Inside the GOP Mind: How to win, and lose, elections - Republican National Convention

National Review, August 28, 2000 by John O'Sullivan

Put yourself for a moment in the shoes of a conservative Republican delegate to the Philadelphia convention-don't get too agitated, it's just for a moment. You have just emerged from the convention hall, tired after shaking around to a sort of recycled bossa nova and looking for the address of a good chiropractor, when you run into some friends from the Iowa and downstate Illinois delegations. There are no television cameras or journalists around, so they are no longer smiling maniacally; underneath their elephant hats, their faces have resumed normal expressions of wariness and suspicion.

"What's up, boys?"

They scowl. One of them kicks moodily at a Log Cabin Republicans paper streamer advertising a "Carmen Miranda Latino Outreach Night."

"Whaddya mean, what's up?" replies another. "Is this a Republican convention or the annual dinner of the Bilingual Friends of Feminism? Frankly, I've had it up to my keister with tostadas and I'm beginning to wonder if the Bush people aren't going overboard with all this inclusiveness. Since when does being inclusive mean excluding Republicans? Or conservatives? Or white males? Or all three combined?"

"Sure, I know he'll cut my taxes-somewhat," chips in a third. "And intervene abroad only when absolutely necessary. And maybe appoint judges who draw the line at infanticide. That's fine as far as it goes. But why do we have to accept race preferences? And make America a bilingual society? And stop illegal immigration by making it legal? And drop our objections to balkanizing multiculturalism? If a Republican administration ratifies the radical reshaping of America as a nation based on group rights and ethnic identities, then we'll entrench that new order for two or three generations-the way Willkie, Dewey, and Ike entrenched FDR's New Deal. Well, I say it's spinach and I say to hell with it."

"Cheer up, boys," you say, waving a copy of the New York Times. "I've just been reading the biased liberal press and we've nothing to worry about. According to the media, this multicultural fiesta is just a charade. Underneath the salsa, everything is just as before. There's even a criticism of racial preferences hidden away in the party platform. And once the election is safely won, we can go back to eating hot dogs, speaking English, treating people on their merits, and advocating assimilation. Yippee!" Would you believe yourself, gentle reader? For there are a number of questionable calculations underlying the apparent Republican strategy as illustrated by the Philly convention, and as outlined to the Washington Post's Tom Edsall by Karl Rove, the Bush campaign's top strategist.

Rove suggested that the time had come to reject "the use of such issues as affirmative action, gay rights, and 'welfare queens' that past GOP candidates had employed in a calculated bid to polarize the electorate and put together a predominantly white majority." In this, he was supported by Ralph Reed, who criticized a strategy of ceding the black and Hispanic votes to the Democrats while seeking to drive the GOP's percentage of the white vote to over 70 percent. Reed added piously that George W. Bush would never "countenance . . . attempting to use affirmative action or issues like that that raise painful and polarizing emotions about race in order to win an election. He would rather lose the election." It is not clear from the text, however, whether this last statement had been cleared by the candidate.

Note that both Rove and Reed treat racial preferences purely as tactical wedge issues. Neither considers whether ethnically based legal privileges ought to be an issue of overriding principle-even though the American Revolution was explicitly justified on the grounds that all citizens should enjoy legal and political equality. That might explain why GOP leaders, on the rare occasions when they oppose preferences (or official bilingualism or illegal immigration), do so half-heartedly and without effect. They are haunted by a guilty fear that they are exploiting racial bigotry, but comfort themselves that at least they will do nothing about it after the election.

That said, let us examine the intellectual steps that lead to Karl Rove's conclusion and electoral strategy:

1. We fought on polarizing "wedge issues" in the last two elections-and lost.

In fact, neither of the last two GOP presidential campaigns was fought on such issues.

The 1992 convention attempted to make "family values" a GOP advantage by holding a notably saccharine family evening built around the Bushes. But when the media suggested that to praise families was implicitly to stigmatize gays and single moms, the 1992 Bush campaign backed smartly away from the issue-and ran a tepid campaign on nothing in particular. Similarly, the Dole campaign long resisted conservative pressure to support the anti-preference Proposition 209 in California until the very last moment when-against the pleas of 209's organizers and to avoid near-certain defeat in California-it backed it because it was a useful "wedge issue." The "divisive" 209 subsequently won with about 1.3 million more California votes than Dole achieved.