Joe Nocera uses his New York Times column today to argue that, in the long run, it would be better for the Republican Party if Rick Santorum were the party’s nominee this year, even though that’s likely to mean a huge defeat in November:
During the McGovern-Mondale era, the Democrats were exactly where the Republicans are now: the party had been taken over by its most extreme liberal faction, and it had lost touch with the core concerns of the middle class, just as the Republicans have now. When I spoke to Whitman this week about what the Republican Party needed to do to become a more inclusive, less rigidly dogmatic party, she said, “It’s going to take some kind of shock therapy.” Those terrible losses in 1972 and, especially, in 1984 were the Democrats’ shock therapy. Just eight years after Mondale’s loss, Bill Clinton was elected president.
What happened in the interim? In effect, moderate Democrats wrested the party back from its most liberal wing. Moderates like Richard Gephardt and Charles Robb began meeting weekly to rethink what the party stood for. One of the people involved in those discussions was Al From, who would later go on to create the Democratic Leadership Council, which became the platform for new Democratic ideas — and, for that matter, for Clinton’s presidential run.
“We had become a party that had stopped worrying about people who were working and only focused on people who weren’t working,” From told me. “The party didn’t understand how big a concern crime was. It had stopped talking about opportunity and growth.”
By the end of the decade, the Democratic Party, embodied by Clinton, was embracing what From would later describe in a speech as the modernization of liberalism: “Progressive policies that create opportunity for all, not just an entitled few; mainstream values like work, family, responsibility, and community; and practical, nonbureaucratic solutions to governing.” This retooled, more inclusive philosophy was successful enough that Clinton became the first Democratic president to win re-election since Franklin Roosevelt.
(…)
If Mitt Romney takes the nomination and then loses to Obama, the extremists who’ve taken over the party will surely say the problem was Romney’s lack of ideological purity. If, however, Santorum is the nominee — and then loses in a landslide — the party will no longer be able to delude itself about where its ideological rigidity has taken it.
An alcoholic doesn’t stop drinking until he hits bottom. The Republican Party won’t change until it hits bottom. Only Santorum offers that possibility.
This isn’t a new argument, of course. I said pretty much the same thing last month commenting on a piece that Jazz Shaw had written. And there’s certainly something tempting about it. For decades now, the GOP has been in a debate between those who think that the party needs to nominate candidates that appeal to the widest possible group of voters and those who think that election results like those in 1976, 1992, 1996, and 2008 prove that the party loses when it nominates conservative candidates, while the results in 1980 and 2000 allegedly prove that it wins when it does. Of course, anyone who actually studies the dynamics of any of those elections, along with the economic conditions of the times, there’s not really any support for the argument. That doesn’t really matter, though, because it’s an idea that has become an article of faith among the hard-core conservatives at this point, and it’s on that is repeated on an almost daily basis by the Limbaugh’s of the world, along with the conservative punditocracy. We must nominate the most conservative candidate, they tell the masses, because otherwise we’re going to lose.
Nocera is largely right about what’s likely to happen inside the GOP and the conservative movement if Mitt Romney is the nominee in November and the GOP loses. Once again, it will be said that the party lost because he wasn’t conservative enough, or that he didn’t “take the fight to Obama” by attacking him personally. The party will go off on another purity quest, and the ground will be laid for a 2016 in which candidates will once again be forced to out-conservative each other as they have this cycle. That kind of cycle doesn’t bode well for 2016 prospects that might actually have a chance of winning like Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Jeb Bush, or even Marco Rubio. It’s perfect ground, however, for the likes of Sarah Palin. Democrats, meanwhile, will be looking at candidates like Andrew Cuomo or possibly even Hillary Clinton. The idea that a hard-right candidate will have any more chance of success in 2016 than it would in 2012 is absurd, but that’s likely to be exactly what the Republican Party gets if a Romney loss is followed by another absurd quest for conservative purity.
Conservatives won’t be able to make the same argument if Rick Santorum is the nominee, though. They won’t be able to argue that the GOP didn’t nominate a conservative if the party ends up nominating the most reactionary conservative in the entire field of candidates. They won’t be able to say the party shied away from social issues in the General Election if it nominates a candidate who thinks that the nation should re-examine a 45 year old Supreme Court decision that said it was unconstitutional for state governments to prohibit married couples from even buying a condom. They won’t be able to say that Republicans didn’t talk about God when their nominee is the most explicitly religious candidate for President we’ve seen since Pat Robertson, if not ever.
Oh, I’m sure there will be some excuses made. They’ll say that the “RINOs” abandoned the nominee, for example, especially if you see the GOP losing support in states like Virginia, or if prominent pundits like George Will continue making the argument that the GOP should give up trying to seek the Presidency this cycle. They’ll say that they were stabbed in the back by the dreaded “GOP Establishment,” despite the fact that, as I noted earlier this week, the establishment has essentially surrendered to them already. Intellectually, though, they won’t really have any argument to make. The Republican Party will have done exactly what the Limbaugh’s of the world have been saying they should do, and it will have lost spectacularly. The only logical conclusion that could be drawn from such an event is that their advice was wrong, and that the party needs to return to the sane conservatism of the Reagan era and the Big Tent that Lee Atwater wanted.
So in some sense, Nocera is right. If you really do hold out hope for the idea of a Republican Party that isn’t intent on driving itself over a cliff, perhaps the best thing to do is to hope Santorum wins the nomination and then watch as the chips fall where they may.
