What’s left for the right?
Sunday, November 09, 2008
JACK ROBERTS
The Oregonian
M ystery solved. Last Tuesday’s election finally showed Republicans what we need to do to win a statewide office in Oregon: Run as a Democrat.
In 2002, Republican legislator Ben Westlund was chairman of the Mannix for Governor campaign against Democrat Ted Kulongoski. By the beginning of 2006, Westlund had re-registered as an independent with thoughts of mounting a third-party run for governor himself. He finally decided against it and ended up endorsing Kulongoski in his race against Republican Ron Saxton. By the start of the 2007 legislative session, Westlund had changed registration again, this time joining the Democrats.
That is a roundabout way of explaining how a longtime Republican politician ended up being elected Oregon’s treasurer as a Democrat.
I write this more in awe than in anger. After all, Gordon Smith spent most of the last year trying to slip into the Democrats’ locker room hoping he could sneak back onto the playing field without anyone noticing he actually played for the other team.
It almost worked. Instead the loss of a two-term U.S. senator merely highlighted an election night of disappointments that included yet another shutout in statewide races and a hemorrhaging of our members in the state House of Representatives. As bad as the national results were for Republicans, the outlook here in Oregon is bleaker still.
According to the modern political calendar, last Wednesday was the first day of the 2010 campaign season. Republicans are convinced we have a secret weapon going into the next election: the Democrats. With Democrats controlling the executive and legislative branches of government both nationally and here in Oregon, Republicans figure our job is not so much to hinder their efforts as to encourage them.
Once voters discover what unfettered Democratic rule will mean to their lives and their pocketbooks, chances are they will rediscover Republican virtues they have forgotten in recent years.
It is a truism in politics that often the only thing worse than our problems are their solutions. That is one of the challenges of democracy. After all, there’s a reason why, when we go to the doctor with a serious ailment, he or she doesn’t simply offer us a choice of painful surgery, terrible-tasting medicine or an ice cream cone and then allow us to pick. That’s also why political campaigns tend to be long on promises and short on actual programs.
As the Democrats grapple with how to fulfill their promises to provide universal health care, end global warming, bring the troops home from Iraq so we can send them to Afghanistan, raise taxes on 5 percent of the people so we can cut them for 95 percent, balance the budget, renegotiate our trade agreements so that we win and our trading partners lose, and reduce poverty, crime and disease, it is a fair bet that lots of voters are not going to be happy with the choices this new leadership offers. The good thing about pendulums is that they do swing back.
The real challenge for Republicans is how to position ourselves to take advantage of the swing back in our direction when it occurs. The easy answer is simply to be against everything the Democrats try to do so that when their efforts fail, the voters will naturally turn to us. If that sounds cynical, it is essentially the secret of the Democrats’ success in 2006 and 2008.
n addition, Republicans can simply adapt our strategy from Richard Nixon’s famous “farewell press conference” after losing the California governor’s race in 1962. Only in our case, the closing words to the Democrats will be: “Think of all the fun you’ll be missing. You won’t have Bush to hang around our necks any more.”
Realistically, however, it would be a mistake to base a political comeback entirely on expectations of a negative reaction to the other party. After all, there is an outside chance that one-party rule by the Democrats won’t be an unmitigated disaster. It took us 20 years before the voters finally tired of FDR and the New Deal. It’s not a bad idea to have a Plan B just in case “We’re Not Them” turns out not to be as compelling an argument in 2010 as it was in 2008.
Of course, Republicans will renew our perpetual fight over whether we lost because we’re too conservative or not conservative enough. It seems we are constantly fighting over whether we would be better off driving the moderates or the conservatives out of our party. Now that the Democrats’ edge in Oregon voter registration, after narrowing for more than a decade, has ballooned back to a 240,000-vote margin, I personally have a hard time figuring out how driving anyone out helps us get more votes.
It seems to me that a better way is to reach out and try to include more people in our voting coalition. I’m convinced we can best do that by changing the tone and focus of our rhetoric, to emphasize practical problem-solving rather than divisive ideology. For example, I think more voters would like to keep government at a level we can afford rather than follow tax-activist Grover Norquist’s advice to “get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
A matter of semantics, perhaps, but I like to think there is a substantive difference as well. I also think there is plenty of room for us to argue over how best to deal with the challenge of global climate change rather than hunkering down in denial while hoping the sun spots change so that we don’t have to.
We need to think seriously about how to extend health insurance to the 15 percent who don’t have it without reducing the quality or increasing the cost to the 85 percent who are already covered. And if we agree that improving the quality and availability of health care is better than simply continuing to spend more, shouldn’t we apply the same reasoning to our schools? But that will require Republicans to end our fixation on vouchers and charter schools, which make it seem like we’ve given up on the public schools when our real focus should be on how to improve them.
In essence, I believe the challenge for the Republican Party is to become more conservative and less right-wing. We need to be a party of sound principles rather than a rigid, dogmatic ideology. If we start listening to the voters and convince them that their concerns are our concerns, rather than lecturing them to think the way we think, we’ll be in a position to take advantage of the tide when it turns.
Meanwhile, we should see our recent defeat as a blessing in disguise even if, in the words of Winston Churchill, “at the moment it is very well disguised indeed.”
Jack Roberts was Oregon commissioner of labor and industries 1995-2002.
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