After Barack Obama was re-elected last fall despite a stagnant economy and lower approval ratings than most presidents have enjoyed while winning second terms, the Republican National Committee ordered an “autopsy” of their losing effort.
The authors of the 100-page report, released Monday, could have kept it to a single line from a Walt Kelly cartoon decades ago: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
From a laborious primary process and the narrative-free nominee it produced, to a couple of disastrous Senate candidates who repeatedly took the GOP off-message and a get-out-the-vote effort that was obliterated by the Democrats’ own ground game, there is plenty of blame to go around.
But if anyone is of the mind conservative activists and elected Republicans were waiting for the RNC report to begin changing, they should have been at CPAC last week.
The Conservative Political Action Conference is the annual confab of the American Conservative Union. This year’s edition just outside Washington, D.C., was the 40th one of these gatherings made famous by Ronald Reagan, and if nothing else it marked a transition to a new cohort of GOP leaders.
The winner of the CPAC straw poll for possible 2016 presidential candidates was Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who said the GOP had grown “stale and moss-covered.” Paul voiced support for “liberty in both the economic and personal spheres” and specifically referred to the distaste the “Facebook generation” has for jail sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.
There were loud cheers for Sen. Marco Rubio, who finished second to Paul in the straw poll and has been one of the most prominent Republicans working on the kind of “comprehensive immigration reform” the authors of the RNC report suggested.
There were numerous references by possible presidential contenders and other speakers to minority outreach, with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush perhaps hitting the point hardest.
In fact, the person who gained the most stature from his CPAC appearance was probably Benjamin Carson. A black neurosurgeon from Maryland — you may have heard his recent speech at the National Prayer Breakfast — Carson spoke eloquently and forcefully on a wide range of topics. A favorite line of his: The answers to our nation’s problems are “not brain surgery.” He drew extended ovations from the crowd when he hinted at wanting to run for office soon.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal chided fellow conservatives for being “in love with zeroes” and having “an obsession with government bookkeeping” rather than promoting a vision for growing the economy. His counterpart in Wisconsin, Scott Walker, urged the GOP to be “optimistic, relevant and courageous.” Walker’s examples from his tenure in Madison made his speech one of the best of the conference, in my view.
There were also plenty of attacks on the GOP’s coziness with Big Business.
None of this is to say everyone’s ready to change everything all of a sudden. It appears a consensus remains regarding an aversion to tax increases, opposition to abortion (though gay marriage had more supporters, at least among attendees), and support for gun-ownership rights. But regarding many other topics and the approach the right should take to them, it was clear this wasn’t your father’s CPAC. Or GOP.
Perhaps the speakers got preview copies of the report and took their cues from it. Certainly, their words last week were only that — words, still to be confirmed by actions. The same holds true, of course, for the RNC report.
Obviously, the GOP since 1992 has experienced the same record of string of presidential-election difficulties the Democrats faced from 1968 through 1988, and it has to change the way it approaches the electorate in some key ways.
But the good news, if you want to see Republicans elected, is that some of the party’s brightest emerging stars are already staking out ground that moves in the direction of change. This necessary process has already begun.
