"The Harder Part" by George Packer at the New Yorker

[applegrove]

The Harder Part

by George Packer at the New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/harder-part

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When the Republicans talk about proving that they can govern, they don’t mean that they intend to solve the country’s core problems. The bills that the leadership has vowed to bring to the floor include corporate tax reform, fast-track trade agreements, construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, and a repeal of the tax on medical devices. Most of these proposals are marginal enough to betray a tactical mind-set: the purpose is not to address important issues but to corner the President with bipartisan votes and improve the G.O.P.’s image ahead of 2016.

In a post-election editorial, the conservative National Review dismissed the whole idea that congressional Republicans need to mature, arguing that the “desire to prove Republicans can govern” will only divide the Party between its establishment and its extremists, play into the hands of opponents in the Democratic Party and the media, and perhaps even persuade voters to keep government divided by electing a Democratic President in 2016. The editorial urged the Republican leadership to dedicate itself to one goal: winning the White House—an extension of McConnell’s stated determination in 2010 to make Obama a one-term President. In both cases, the main objective is power. You can hear the voice of the Party’s enablers: why sober up now that the bad behavior is paying off?

A party that dedicated itself to extreme policy positions and a strategy of legislative intransigence won’t find reform easy. Some moderate Republicans studied the résumés of the midterm candidates and decided that the Party was returning to its respectable self of the Eisenhower years—the party of Rotarians, prudent business owners, patriotic veterans. This is wishful thinking. That party no longer exists, and neither does the political consensus of the postwar years. It was based on a wide distribution of economic rewards, a high degree of civic participation, and respected national institutions, including the federal government, which the modern Republican Party has done everything it can to discredit (with help from feckless Democratic ideas and actions, not least the rollout of Obamacare).

The fact that there were no rape gaffes from Republican candidates this year doesn’t mean that the Party has moved toward the center. Instead, it has learned how to muffle its extremism. The Growth and Opportunity Project’s withering assessment had no new policies to propose—it seemed wary of the very notion of ideological debate. The report was a strategy plan—a guide to using messaging, polling, technology, fund-raising, and other “campaign mechanics,” in order to reverse the Party’s growing isolation as a bastion of the older, rural, white electorate.





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