THE GHOST of ‘64
As we watched and listened to the Republican party publicly conduct its famous autopsy on what went wrong in 2012, and what they might be able to do to reverse course and actually play a role in governing, it occurred to us that the Republican National Committee doesn’t understand who’s running the show. Because it certainly isn’t.
For months on “Political Safari,” we’ve reported on the real phenomena enveloping the Republicans.
Briefly, that consists of politicians who for nearly fifty years have been in the wilderness but who are now returned to power, state by state, and newly installed in their state houses, often led by Republican governors, and who are devoted to the long-suppressed explosion of conservative ideology of yore, state by state.
We’ve focused on voter suppression techniques in Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan. We’ve witnessed anti-union legislation being passed in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan. We’ve kept up with the punitive anti-abortion legislation passed in North Carolina, Kansas, Arkansas, and now in North Dakota. We’re aware of the struggle to close the southern border to Mexican workers in Arizona and Texas. We’ve been astounded by the Governor of Michigan with his Emergency Manager Plan that completely disenfranchizes that state’s voters.
We’ve been saddened by the lack of push-back from Democrats in these august houses of reason, but heartened by the repeals in Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Reading about the RNC and listening lately to what it has now to present to voters, many of whom attended the recent conservative conclave called CPAC, what has become absolutely clear to us is that the RNC has become strictly reactive, not proactive at all.
The reorganization and regeneration of the Republican Party is not happening from the top down, but from the grass roots up. Newly white-hot members of state houses have resurrected political thinking from the fifties and sixties. It is they who are directing the RNC what tacks to take on immigration, on taxes, on health care.
Continual polling seems to be the RNC’s other guiding principle. With any reasonable amount of support recorded from voters to do want what it wants to do anyway, it has apparently decided that any view that represents an extreme is worth adopting.
The party makes a great show of listening, as opposed to dictating. Yet the party seems oblivious of the fact that it is being dictated to. The old white men at the top of the organization — albeit with the help of a few younger-looking faces atop old hearts and habits — haven’t the faintest idea that they are, at the most, a couple of years from being irrelevant altogether.
Side Effects 