New Englanders favor a practical approach

Look to future, not back, say GOP governors

MIAMI - Other state executives may have come to the Republican Governors Association annual conference with a list of recriminations and 10-point plans for GOP renewal, but the two New Englanders who traveled to Miami this week did not have much to say about what their presidential nominee could have done better.

Their party had, after all, in many ways picked the candidate who seemed perfectly cast to star in New England: an idiosyncratic fiscal skinflint who wore sweater vests under his suits and liked to play the pragmatic independent.

"I thought Senator [John] McCain would be more successful," Vermont Governor Jim Douglas lamented in an interview Thursday. "I thought he might provide an appeal as someone around whom New Englanders could rally."

Despite early declarations from McCain strategists that he could be competitive in states such as Connecticut and Maine, his only sustained effort in the region came in New Hampshire, which he eventually lost by nearly 10 points. But the unpopularity of Republicans during the Bush era - based on the notion that the party had prized ideology over competence - likely doomed McCain from the outset there, those strategists now acknowledge.

Now New England (and the Northeast more broadly) sends no Republicans to the House of Representatives, and is as far out of reach for its presidential nominees as any region has been for a party in the modern era.

"In that kind of milieu, the fact that the result came out the way it did was pretty understandable," said Rhode Island Governor Donald Carcieri. "At the gubernatorial level, we're actually having success. The question is the national agenda in Congress and the Senate."

Neither Douglas nor Carcieri participated in any of the soul-searching panels that filled the three-day conference. A third Republican governor from New England, Connecticut's Jodi Rell, opted to skip the trip to save taxpayer money. "She felt her time is better spent here in Connecticut," said spokesman Adam Liegeot. (Her predecessor John Rowland, who served prison time for a corruption conviction, filled the void: He cut a prominent figure around the conference.)

Carcieri said that to be competitive again in New England, the party needs to build a new generation of town councilors who could help Republicans organize locally and offset some of the Democrats' national advantages: "They're the farm system, if you will, and that's withered in both parties over the decades."

Douglas was repeatedly celebrated during the conference for winning reelection this month by a sizable margin even as Obama carried over two-thirds of the votes in his state. Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour said the results showed that Douglas was "strong as an acre of garlic."

"What works is not ideological, it's practical," Douglas said.

Neither Douglas nor Carcieri, however, laid out much of a short-term plan for a resurgence in the Northeast. "It's like when you're swimming against a riptide," said Carcieri. "The best thing you can do is only go ahead of it until you find an opening."