Progress?
By Mitch Berg
I grabbed this John Hawkins piece last winter. It’s been sitting in my drafts folder – just a link and a long quote – ever since.
Oddly, it still pretty much applies:
The conservative movement and the vehicle that we use to implement our ideas, the Republican Party, have a number of problems right now that need to be addressed. For example:
Taking Care Of The Base: The first rule of politics is to make sure that your base is reasonably happy and if they’re not, find a way to change that. Unfortunately, too many Republican politicians have forgotten that most basic of rules and they’ve allowed their biggest supporters to become dispirited and angry with them. Even the beatings that the GOP took in the 2006 election only partially shook George Bush and the Republicans in the Senate out of their stupor (To the House’s credit, it seems to have gotten the message). This anger/malaise is reflected in the lack of conservative activism right now, the querulousness of many conservatives, and the fundraising gap that has sprung up between Democrats and Republicans.
While it’d seem the fundraising gap is closing, I think we’re seeing more of what worried me during and after the ’06 campaign. The GOP relies on volunteers (unlike the Democrats, who tend to pay not only their Get Out The Vote workers but much of trhe rest of their “grass roots”). And those volunteers turned out and gave it their all in for Grams in ’94, Coleman in ’98, Bush in ’00, Pawlenty and Coleman again in ’02, the Presidential race in ’04…
…and were rewarded with an administration that didn’t deliver on many of the values for which these people had volunteered so much of their time.
I started sensing exhaustion among a lot of key volunteers – the kinds of people GOP campaigns need, the kind that keep coming back for more – in ’08. I started asking GOP officials – what about the state of our volunteers?
I don’t think they’re back yet.
Yes, maybe some conservatives do have unreasonable expectations of Republicans in Congress, but that’s a reason for Republican pols to try even harder to make it clear to conservatives that their hearts are in the right place. The GOP absolutely cannot get back on track until conservatives feel that they are being well represented in DC and the Republican Party needs to make that happen.
That goes for Saint Paul as well.
Where’s Our Soros? The conservative movement has had plenty of rich, civic minded members who haven’t had a problem with greasing the wheels of democracy with a bit of lucre in the past, but the Left seems to be blowing our doors off in this area of late.
You can hardly turn around without finding some project funded by George Soros that’s making a political impact, but when we look for conservatives to do the same thing, we hear crickets chirping. There aren’t many conservatives who have enough money to make a big difference, but there are a few, and we need their help, now. If Soros and his limousine liberal pals are willing to spend the money while deep pocketed conservatives stand by and watch, the conservative movement — and this country — are going to suffer the consequences.
It’s tempting to respond “yeah, but what does Soros get for his money? Steve Perry and Molly Priesmeyer? Atrios? Ollie Willis? SFW?” At least on the alt media side of things, the conservatives have always done it for the love of the game (except for talk radio, which does it because they make a ton of money. Except the NARN; we’re also about that love of the game thing).
And yet when you work a day job – like the vast majority of conservative bloggers do – it’s hard sometimes to counter the immense flood of BS the Sorosphere generates. Soros’ money has turned the information war into a war of attrition.
Practicality vs. Purity: Yes, we want politicians to live up to our expectations and when they don’t, they can expect consequences. On the other hand, if we refuse to vote for a Republican politician every time he does something we don’t like, we’re going to be responsible for putting Democrats in office who don’t agree with us on anything. That’s the dilemma conservatives always have to deal with: practicality vs. purity.
Unfortunately, the conservative movement has tilted too far towards expecting purity from Republicans in Congress — so much so in fact, that we’ve got conservatives threatening to form third parties if certain candidates are elected — even as different factions of the conservative movement beat up on each other on an almost daily basis
When conservatives start acting like Libertarians or Greens – taking their toys and leaving to go someplace more ideologically pure – it’s a bad thing. And the next time I hear a conservative venting about how much they “hate” Norm Coleman or Tim Pawlenty for being not ideologically-pure enough, they’re going to get my lecture about the tug of war. The whole thing. I’m serious.
.Technophobia: Liberals have made much better use of the internet as a messaging and fundraising tool than conservatives.
That astounds me. Given the percentage of technical people who identify as Republicans, it should be much closer. Money, of course, counts for a lot here.
Ronald Reagan Isn’t Coming Back: Unfortunately for conservatives and for America, Presidents like Ronald Reagan only come along every 50 to 100 years. So, comparing every Republican politician who comes down the pike to Reagan — or worse yet, the idealized version of Reagan who has had all the times he deviated from conservative orthodoxy airbrushed out of existence — is only going to produce disappointment
Every time I hear some of the “I hate McCain/Coleman/Pawlenty” crowd, I’m tempted to haul out my copy of George Will’s The Morning After – his collection of columns from the mid-eighties, most of which involved some degree of sniffing about how conservative Reagan wasn’t.
This next one is my peeviest pet peeve of all:
We Don’t Reach Out To New Constituencies: Conservatives have started to get into the bad habit of allowing ourselves to be perceived as hostile to potential blocks of new voters, for no good reason.
This has been my complaint about the Fourth District for years; how can a party in a district that is almost entirely urban (Saint Paul and its environs) expect to get anywhere by ignoring the city? The Fourth District GOP should be out in front of the people in this district who are repulsed by the horrible state of education, the decay of society and respect for hard work, and the erosion of free enterprise; all of these, and crime, are issues that, party labels aside, are vital to the “urban” voter of whatever party.
Not Defending Our Own: Unlike the Left, which considers the only sins its members can engage in to be not being liberal enough or helping conservatives somehow, the Right doesn’t mind cracking down on our own when they deserve it…There has to be a happy medium between the Left’s Pavlovian defense of each other under almost any circumstances and the Right’s current willingness to too quickly agree with the Left’s lies about people on our side.
Tom Delay, anyone?
Abandoning Our Principles In Office: One of the weirder tics of American politics is that liberals typically pretend to be much more conservative than they are to get elected while conservatives run on their principles, then break their promises once they get in office because they believe, falsely oftentimes, that it will be to their political benefit.
That is, indeed, the price of having principles; having to uphold them.
