The McCain Moment and the Future of the GOP

Portrait of Theodore Roosevelt by John Singer Sargent

Photo of Robert M. LaFollette from Wikipedia

Of late on the GOP campaign trail talk among the leading contenders has been all about who can best lay claim to being the true heir of the most beloved Republican president in history since the Great Emancipator namely – Ronald Wilson Reagan. And one of the leading Democratic candidates, Barack Obama, has gotten himself into some tepid water within his own party by citing Reagan as a president who changed history. Frank Rich, always a reliable barometer for the state of snarkiness in liberal ranks, was moved Sunday to snort that Ronald Reagan Is Still Dead. Now I've been reading Frank Rich since the early '70s when I was an undergraduate at William & Mary and Frank was a young writer for the raffish Richmond Mercury which he started along with Harvard chums Garrett Epps and Harry Stein (the latter having since become an apostate from the church of modern American liberalism).

But Mr. Rich is on to something here. The old Reagan coalition of national defense hawks, social values conservatives, and anti-tax, pro-growth business advocates, never an easy alliance to begin with, is rent and probably cannot be reconfigured as before. Some of the reasons for this are demographic as outlined in my earlier piece The Coming Democratic Majority? but others have much to do with the party itself as typified by the last eight years come to fruition in the intellectual exhaustion and corruption of the 109th Congress made large by the Abramoff scandal and the rent-seeking of Grover Norquist's K Street Project. Throw in a dramatically worsening economic outlook and the likely prospect of a recession and the future for the GOP this year looks as chilly as today's weather.

But need this all come to pass for the GOP both next year and down the road? The answer is yes if the party buries its head like an ostrich and tries to coast along as the Democrats did until Bill Clinton's leading them from the presidential political barrens with the DLC-inspired "Third Way" in the early '90s. But with John McCain the party has a chance to begin to reconfigure itself and set the underpinnings of what could be a Republican comeback. For guidance as to light the way McCain should, when he gets the nomination as I believe he will, look back a century and take as his sherpas two giants of American political history Republicans Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Robert M. "Fighting Bob" LaFollette of Wisconsin.

Both TR and LaFollette made their political bones challenging the entrenched interests of their times namely the railroad trusts and the other monopolies of America's Gilded Age (does the Justice Department's antitrust division even exist within the Bush DOJ). Their efforts gave us the precursor to the Interstate Commerce Commission and what now is known as the FDA and the Progressive Party founded by TR and later carried on by his sometimes enemy LaFollete remains the most successful in US history although it carries a cautionary tale for today since most of the Roosevelt men later returned to the GOP when the more progressive Charles Evans Hughes was nominated for president in 1916 and later would find themselves in the political wilderness before signing on to the New Deal coalition that would elect FDR in 1932.

The challenge for McCain, as a noted contrarian when it comes to recent GOP orthodoxy, will be to unite the party in the coming election and avoid the fratricide which doomed the original Progressives. He can certainly do this with the defense hawks and his social values stances are squarely within the party for the most part. Where the rub will come, aside from the idiocy of the "build the fence and kick them out" crowd on immigration which recent elections in Virginia proved cannot possibly make a difference on a larger stage, is with the corporate wing of the GOP. But here too he can make his appeal over their heads (where else are they going to go – the Democrats?) with a smart play against larger monopolies that are anti-competitive (witness Bank of America's recent announcement of a bargain basement buy of troubled mortgage lender Countrywide and of course the laughable Telecommunications Act of 1996 which has only fostered noncompetitiveness in the information age) and making an appeal to the Main St. versus Wall St. part of the GOP which Reagan courted and wed so successfully. To prove his bona fides on taxes and spending he should appeal to former GOP Congressman John Kasich, always a reliable fighter against corporate welfare, and Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn who has joined him in the anti-pork barreling coalition which reached its zenith under the 109th Congress. On taxes he should propose a broad-based carbon tax as a full or partial replacement for the current FICA tax on wage-earners as outlined by Tufts University economist Gilbert Metcalf but stay away from the "cap and trade" part of such a tax proposed by the Democrats which promises only more favor-seeking on K Street.

In summary, Karl Rove thought he was going to rebuild a GOP majority for a generation in taking as his model his hero William McKinley and McKinley's "brain" Mark Hanna. It would highly ironic, to say the least, if instead the new Republican standard bearer looked back not to McKinley but to his heterodox vice president Theodore Roosevelt as the beacon to light the way.

Back To Top