November 6, 2008
Mac Zilber
Roy Blunt, the minority whip of the House of Representatives, has stepped down, and the Republican leadership now consists of two men: John Boehner and Mitch McConnell. This is just further demonstration that the Republican party is in tatters, and is essentially starting from ground zero. They have few promising up-and-coming political stars and fewer leaders who are actually in office.
While the party runs around like a chicken without a head, some of its few remaining big names are starting to make the rounds in Iowa, a sign that the 2012 election process is already beginning. Mike Huckabee is making multiple stops on his book tour in Iowa, the caucus that he won this year, and Sarah Palin stopped in Dubuque, Iowa on election eve, not even waiting until the ballots were cast to begin 2012 speculation. Most interestingly, Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana, is going to be the keynote speaker at the Iowa Family Policy Center’s banquet in two weeks. Governor Jindal, if he so wanted, could probably be the 2012 Republican nominee, if he so wanted, and he will probably run if Obama ends up being an unpopular president.
Jindal is the most politically experienced thirty-something since Jack Kennedy. He was a Rhodes Scholar before being the president of the LSU system at 28, an assistant secretary for health and human services at 30, a congressman at 32, and the governor of Louisiana at 36. By 2012, he’ll have more experience than Hillary Clinton did when she ran this year, and he’ll still only be 41. The big question mark surrounding his political career, however, is whether he’s too radically right-wing, as he’s in the same wing of the Republican party that Sarah Palin is from. The country seems to be drifting to the left demographically, and that drift may leave his career in the dust.
An interesting factoid about Sarah Palin’s desires to run for president that would suggest she’s not as much of a favorite for the 2012 nomination as she thinks is that, in the last 85 years, only one Vice Presidential nominee who never became vice president was nominated to be the presidential candidate of his/her party: Bob Dole. And Bob Dole had to wait 20 years to get nominated. As such, Sarah Palin is hardly a frontrunner for the 2012 spot. The fact that, according to Fox correspondent Carl Cameron, Sarah Palin didn’t know which countries were members of NAFTA and didn’t know that Africa was a continent could prove to be a problem as well. There are just too many things she doesn’t know for her to be a successful presidential candidate, since as a presidential candidate, you actually have to do more than a couple of interviews and you actually have to hold press conferences.
This entire discussion brings me to an important point about the future of the Republican party. On election night, I heard a conservative correspondent on CNN say “well, the reason John McCain lost was because he wasn’t conservative enough.” If that is the lesson that the Republicans take home from this election then they will be a minority party for a long time. If, on the other hand, they tack more towards the center, make themselves more of a big-tent party, and stop pandering to the ultra-right minority, then they might just make themselves a competitive party again. Even if they can’t compromise ideologically, they’re going to need to do something to get at least a decent portion of the minority vote back, as they’re essentially an all-white party (90% of Republicans were white in this election. 40% of Democrats were nonwhites in this election), and that model isn’t going to work in the 21st century. When Walter Mondale got 90% of the black vote and 70% of the Latino vote, it didn’t matter much because blacks and Latinos weren’t a huge portion of the country. This year, Obama got 80% of the nonwhite vote, and nonwhites made up 26% of the electorate. That number will only grow, and that is not good for the all white Republican party.
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The US has not elected a moderate to the White House in modern history. Every president – including Obama – has been an ideologue who could motivate his base and was energetic enough to attract independents and voters from the other party.
McCain lost because the base of the party didn’t trust him. In 2012, mushy moderate “mavericks” need not apply.
A guy like Jindal is just the thing the GOP needs.
Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, JFK, and Harry Truman were hardly ideologues. “The Base” is no longer big enough to tip an election for the Republicans; McCain won 90% of the Republican vote, there just aren’t that many Republicans out there any more.