Schwarzenegger: Time To Rebrand GOP
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, Democrats, Independents, Republicans
And I’ll give you one guess where he wants their politics to move.
“The Republican idea is a great idea, but we can’t go and get stuck with just the right wing,” Schwarzenegger said. “Let’s let the party come all the way to the center. Let those people be heard as much as the right. Let it be the big tent we’ve talked about.“Let’s invade and let’s cross over that (political) center,” he said. “The issues that they’re talking about? Let them be our issues, and let the party be known for that.”
The only issue? Many Republicans currently in Congress are ideologues and will most likely not want to move to the center.
See, I’ve been trying to figure out why they haven’t done it until it’s way past too late, and the reason is simply…they just don’t believe in bi-partisanship. These are politicians who’ve won races being strong partisans. After all, it wasn’t too long ago that the House was under the guidance of Tom DeLay, who has to be one of most blindly partisans politicians I’ve come across in years. Along with Bush, Cheney, and Rove they completely dismantled what the Republican stood for.
So while Schwarzenegger’s intentions are noble, it’s probably going to take a big loss in order to get rid of a majority of the wrong kind of Republicans so they can be replaced with the right…ummm…correct kind.
We shall see…
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May 19th, 2008 at 7:43 am
Schwarzenegger is absolutely right. The Republican Party needs to realize that Reaganism is in its twilight years if not dead already… and governing from the center is probably the best course of action. The Democrats have been moderately successfully doing this, but in my opinion, most Americans will be more willing to vote for a moderate or liberal Republican than a moderate or conservative Democrat. Guys like Thomas Dewey and
Changing demographics, socioeconomic conditions and new generations of voters all contribute to this. Those born between 1920 and 1940 are going to be voting less and less in years to come, only to be replaced by those born between 1980 and 2000. These are people who will have little or no memory of the conservative glory days marked by the Cold War, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. They only see a sadly stubborn and backwards Bush-era Republican Party which has failed to capture the imaginations of Americans in the same way that Roosevelt, Kennedy or Reagan did in the past. So unless Republican Party can reform itself, I would say that voting trends will only continue to move towards the Democrats in years to come. Republicans should take Schwarzenegger’s advice. If they don’t they will have to learn their lesson the hard way.
May 19th, 2008 at 7:46 am
*Correction to my unfinished sentence above.*
“Guys like Thomas Dewey and Wendell Wilkie may have a difficult time being elected in the 1940’s, but they’re the kind of Republicans that could really dominate today.”
May 19th, 2008 at 9:11 am
Hey, I’ve got it! How about they claim to be fiscally responsible while tripling the debt and claim to be for smaller government while growing it to record size and maybe act like they are against huge social programs while adding $800 billion to medicare? Oh wait, they already tried that, I guess they just need some new lies. I know, they could claim to be against abortion but never do anything about it when they controlled the entire government….no, wait….man, these new lies might be hard to come up with.
May 19th, 2008 at 9:29 am
…uhm, easier said than done.
Here’s the problem with that line of thinking….it implies that the GOP is made up of people who can sit back and say “this is the way we are going to go”
That’s just not the case.
In some ways, it is miraculous that McCain with his more moderate past has got this far, but over the years the hard-right has infiltrated the GOP at ever level. I know quite a few active Republican party members who have been battling these people for years, but it is a difficult battle. The far right is organized and driven. They start with precinct delegates and from there select people like themselves who represent their radical views.
The GOP welcomed these people when Reagan was in office and invited them in, but they never anticipated that the far right was going to take over. Bush’s horrific presidency has given the more moderate republicans to get a foothold, but they are a long way from taking back the party.
May 19th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Not to sure what a “correct” republican means? What do we do with all those people who do not support gay marriage or abortion, or people who don’t want government micromanaging of the economy, or hyper-progressive taxation ect… I guess they don’t need to be represented. They dont have the “correct” opinion.
Look, the Republican’s image has faulterred because Bush is an inarticulate moron, and everybody is sick of Iraq (even though the war is practically won). Democrats are ascendant because they are not associated with Bush, and Obama is attractive and has offerred “Hope” and “Change” whatever that means. Its a high school popularity contest, it has nothing to do with ideas.
Rebranding the GOP is exactly what it needs. A superficial change in “brand,” like when the deodorant stick you always buy comes in the same formula, but with a neat new dispenser thingy with a flashy decal that says “New Look!”
A charismatic personality who can talk over the media, appeal to people at an emotional level, and get back to the roots of conservatism rather than watering it down. Thats what the GOP needs and they will be fine. I don’t think a curmudgeon 72 year old with false teeth will necessarily do the job, even if he got those teeth knocked out in a POW camp.
May 19th, 2008 at 10:26 am
“Correct meaning” limited government, staying out of people’s lives, etc. A Republican more in the Goldwater/Reagan mold, not the Bush/Cheney/DeLay mold.
May 19th, 2008 at 10:28 am
Jimmy, I don’t think some shiny new chrome is going to sell this clunker. Schwarzenegger has the perspective of someone who has lived in California for years.
For the past several terms, the California Republican Party has guaranteed the election and reelection of arguably the luckiest politician in the state. That would be Senator Boxer. Time after time, we end up nominating someone who is very conservative, even for a Republican. And when tht doesn’t work, we try someone even more conservative . . . who loses by an even bigger margin. If Schwarzenegger, or any other moderate, ran against her, she’d be toast. But can a moderate make it thru a California Republican primary? On the evidence, I sure wouldn’t bet the ranch on it.
“Insanity: repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result.”
