The Republicans of 2013 look a lot like the Democrats of 1989 -- shut out of the presidency, beholden to a shrinking base and on the wrong side of major demographic shifts in the country.Wait, the Pubs were on the right side of the demographics in 1989?
That's the argument two longtime Democratic strategists -- Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck -- make in an essay titled "The New Politics of Evasion" in the fall edition of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. For any Republican hoping to win back the White House in 2016, it's an absolute must-read.
Because you can trust a couple of Democratic strategists to give the Republicans clear, unfiltered, good advice...
The first myth centered on the idea that Democrats had come up short at the presidential level in 1980, 1984 and 1988 because the candidates they had nominated -- Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis -- were insufficient adherents to liberal orthodoxy. If only the party had nominated a "true liberal," the argument went, they would have won. Sound familiar?
Another similarity - they were all doofuses.
The second myth -- of mobilization -- is all about demographics. In the 1980s, Democrats insisted that if only blacks and Hispanics would vote in numbers commensurate with their share of the population, the party's nominee would win. They didn't, and Democrats didn't win. Fast-forward to today and some within the Republican Party are making that same losing argument about consolidating the white vote.
And if the Pubs could figure out how to get dead people to vote five times, that'd be another good lesson from the Dems.
The final myth is that of the "congressional bastion," the idea that if the party out of the White House still controls a chamber of Congress and/or a number of state and local offices then it's evidence that all is well and major change isn't required. But, holding a House majority in a deeply gerrymandered set of districts is not the same as winning a national presidential election. And the 2012 election proved that the massive gains the GOP made in the 2010 midterms are more the exception than the rule.
The problem for smart Republican strategists is not figuring out what's wrong, but developing a real and pragmatic plan to fix it. Democrats fixed their problems of the 1980s with one man: Bill Clinton.And now, the interesting part.
The obvious analog to Clinton in the modern Republican Party is former Florida governor Jeb Bush. Bush, like Clinton, spent much of his formative life as a governor and, on issues ranging from education to immigration, has shown a willingness to break from Republican orthodoxy and the party's base.
Has he also got a thing for not-all-that-attractive young wimmins?