McCain's defeat poses threat to GOP's short-term ambitions
After painful loss, the deflated party looks for answers
PHOENIX - Hours before the sun broke on Election Day, a sleepless and emotionally worn John McCain closed out his campaign on the steps of the Yavapai County Courthouse in Prescott, Ariz., where his predecessor Barry Goldwater had ended his own presidential run in 1964.
Goldwater would go on the following day to lose in a historic landslide, carrying only six states, in the Deep South and his native Arizona, and under 40 percent of the popular vote nationwide. The results provoked instant recriminations among Republicans, with many saying the nominee's hard-line ideology had doomed his candidacy and jeopardized the party's future.
"There was a ferocious reckoning and ferocious purge of conservatives from the corridors of power," said Rick Perlstein, a historian who has written about Goldwater and Richard Nixon, one of the few Republicans who argued that Goldwater's robust rejection of government was not to blame for his loss. Four years later, Nixon rose to the presidency, inaugurating a generation of Republican dominance assembled in large part on Goldwater's failure.
On Tuesday, McCain reenacted his own version of Goldwater's loss, not as large in margin but nearly as threatening to his party's short-term ambitions. Yesterday, House minority whip Roy Blunt stepped down from his post, the first victim of another reckoning certain to dominate the party's internal deliberations for years and shape the way it determines its congressional leadership and selects a nominee in 2012.
"There is going to be a real struggle. Not about the enormity of the defeat for the Republicans, but why," said former Oklahoma congressman Mickey Edwards.
That debate has already begun, as those on the right rushed Wednesday morning to autopsy the corpse of the McCain candidacy, diagnose survivors, and prescribe a new course of treatment for the future. It was also an occasion for ideological triage, as activists tried to separate the fortunes of the party's right and its center.
"The liberal wing of the GOP has caused the collapse of the Republican Party. . . . For a decade it has spat on the values of Ronald Reagan," L. Brent Bozell III, an activist, said in a statement Wednesday. He hosted a passel of conservative-movement veterans at his home yesterday in Virginia to strategize on the party's future.
The election's outcome is a "fairly thorough repudiation" of the party's governing style, said Peter Wehner, a former deputy assistant to President Bush. "The Republican Party is in worse shape than conservatism," he said. "The problem with the Republican Party is that it is not speaking the language and addressing the concerns of the middle class."
Democrats made great gains this year in some of the fastest-growing parts of the South and Mountain West, boosted by expanded support from young voters, suburbanites, and Hispanics. The results demonstrated Republicans had become "a white, rural, regional party," retiring US Representative Tom Davis of Virginia lamented on Tuesday.
Jennifer Blei Stockman, chair of the Republican Majority for Choice, an abortion rights group, said, "I think the Republicans were so connected with the ideology of their base because of Sarah Palin's addition to the ticket that it dissuaded many Republicans and independents who would have voted for McCain."
"This is the third presidential election where Karl Rove has put the party on the wrong course. It was only a matter of time before it would really start to hurt us in electoral races, from the president to the House," continued Stockman, whose group is planning its own strategy session with fellow moderates from the Republican Leadership Council and the Main Street Partnership. "For us, this is expected."
However, many conservatives, including those who days ago joined McCain in criticizing Obama as a doctrinaire leftist and even a "socialist," claimed that his victory did not in fact represent an affirmation of liberalism.
"Conservatives should be reassured that our president-elect did not seek an ideological mandate in this election, nor did he receive one," Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, a McCain ally, said in a statement Wednesday. "The failure of the Republican Party in this election does not represent the failure of conservatism, but of the big government Republicanism that took over our party in 1996."
Some sharing Coburn's position pointed to exit polls showing little shift in the percentage of voters who described themselves as "conservative." House Minority Leader John Boehner, whose caucus lost its last Northeastern member on Tuesday, wrote to his colleagues that "America remains a center-right country."
Wehner, the former Bush aide, tried to cast Obama's victory as something of a win for a conservative agenda. "He tacked right on a number of issues," he said, citing the candidate's positions in favor a federal wiretapping program and a broad array of tax cuts, and against a federal mandate requiring individuals own health insurance.
The Republican debate recalled one held by Democrats just four years ago, after Bush's victory over John Kerry appeared to install a new - and potentially enduring - era of Republican leadership. Democratic bookshelves were quickly filled with tomes whose covers bore lines like "A National Party No More" and "How the Republicans Stole the South and the Heartland and What the Democrats Must Do to Run 'Em Out."
"The Democratic Party did a lot of hard work with regard to its core principles, rethinking the role of the state," said Perlstein. "Now we're at this moment where Republicans say, 'If only we had followed with more steadfast purity, everything would have turned out alright.' They need to interrogate the core principles of conservatism and, until they do, they're not ready to govern." 