Friday, January 18, 2008
OK Now We're Getting Somewhere
Ramesh has posted a follow-up item elaborating on his criticisms of Comeback. This is very helpful, because it clarifies a lot that was obscure or off-point in his original review. Here's the key paragraph:
[L]let me point out that in an entire book about how conservatives and Republicans can make a comeback, at no point does Frum offer a word of advice about which voters are likely recruits for a new center-right coalition. So it isn’t as though Frum can say that the strategy he recommends is superior to the one Lowry and I discuss. He has none.
OK, there's the gravamen of the complaint. Two responses:
1) Ramesh is just wrong on this point. Comeback abounds with suggestions to relieve the distress of economically hard-pressed middle-income voters - exactly the voters Republicans are most in danger of losing. In addition, Comeback talks at length about the problem of reaching young voters, for whom environmental issues loom large - but for whom the Republican social agenda is often off-putting. And while Ramesh dismisses my empiricism as "theoretical," I promise that even the data-hungriest reader will find plenty of demographic numbers to crunch.
2) However, I do understand how Ramesh made his mistake. All of us have become accustomed over the past years to the Karl Rove "targeted" approach to politics. In this approach, you reach 51% by stringing together interest group after interest group. You offer tax cuts to woo traditional Republicans, a "faith-based" initiative to appeal to enangelicals, an immigration amnesty for Hispanics, education for married women, etc. etc. and le voila: 51%. (Or, as it happened 47% - but close enough!)
Even those who reject Rove's particular mosaic pattern have come to accept his way of doing politics - so much so that many find it difficult to imagine that political thinking could take any other form. Thus I quoted Ramesh & Rich in my previous blogpost:
The most plausible path toward a renewed center-right majority involves consolidating and deepening the trend of the decades before 2006: holding on to as much of the existing conservative coalition as possible while adding more downscale voters who lean right on social issues.
The trouble with this, and all similar exercises in Rove-imitation, is that it substitutes campaign strategy for governance. Issues are identified and policies are chosen with an eye to coalition-management, rather than policy coherence. The results ... well we see them all around us.
I attempted to do something very different in Comeback: rather than building a political strategy upon constituency demands, I started with urgent public problems — and tried to think through solutions.
Ramesh dismisses some of my proposed solutions as inadequate. That may be as it may be. Each reader can judge for himself or herself. More disturbing though is the indication that Ramesh finds policy solution-finding in itself somehow silly or amateurish: the equivalent (as he said in his original review) of dropping notions in the company suggestion box - or (as he suggests in his second post) a distraction from the real work of politics, shifting demographic groups from one party's column to the other.
I would suggest that the best way to add downscale voters to the Republican coalition is for Republicans to try as seriously as they can to meet the needs of downscale voters. In the same way: the best way to enhance American strength in the coming competition with China is to devise policies that meet that challenge, ditto for energy independence, ditto for education, ditto for pensions and healthcare.
Restoring conservative credibility by rededicating ourselves to effective conservative policy: that's the project of Comeback. And the longer Ramesh explains his objections, the more it starts to feel that it is that it is the project itself that he finds so curiously irritating.
01/18 08:20 AM