May 19th, 2008 at 10:51 am
I would have Sooooo supported Robert Taft over Wilkie in 1940 and against Dewey in ‘48. And needless to say, I would have been chanting “Yes, We Can!!” all day long in support of Taft over Eisenhower. The Republicans have a long fucked-up history of international intervention — with noteable exceptions.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:46 am
That would mean drifting more to the right, not the center, wouldn’t it? Mitt Romney campaigned that Republicans need to act like Republicans. I think that is true. Republicans keep voting for more spending, more entitlements and more regulation, not less because they are drifting leftward, not in spite of it.
May 19th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
If the conservative party is “smaller government” and the liberal party is “think about the little guy”, then where is “get elected by pretending to be conservative, and then overwhelm the system with out of control spending, wars, and the promotion of incompetent ideologues”? That would be the out-of-office party.
May 19th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Exactly, Jimmy. The problem with Republicans is that in terms of the size (cost) of the federal government, they behave like a bunch of leftist statist. Quite honestly, why not let the Democrats do that and take the blame for it?
May 19th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
The problem Jimmy, is that as it is, the current Republican Party doesn’t value those things. They believe in a huge military, and huge military spending. That runs completely counter to the true notion of small government.
Sure, it was a Reagan ideal, but the problem is that its completely outdated. It was a strategy that Reagan used to defeat communism - spend them into oblivion. the problem is, they kept right on spending well after the cold war had ended, and for no justifiable reason. Militarily speaking, despite all our spending, we don’t have a military that can adequately confront todays challenges because we keep building for World War III instead of to fight small localized conflicts that require ground forces. We’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars building machines of war that wont ever see use, or in other cases, to replace machinery that is still, thirty years later, better than anything else on the market.
Thats unnecessary, wasteful spending.
What really irks me is that Republicans complain about Democratic social spending which pales in comparison to the massive amounts of money they’re spending in the defense sector. I know I don’t need to tell you this, but for decades we’ve spent more on defense than everything else COMBINED.
Social security, heath care, infrastructure, education - we could solve all of those “issues” in a year and half if we’d cut our military spending in half. But instead we throw billions - trillions of dollars over the year at projects that routinely fail to produce a product, and frequently falls into a black pit and is never seen or heard from again.
Thats my big issue, and to pretend it doesn’t exist is bogus. When billions of dollars of taxpayer money is essentially spent to line the pockets of people who are already billionaires for no particular reason, it really gets my dander up.
Sure, the Republican right has remained true to its conservative social issues - abortion, gun control, gay marriage - but policy wise, they’re anything but conservative. They spend way more than Democrats, but they say they don’t since its on the military and not the people, thats ok, “Its needed to protect our country.” Total BS.
And speaking of social issues, why does the right wing want the government not to legislate (stay out) of the gun fight, which is a real conservative ideal, and then in abortion and gay marriage, wants to inject itself as completely as possible into public life??? Talk about a study in contradiction. They don’t want leftist telling them they can’t own guns, but they’re just fine telling leftist how they have to live their lives.
Hypocrites.
I find all of this sad, because at heart, I believe very ardently in the idea that we should tax as little as possible and spend as little as possible. Give the people their money. I don’t want government telling me how to live my life and I don’t want them intruding on my privacy (Real ID anyone???).
The problem for me is that neither party does that for me. But at least Dems come across as genuine. They don’t claim to be something they aren’t and frankly, if someone is going to be spending so much of my money, I’d rather it be for social programs to help the nations poor, than to line the pockets of billionaire defense contractors.
May 19th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Not true. The purpose of the goverment is to provide 3 basic services: a system of law and order, public infrastructure (i.e. roads & bridges), and national defense (you could add public education and safety-nets for the elderly and indigent as auxiliary services). These cannot be operated and maintained by the private sector. When the government uses taxpayer money in some sort of socialist, wealth distribution scheme, or uses its power to coerce the economy towards a particular political goal, then it has over-reached and stepped out of its bounds.
The government is supposed to spend money on the military. It has to. Yes it is bloated, bureaucratic, and wasteful, but so is everything that the government gets its hands into, which is why the government has to get its hands out of almost everything else.
May 19th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
I don’t think it’s a drift leftward that made Republicans into a big government party. It was a focus on securing power over all else. Securing power takes money and cutting budgets simply doesn’t help when you need to get the pork to the proper places.
They aren’t statist. That would imply they want the state to control people’s lives, which isn’t really what Republican-led fiscal irresponsibility is all about. Too many elected Republicans are power grubbers, plain and simple.
If “moving to the center” means placing results over power politics, then Schwarzenegger is correct. If he means just becoming a watered down version of Democrats, then we lose the whole point of the two party system. What Republicans need to do is start using conservative principles to solve real problems rather than just using conservative talking points as the backdrop for power grabs.
May 20th, 2008 at 2:14 am
Jimmy, there is a marked difference between spending enough to maintain a capable military and spending more than every other nation on the face of the planet combined. Thats what we do, and it needs to change.
May 20th, 2008 at 6:17 am
As a percentage of what this country earns, our defense budget is about 4% (of GDP). Other than the “Peace Dividend” during the mid-late 1990’s, that is a lower number than at any time in our country’s history. That’s lower than during the administrations of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, even Jimmy Carter! While defense comprises about 19% of our federal budget, Medicare and Medicaid are over 23%.
The point is, we can afford it. And we should. I’m glad we have a stronger military than all of the tin-pot dictators, tyrants and terrorists in the world combined. You should be glad too, that this capability is in the hands of a country like the the U.S, and no where else.