Ditching Palin, Talking Nice Won’t Revive Republicans

Feb. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Something very interesting is
happening in the Republican Party. It’s just not entirely clear
what it is, or how far it can go.

Dick Morris and Sarah Palin are out at Fox News.
Representative Paul Ryan is helping House Speaker John Boehner
talk his caucus down from the debt-ceiling ledge. Senator Marco
Rubio is going from one conservative talk-radio host to another
to sell them on bipartisan immigration reform. Louisiana
Governor Bobby Jindal is telling Republicans to cease being
“the stupid party.” Tea Party icon Jim DeMint left the Senate,
while FreedomWorks, a Tea Party catalyst, went through a nasty,
costly divorce with its figurehead, Dick Armey. Karl Rove’s
super-PAC is turning its formidable financial artillery toward
helping Republicans win primary elections against Tea Party
insurgents.

The Republican establishment is reasserting control. It’s
purging some of the hucksters who’d taken the party’s reins --or
at least the airtime -- in recent years. It’s resisting much of
the brinkmanship that marked the last Congress and trying to
present a more fearsome, united front against counterproductive
strategies favored by the right. All of the major 2016
presidential contenders have made the same political
calculation: It’s better to build a reputation as one of the
party’s adults than as one of its firebrands.

Normal Progression

“We’ve had a period of this movement at the grass-roots
level, call it Tea Party or something else, and it seems to me
we’re seeing the normal progression of a grass-roots populist
movement,” said Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from
Minnesota. “It ran out of control for a few years -- that’s why
we call it a movement rather than an organization. But it’s
receding a bit now. That’s allowing natural leaders to reassert
themselves, and institutional forces to reassert themselves.”

Just don’t call this process moderation. The Republican
Party isn’t reinventing itself so much as reverting to its
previous form. There’s little evidence of a rethinking of core
Republican policy ideas. There’s no obvious analogue to the
Democratic Leadership Council of the late 1980s and early 1990s,
which was a moderating influence on the Democrats, or even to
the “compassionate conservatism” that George W. Bush promoted
to the nation in 2000.

That was particularly evident this week when House Majority
Leader Eric Cantor gave what was billed as a major policy speech
at the American Enterprise Institute. With the ambitious title
“Making Life Work,” Cantor’s address was thick with policy but
thin on new ideas. Then again, that was the point. His aides
told Politico that Cantor was “taking policies that have been
on the shelf for a while, or back burner, and elevating them.”

The most significant idea was to convert federal education
funding to a weighted-student-average model, as officials have
done in San Francisco, where schools get more money if they
attract poorer students. But the bulk of the ideas were half-measures, and many of them, somewhat ironically, are more fully
developed in the Democratic agenda.

Cantor endorsed the Dream Act and green cards for
immigrants who earn a master’s degree or doctorate from an
American university, but he stopped well short of supporting
comprehensive immigration reform. He offered a lengthy encomium
to the government’s “appropriate and necessary role” in
funding basic medical research, but proposed only that we
reinforce it with the paltry sum we’re currently spending on
social science research and cut some red tape. The section on
tax reform was vague, the big idea on health care was repealing
the Affordable Care Act’s tax on medical device manufacturers,
and the solution for working parents who want more time at home
with their children was to permit them to convert overtime into
flextime.

Modest Intentions

It was hard, listening to Cantor’s speech, to imagine the
person whose life wasn’t working now but would work after this
minimalist agenda became law. The ambitious headline belied a
more modest aim: Cantor’s intention, he said at the outset, was
to “focus our attention on what lies beyond these fiscal
debates.” But the reason Republicans have centered their
identity on the deficit is that it’s an issue of sufficient size
and scope to excite a political party. It is almost impossible
to imagine the party reorganizing itself around Cantor’s menu of
appetizers and side courses.

Renewal, however, is a process. After the 2008 election,
Republicans went through their anger phase, engendering the rise
of the Tea Party. In 2012, there was denial, which resulted in
their choosing the least provocative candidate on the theory
that if Mitt Romney could avoid offending anyone, voters would
instinctively, overwhelmingly reject President Barack Obama. Now
we’re in the bargaining phase, with Republicans hoping they can
change only their behavior while retaining all their ideas. The
question now is whether the Republican Party will be forced into
the final step of the process: policy change.

“The Democratic Leadership Council was founded in 1985,”
said Kenneth Baer, author of “Reinventing Democrats.” “Their
focus initially was on intraparty fights. They thought that the
activists took over the party and the elected officials who
represent real people weren’t relevant anymore. They weren’t
playing a big role at nomination conventions and so forth, and
that’s why Democrats kept nominating extreme candidates. It was
only after 1988 that they decide they can’t just critique, and
instead have to put out an agenda. So they created their think
tank, and their first paper said you don’t need to raise the
minimum wage, you should do the earned income tax credit. Then
they moved onto national service and welfare reform.”

This is exactly what the Republican Party hasn’t done.
There are, in corners of the Republican coalition, dissidents
calling for a new approach. A surprising number of conservatives
have, for instance, begun arguing that Republicans should break
up big banks. A few indefatigable thinkers, including Bloomberg
View’s Ramesh Ponnuru, continually argue that Republican tax
policy should be helping families rather than lowering rates on
the rich. A number of important voices in the party, including
Ryan, have called for a focus on restoring social mobility, but
the concerned rhetoric hasn’t been matched by serious policy.
None of these strands of thinking appears close to blossoming
into a new, or even slightly different, agenda.

That’s the problem with the Republican establishment
reasserting control. They’re still the establishment.

(Ezra Klein is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions
expressed are his own.)