Strangers in A Strange Land

Recent Republican behavior may make sense from a psychiatric point of view but does it from an electoral stand point? With party identification down to 20-21% of the population, the lowest since Barry Goldwater's debacle in 1964,virtually every political analyst has remarked how Republicans are losing in every demographic. The weeklong attacks on Sotomayor only highlight on-going damage done with Hispanics, but the Republicans are also losing the Digital generation, who voted for Obama by a two-to-one margin.

First, Republicans are looking at the 2010 first because they are very short now on strategic thinkers. The person to watch here for cues as to strategy is former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who acts as a mentor to the current House Republicans and was instrumental in persuading them to vote in block against the President' stimulus package. Recently, Newt has been upfront in invoking the need for Americans to live in constant fear about the next terrorist attack. He also has racheted up his rhetoric that Sotomayor will be seeking race-based solutions from the bench. Since Newt has virtually no influence over Senate Republicans,there is an odd method to his madness because he is outlining ideas and themes for Republicans running for the House. At one point, Newt actually suggested the Republicans could win back the House in 2010, something he knows would be an earthquake in Washington. This explains his drumbeat campaign against Nancy Pelosi to resign from the speakers post because of her claims that the CIA lied to her in briefings about the torture program. For Newt it was a twofer--pretending to defend national security, while attacking a woman, who is unpopular among conservatives, primarily because she is from San Francisco, the modern day Sodom.

The Republicans have four months to get their act together before launching into the campaign for 2010. What are the likely things to happen? I expect that the Obama Administration will move for an immigration reform bill and will get some form of health care reform out of Congress. These two things will put the Republicans behind the eight-ball. Rumors from the RNC are that they expect the Supreme Court to take a chunk out of the Voting Rights Act, which will enable them to plan strategies of voter suppression in the upcoming election.

Republicans are banking on a few things for 2010. By -election turnout is always much lower than presidential years. Turnouts by African-Americans, Hispanics and the younger voter will be dramatically down, leaving the core voter from 45-70 years old and white. Republicans will go back to the "Silent Majority" playbook begun with Nixon's southern strategy and try to exploit "white male rage" through a number of issues,citing Sotomayor,Obama and intellectual elitism. I've heard of a strategy to use the year to expand white voter turnout, where Republicans believe they can secure dominance. Some of the themes to be used were those exploited at Sarah Palin rallies. Using Karl Rovian cynicism,the campaigns will invoke the need of "real Americans" to mobilize to retake the country from ever-expanding government and experiments in social engineering. The Democrats will be portrayed as making the country weak, making us vulnerable to another terrorist attack, and embarking on bold new experiments in socialism when all we are facing is a recession. Republicans will try to plug into the growing Tenth Amendment movement as a break on federal intrusion into the private lives of Americans. If you add voter suppression efforts,Republicans believe they can increase their numbers in the House, perhaps not as optimistically as Newt projects.

I was naive in thinking that the failure to vote for the stimulus package and the president's budget would hinder the Republican efforts to recoup because you can't claim any credit in the recovery if you opposed it. They are banking that these efforts will not produce the type of dramatic results for everyday voters that the original hype seemed to imply. Also, the bank and Wall Street bailouts are not popular with anyone, even though they are necessary. The other argument Republicans are going to use is that the United States faced a recession and not the catastrophe which almost all economists agree would be a full-blown Depression. Ironically, the recovery should be such that the electorate will not believe things were as bad as portrayed. The Republicans are banking on this perception to support their meme about the Democratic Congress making a powerplay to take over the economy.

On the Senate level, I expect the primary targets for the Republicans will be Senators Dodd, Reid and Specter. The theme will be the need for there to be sufficient number of Republicans to be able to mount a filibuster. For me this is ironic because it harkens back to the days of the civil rights movement and the argument Southern Democrats used to get elected. To elevate the filibuster to a fundamental principle in your platform shows how degraded the Republican argument has become. Frankly, at this early stage,at best I could see a Republican gain of two seats in the Senate but very possibly a loss of 3.

