Northern Strategy
Can the GOP become a national party again?
BY BRENDAN MINITER
Tuesday, March 27, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Remember Christie Todd Whitman?
As recently as four years ago she was held up as a symbol that the Republican Party was moving away from its conservative roots and would maintain national dominance by appealing to moderate, suburban women. Ms. Whitman herself won two terms as governor of New Jersey and was tapped to run the Environmental Protection Agency by George W. Bush. She left government in 2003, published a book called "It's My Party Too" and created a political action committee aimed at establishing her as a moderate anchor for the GOP.
She then precipitously sank into political oblivion as her party sailed on without her. It's not likely she'll make more than a cameo appearance at next year's Republican National Convention or, for that matter, at any other high-profile Republican event. She won't, we can be confident, persuade many voters to follow her lead with whomever she endorses for president. In a few more years, no one will remember who she is or why she was once an important political figure.
Now another former governor of a Mid-Atlantic state, Maryland Republican Robert Ehrlich, is writing a book aimed at influencing the future of his party. His working title is "Not Your Father's Republican Party," and his aim, unlike Ms. Whitman's, isn't to push the GOP into the mushy middle. In a visit to The Wall Street Journal's offices recently, Mr. Ehrlich said he'll offer this advice to his fellow Republicans: Elect a strong leader. Don't shy away from taking on controversial issues, even those involving race. Return to economic and fiscally conservative principles. And "never apologize when you're right."
Will he be more successful than Ms. Whitman? Last year Rudy Giuliani campaigned for him and before Election Day was telling Republicans in other states to emulate Mr. Ehrlich's strategy of winning votes in a heavily Democratic state by forcefully sticking up for conservative principles. Mr. Ehrlich says he'd likely be on a short list of potential vice-presidential candidates, if he hadn't been unseated in November.
Politics is a rough-and-tumble sport, and Mr. Ehrlich is advocating making contact with the other team. But he's also advocating an idea that, like the Yale-Harvard football rivalry, once ran strong in the imagination of the practitioners of the game: that to be nationally competitive, a party has to be regionally balanced. For Republicans this would mean regaining a balance the party has steady let slip away since the 1968 presidential election, when Southern states started to huddle with the GOP, and that hasn't seemed necessary in an era when the last two Republican presidents have come from Texas, when two successive House majority leaders also hailed from the Lone Star State, and when the first Republican speaker of the House in four decades came from Georgia.
Nonetheless, in last year's elections the trend was clearly in favor of Democratic dominance of the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Upper Midwest. Republicans were all but wiped out in the Northeast. There is now just one GOP member of the House in all of New England, Rep. Chris Shays of Connecticut. Republicans were turned out en masse in New Hampshire, where Democrats now control both House seats, the governor's mansion and both houses of the state Legislature. Gov. Mitt Romney opted to run for president instead of re-election in Massachusetts, making it all but impossible for the GOP to hold onto his seat. Democrats also won gubernatorial elections in Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland. Connecticut's Republican Gov. H. Jodi Rell won her election, but she's now pushing the largest tax increase in recent memory. If another Republican manages to win her post within a generation, it will be a minor political miracle.
Presidential candidates have long detailed proposals on education, economics and national security. Each person running for the White House over the next year will be forced to take a position on Iraq, the Bush tax cuts and funding for embryonic stem cell research. Candidates will be forced to reveal their ideas on school choice, abortion and health care. Sen. Barack Obama over the weekend took a hit among Democratic loyalists for not having a more detailed plan on creating a federally funded, universal health care program. He won't make that mistake again.
But what Mr. Ehrlich is arguing for is a forceful party that competes in all regions of the country by focusing on core conservative principles--tax cuts, low regulation, marriage and the like--to rebuild in Michigan, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania and even New England. The idea of a need for a regionally balanced party isn't new, of course. Virginian Thomas Jefferson understood the political necessity in running with New Yorker Aaron Burr to unseat, in a close election, incumbent president and Massachusetts native John Adams in 1800. The electoral math today is similarly demanding. President Bush prevailed in 2000 and 2004 by winning Ohio and Florida. Unless Republicans make inroads in other Northern states, in 2008 Hillary Clinton could win the presidency by losing both Ohio and Florida and carrying instead Colorado, Iowa and Missouri.
The X-factor in next year's presidential election is the accelerated presidential primary schedule, which may enable a candidate who might otherwise be sidelined to win his party nomination. New York's legislature recently voted to move the state's presidential primary to "Super Duper Tuesday," Feb. 5 next year. That would send Empire State voters to the polls on the same day that voters in more than a dozen other states, including California, also head to the polls. The calendar may give an edge to Mr. Giuliani or another candidate not beloved by social conservatives.
Last week Mr. Ehrlich joined the presidential fray and endorsed Mr. Giuliani. Whether the former governor is much remembered four years hence will likely now depend on whether the former mayor of New York is an anchor for his party in states where it risks being swept out to sea.
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.
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