[img]1640|left|Arthur Christopher Schaper||no_popup[/img]In 2012, Republicans witnessed President Obama win re-election in spite of stagnant unemployment, a record number of welfare recipients (including food stamps), and a failing foreign policy.
The Republicans fled into their own bewildered wilderness to process this dismal showing. Just as the Democrats brushed off their defeats and lined up candidates for 2006 and 2008, so, too, the Republicans can reassess their mission, their message and prepare for successes in 2014 and 2016. Following their shocking, widespread losses in 2004, the DNC Chairman Howard Dean crafted a Fifty-State strategy, which won Democratic gains in Congress in 2006, followed by the White House in 2008. Before discussing how the Republicans can adopt a similar strategy, they must reflect, then refresh their playbook.
Predicting a North to South migration pattern, Republican President Richard Nixon set up the Southern Strategy in the 1960s. Combining conservative principles, states' rights, and federal subsidies for Southern states, Nixon transformed “Goldwater extremism” into “Silent Majority pragmatism” to sweep one Presidential election after another. After 1968, the Solid Democratic South crept steadily into Solid Republican. This metric worked in 1980, 1984,1988, and slightly more following the disruption of 2000 when the captious infighting over Florida ballots and recounts ultimately tallied the Sunshine state to Bush. In 2004, he rested on his incumbency to regain the White House.
How We Got Here
By 2008, the diversity of the country had tilted the electorate toward a more favorable role for government, “Many to Become the One.” The Republican Party still has the record on civil rights, individual liberty, and economic prosperity. Liquid population demographics, movement from the North to the South, have continued. In the South, more Alabama legislators, black and white, are switching to the GOP, including Artur Davis, a former Obama acolyte. He moved to Virginia and converted to the GOP. He spoke at the Republican National Convention on behalf of Gov. Romney.
Today, the Southern Strategy no longer is capitalized on GOP essentials. A region dominated by old, white males has become the standard, the brand of the Republican Partythat threatens to drag the national conference into a regional orbit. More party-switching is needed on the West Coast, in the Northeast, in Chicago and its urban environs. The GOP can develop its own Fifty State strategy. Pay less attention to regions, more attention to creed and to culture as they relate to the principles and values of a community.
GOP in Concert with Immigrants
New immigrants respect the message encapsulating the values for future Republican voters. These communities are not destined to become Democratic, as they did in New York City during the Gilded Age. Republicans can provide resources for immigrants that would surpass welfarism, which inevitably turns into warfare against their long-term prosperity. One summer in the Orange County community of Westminster, I spoke with first-generation Vietnamese immigrants. As registered Republicans, they complained that the Democratic Party spent time and money on the poor without protecting the rights of others. Fleeing from grinding poverty following the Vietcong purge of professionals and businessman, their disdain focused not on the poor, but on the government’s failed solutions.
He Was a Joke Only Temporarily
As for Dean, the former governor of Vermont, he may have screeched himself into a laughing-stock after his dismal third-place finish following the 2004 Iowa caucuses. However, his Fifty State strategy (http://www.democrats.org/about/fifty_state_strategy) deserves scrutiny. The Democratic National Committee risked offending Progressives and leftists when they took conservative Pennsylvania away from Sen. Rick Santorum with pro-life challenger Democrat Bob Casey. Republicans can phase out the Democratic dominance of Washington state, Oregon, even Massachusetts and Maine by tolerating (not necessarily accommodating) more diverse views. Since the older, socially conservative generation is dying out, young conservatives are emphasizing fiscal restraint over social prohibitions. Marriage, as a private matter, is a more consistently conservative argument. Churches can retain their authority to join in holy matrimony according to the dictates of their religious conscience or their congregants’ communal decisions.
Following the liberalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington state, Republicans should champion decriminalization (or at least defederalization) of controlled substances since it was Democrat FDR who criminalized cannabis in the first place. Nixon and his Republican acolytes (including Ben Stein) cobbled together a civil rights coalition while integrating Southern voters. The GOP can reflect urban and coastal interests without alienating the rural regions of the country. They can forge new alliances with evangelical voters and libertarian social views, and expand a party dedicated to the fiscal prosperity and individual liberty of all creeds and cultures.
Arthur Christopher Schaper is a writer and blogger on issues both timeless and timely; political, cultural, and eternal. A lifelong resident of Southern California, he currently lives in Torrance. He may be contacted at arthurschaper@hotmail.com, aschaper1.blogspot.com and at asheisministries.blogspot.com. Also see waxmanwatch.blogspot.com
