Should the GOP steer right to regain momentum? Two Views

Today the source of the pundits' scorn is the defection of Sen. Arlen Specter to the Democrats. This proves, they charge, that the GOP is controlled by extremists and, with Specter gone, is just a regional party. The only way back to relevance is moving to the center and moderating our stands on core principles, they insist. Otherwise, the GOP is doomed.

That is the same prescription for Republican ills that William Scranton and Nelson Rockefeller called for following Goldwater's defeat. Republicans rejected that call in 1965 and should do so again.

Specter did not switch to the Democratic Party over any deep-held ideological beliefs. Specter switched because he would have lost the Republican primary.

The worst thing Republicans could do is move away from the core principles that have guided the party for the past decades. America is a right-of-center nation. The problem for Republicans is that voters felt betrayed by the party. Republicans were elected to rein in spending and promote less government — not more government and spending. Overlooked in much of the commentary about President Bush's dramatic slide in polls was that while Katrina started it, it escalated out of control when conservatives felt betrayed by the Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination.

Today, many voters still do not trust the Republican Party to remain true to its core principles once they recapture power. That is where we have to start first, re-earning the trust of the base and like-minded independents.

Next, Republicans must not be afraid of a bold and dramatic agenda. When given a positive conservative platform, voters will always vote for that over the liberal alternative. Overlooked in 1964 was not that voters greatly disagreed with Barry Goldwater's conservative stands but that they didn't like him as a messenger. The messenger is still important in this media-driven age. That is why 16 years after rejecting Goldwater, Republicans rode into power with Reagan saying the same things Goldwater had said in 1964, only doing so with a smile. The Contract for America, much derided by many pundits, captivated the imagination of voters and reinforced their basic conservative instincts. What is needed now is another conservative agenda to present to the American people, and to say it with a smile rather than a scowl.

Then, Republicans need to use the new media to get our message out to voters. Conservatives pioneered talk radio, allowing the conservative message to reach millions. But sadly we have fallen far behind the left in utilizing social networking such as Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin, and Twitter. Just as "soccer moms" and "security moms" have been the sought-after voters in past elections, so now the battle for "Facebook moms" begins.

Finally we must be a big enough party to invite new people in. We must follow Reagan's adage of wanting people who will agree with us 80 or 90 percent of the time (but not necessarily those like Specter who support you perhaps 40 percent of the time and leave you in the lurch at key moments like the Robert Bork nomination).

The obituaries for the Republican Party are premature. They have been written in 1964, 1974, 1992 and now in 2009. The party is not dead nor just a regional party. But it will become one if it abandons its core beliefs and tries to run as a me-too party.

David E. Johnson is the CEO of Strategic Vision, an Atlanta public affairs and polling company.

Extremism scares moderates, would shrink numbers

By Lee Raudonis

As movers and shakers in the Republican Party begin to plan new strategies for making the formerly Grand Old Party more attractive to a larger number of voters, they need to remember two values — patience and commonsense.

First, they need patience, because time, external events and the Democrats have a much larger role to play in a potential comeback of the GOP than anything the party elders or elected officials can do. All the fund-raising, "new ideas," issue papers and anti-Obama and anti-socialist rhetoric in the world are unlikely to suddenly elevate the minority party into majority status.

Consider that the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 was much more the result of popular dissatisfaction with LBJ and the war in Vietnam than any great positive feelings for Nixon or the GOP. The election of Jimmy Carter in 1976 was due more to Watergate than anything new the Democrats were promising, and the election of Ronald Reagan four years later was the result of public dissatisfaction with double-digit mortgage rates, high gas prices and Americans being held captive in Iran, rather than with a sudden infatuation with supply-side economics. And most recently, public discontent about Iraq, a crashing economy and the perception that the government was broken caused voters to chase the Republicans out of town and give the Democrats a chance — in spite of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi — rather than because of them.

This does not mean that Republicans should just wait for world events or Democratic missteps to thrust them into political nirvana and control of the Congress and White House. There is much that the GOP can — and must — do to gain the public's confidence so that the public will not hesitate to turn to them for leadership when the Democrats fall into disfavor, as will likely happen.

The primary challenge for a party, such as the GOP, that is shrinking in influence and in number of supporters is to prevent the base of the party, which tends to be highly ideological and more extreme than the population as a whole, from dominating the party's agenda and further narrowing its appeal. If this is allowed to occur, it could cause the party to be seen as so extreme that voters will allow the Democrats to maintain power longer than they might otherwise, simply because they see no viable alternative.

Unfortunately for those of us who want the Republican Party to rebound as a viable alternative to the Democrats, the momentum toward an incredible shrinking party seems to be gaining, while common sense seems to be waning. At the national level, for example, we have the ersatz self-proclaimed head of the GOP, Rush Limbaugh, encouraging John McCain to follow Arlen Specter out of the party, presumably so that there will be only "real" Republicans left (real Republicans such as Rush who defend "American values" as compared to "liberals" such as McCain who spent how many years in a North Vietnamese prison camp?).

Even in Georgia, where the GOP has a fairly broad base, there is a candidate for governor, John Oxendine, stooping low enough to assure the secessionists in the Georgia GOP that, if elected governor, he "would support legislation which states all compulsory federal legislation that directs states to comply under threat of civil or criminal penalties or sanctions or that requires states to pass legislation or lose federal funding be prohibited or repealed." Never mind that the first Republican president settled that issue more than 140 years ago, let's make sure that the hard-core base of the party is happy — even if such pandering chases away potential moderates who might otherwise look upon the GOP as an alternative to the Democrats.

What will it be, GOP — patience and common sense — or an incredible shrinking party?

Lee Raudonis is a former executive director of the Georgia Republican Party.