GOP to Reinvest in Southern, Evangelical Strategy?
The RNC is still looking for a new Chair, and until Donald Wildmon weighed in on behalf of the side of the whack job wing of the party, it looked like they might name fiscal conservative Michael Steele. Wildmon endorsed a South Carolinian instead, signaling a potential shift to a regional party wishing to renew its wedge issue strategies.
The big news over the next little bit is going to concern the new Chair of the GOP. You’ve got Newt Gingrich wanting to go back to his “Contract with America” roots, and you’ve got many Republicans wanting to focus on small government and fiscal responsibility over socially conservative wedge issues. Another big problem for the Republicans is that they’ve become a regional party centered in areas where wedge issues concerning gays and guns and abortion work best. Perhaps it is not coincidental that race works in those areas as well. Yeah, the Republicans have become the party of white social conservatives, and all the whackjobiness that entails.
Here’s an interesting nominee for the RNC Chair, Michael Steele, former Lt. Governor of Maryland. He’s black, and just that fact would go a long way to redefining the party, at least symbolically. Steele can also claim that he’s not part of the regional self-ghettoization of the GOP. I’m not a fan of Mr. Steele, mind you, but know of many Republicans who think he is an asset, both as a conservative and an African American, the latter fact important because of the dismal support the GOP gets from African Americans. If they are to remake themselves into a national party again, one that represents all Americans, they will need someone like Steele. Here’s Steele representing his opinion about the GOP, from Yahoo News:
“The Republican Party must present a vision for the future of America that relies on our conservative values and core principles,” he said. “It is wrong to believe the voters have suddenly become liberal. They have just lost any sense of confidence that the Republican Party holds the answers to their problems.”
Steele was state chairman of the Maryland Republican Party from 2000 to 2002. He was the state’s lieutenant governor from 2003-2007, becoming the first black candidate ever elected to a statewide position there. In November 2006, he lost a bid for the U.S. Senate.
“Most Americans today see a Republican Party that defines itself by what it is against rather than what it is for,” Steele said in announcing his candidacy Thursday in Miami, where the Republican Governors Association is meeting. “We can tell you why public schools aren’t working but not articulate a compelling vision for how we’ll better educate children. We’re well equipped to rail against tax increases but can’t begin to explain how we’ll help the poor.”
Well, it appears Steele’s candidacy, a potential move away from GOP regionalism and wedge issues, is under attack from the whack jobs of the extremist right wing. Donald Wildmon, who looks far more like Donald Duck than is healthy, and is Founder of the radical American Family Association of Tupelo, MS. He’s decided, surprise, surprise, that he wants a southerner in the role of RNC Chair, a Mr. Katon Dawson of South Carolina, and Wildmon also takes a shot at Michael Steele. From the Washington Times:
The Rev. Donald E. Wildmon, who founded the American Family Association in Tupelo, Miss., publicly endorsed South Carolina GOP Chairman Katon Dawson, a wealthy auto parts distributor, for the post of national Republican Party leader.
In a Nov. 19 e-mail to Saul Anuzis, party chairman in Michigan and also a contender for the RNC leader post, Mr. Wildmon extols the virtues of Mr. Dawson and also questions the conservative bona fides of Mr. Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland.
“Dear Saulius,” Mr. Wildmon wrote, referring to the Michigan chairman by his formal name. “If the Republican Party is to survive, it must get back to its roots. I believe that Katon Dawson, Chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, has the ability to take the party where it needs to go.”
Mr. Wildmon’s note goes on to state: “If you haven’t decided who to support, I certainly hope you will consider Katon. Should you have questions concerning Katon and his ability to lead, feel free to contact him,” going on to provide the phone number.
The e-mail is signed, “Donald E. Wildmon, Founder and Chairman American Family Association.”
This development in intraparty infighting may well tell us if the Republican Party will move to represent all Americans, or continue to ghettoize itself. As a Democrat, I’m watching with the avidity I reserved for demolition derbies in my youth. If Donald Wildmon gets his way (Armbinder thinks Dawson is “on the move“), look to a long, long time in the political wilderness for the GOP. His represents a return to the wedge issue strategy and also represents the abandonment of any attempt to attract the votes of African Americans. A GOP focused on the south will always be seen as suspect in terms of race.
Steele is a putz.
However he is correct in one respect. No, America did not become liberal over night.
It was liberal to start with. However, during the late 80’s to late 90’s, liberals were more and more disenchanted and disenfranchised with the government as it was taken over by conservative assholes like Steele. Much like myself, they started seeing the government as a big monolith that they could neither guide nor effect in any real positive manner. As a result, these people just stopped voting entirely, or only voted on issues that genuinely concerned them. Unfortunately this lead the GOP voters to surge on the coat tails of the religion whacko movements that didn’t get any traction during the 80’s because they knew they could count on them to be motivated enough to get out and vote whichever way they were told to vote. Hence the embrace of religion not just as a personal matter - like Barry Goldwater believed it to be - but as a sledgehammer to remake the United States into a place they could easily control. But the fact is that Barry Goldwater would have slapped the piss out of someone like Bush or Cheney or Steele for that matter.
The critical mistake that the GOP made was that they decided to use 9/11 as cover for the ramping up of this operation. It was their pretext. Their excuse to seize the reigns of power to actually create the ‘permanent Republican majority’ that they had been wetting their pants over for years. Had they spent the last eight years moving silently in the shadows, they might have been able to continue restricting civil liberties and so forth. But with the invention and proliferation of the internet communication that became all but impossible. It was a lot easier when people couldn’t send picture, text and even video from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world in mere seconds.
Their mistakes over the last eight years made the liberal segment of America stand up and realize that the only way out of this mess was to vote out the idiots who caused it. Combine this with Republican voters who realized that their party was systematically destroying the nation they loved and ( using Katrina as an example ) did not have their best interests at heart.
If Steele really wants to get back into power again he and the rest of these assholes would focus on actually living up to the supposed principles of the Republican party as opposed to just repeating them to fool the idiots who vote for them. Route out the corruption in your own party. Enforce the rule of law even on your own party. Don’t wield the government like your own personal vengeance machine. Practice fiscal responsibility. Remember that the government shouldn’t be intruding on your personal life.
But until they start doing all that they’re not going to gain any traction. People are fed up and that’s not going to go away easily.
Agreed, E. I don’t expect Steele or anyone on the right to follow your suggestion, and that makes me smile in some ways, though I do think this country needs at least two viable parties. To that latter end, I hope the Republicans come to their senses some time in the next thirty years or so.
It certainly doesn’t disappoint me to watch God’s Own Party permanently morph to Gomer’s Own Party.
In my lifetime it seems that the GOP has relied on two elements - fear and popularity. Nixon’s Southern Strategy of fear of the black man feed directly into the dynamic popularity of Ronald Reagan’s pronouncement that government was the problem. Wasn’t it after all the federal domination of states’ rights that allowed for the Civil Rights Act?
And now it seems that this duality has run its course and hit the wall of demographics.
Instead of nurturing a governance based on what they call their core values, they chose to promote self-aggrandizement and fraudulence under the rubric of God, guns and anti-gay.
Paybacks are a bitch.