At the gubernatorial level, Republicans are hellbent on recapturing Virginia because Obama's victory here represented a major, symbolic loss, a possible specter of further losses in the South. They are also confident about beating Corzine in New Jersey. This will not be because Republicans got their voice back, as Mitt Romney claims, but will be because of the natural political cycle. Republicans gains in Statehouses will be a false dawn, still camouflaging deep and almost unrecoverable vulnerabilities.

If one wants to get a sense of the base of the conservative movement, you only have to link to www.freerepublic.com . This website reflects more accurately the sentiment of the grassroots people than Fox News or Rush Limbaugh. The tea bag parties, although funded by big Republican donors, were also organized by grass-roots people , who have very distinct worldviews than the Washington conservative and Republican establishment. One of the questions someone like Nate Silver at www.fivethirtyeight.com should ask is how many of the recently documented "Independents" on the latest polls are actually extreme right or libertarians. With the Bush era finished, many of the grass-roots conservatives are uninhibited in registering their disgust with Washington Republicans, not only by designating them Rinos but also by believing they are Democrats Lite, which seems absurd from the last several months.

This Base views American popular culture as degrading at best and satanic at worse. All newspapers are liberal, all television with the exception of Fox News is liberal,while Fox is snobbish and elitist. They are religious and almost all are end-timers. There are predominantly pre-Vatican II Catholics and evangelicals. They view Mormons as a cult with which they can make tactical alliances on such issues as gay marriage and anti-abortion. The war against Islamic terrorists is a religious war where all means should be used,including torture. If there were no terrorist threat, they would be neo-isolationists, wanting the United States to abandon all treaty commitments and foreign alliances, including getting out of the United Nations. There are pro-Israel because of the role that country will play in the end times and recognize the Holocaust as one of mankind's greatest disasters. They are pro-military and for expanded military budgets. They are for full absolute gun rights without exception. Social issues such as abortion and gay marriage are not wedge issues for them but essential to the way they understand themselves and the world. They view these issues as key indicators for the moral health of the country. They are pro-private property and pro-small business but, since the days of Reagan, have not been for Wall Street, the banks or Big Business. They are highly susceptible to populism on economic issues. They are not pro-environment or global warming, even though a good portion of them hunt and fish. They believe the whole discussion on alternative fuels in bunk. They believe the United States can sustain its level of development if the government simply allowed for more drilling and development of natural gas wells. They are anti-immigrant and are for the construction of a wall between the United States and Mexico. They are creationists and hold evolution in contempt as well as much science. They view colleges as the place where youth are indoctrinated--the more prestigious schools, the worse the effect. The issue of taxes for them is not the same as for wealthy Republicans, it is a matter of freedom. And they value authenticity in their candidates--however that is measured. From all indicators, their favorite candidate for the presidential nomination in 2012 is Sarah Palin and they believe she is being deliberately cut out of all the recent efforts of the party to revive itself.

The Base really,really hates Barack Obama. They believe he is foreign born,a Muslim who turned to Black Liberation Theology, a leftist tutored by Bill Ayres with the techniques of Saul Alinsky. is aligned with the New Black Panthers and ACORN to subvert the United States. They view him as kowtowing to foreign dictators, putting unfair pressure on our only ally, Israel, and weakening the United States by dismantling Cheney's torture program. They believe he has an overarching plan to destroy the country and make the United States into a socialist country on the model of Western Europe.

The Republican Base can secure some House victories as Newt Gingrich knows and is manipulating. But the Base believes Newt is a phoney, who has used his Washington connections to get rich, and his three wives leave the Base cold. But in the long run,the Base has very limited appeal to the rest of the country and is self-restricting. The Base truly believes that if the Republican Party purifies itself of its moderate tendencies then it will secure real and sustaining victories. All the objective evidence is to the contrary. The key problem for Republicans is that the Base represents a worldview , rather than a set of political positions. It's a very thin line here until the Base withdraws from political life all together. It does not have political aspirations, while it does have cultural and religious purposes. The Base is really geared to the local, to accomplishing minor goals in preventing evolution being taught at the elementary school or advocating pro-life issues at a state level. It is not geared to national politics because at it's heart it believes Washington is too corrupt, government is too big and run by bureaucrats, the press too vicious and liberal that the true American values get lost. These are the people Republicans have manipulated for years and there is some evidence that they are wising up to this fact.