh. Mitt Romney may have been wounded by the 20-odd debates, but he agreed to so many of them in the first place because he was a weak front-runner fearful of doing anything to cross primary voters. If Romney had been granted the Republican nomination with no competition whatsoever, he still would have been a politically inartful former management consultant vulnerable to populist attack.
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Kemp did his most important work as a backbencher in the House. Where is his equivalent today? It’s too bad John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy don’t tell some promising member to spend the next three months coming up with 10 ideas for promoting work in America, or for a new welfare reform agenda, or for replacing Obamacare, or for making college affordable. Instead, it’s all federal debt, all the time.
Two possible Republican contenders in 2016 have demonstrated some of this entrepreneurial spirit. No committee ever would have come up with the idea for Rand Paul’s filibuster. It showed gumption and creativity and caught people’s imagination. [……..]
For his part, Rubio has begun to talk about college affordability, an issue that should be part of a new conservative agenda aimed at concrete middle-class concerns. All the action, though, is around Rubio’s other cause of comprehensive immigration reform.
The Republican Party can study itself to death and hire the world’s best marketers, but without some Jack Kemps it will only be dressing up stasis.
Read the rest – Where is today’s Jack Kemp?
Tags: Rich Lowry
