Peggy Noonan writes astutely (as she always does) in today’s Wall Street Journal about the continued inability of Republicans to earn broader support than their Democratic rivals, even when Democrats in Congress are on their heels and their President at his nadir. What she gets absolutely right in particular is the importance of branding, of reputation, in this. Democrats still benefit from their perceived history of the broadminded rich joining with the blue collar masses for the betterment of the entire society, with a bit of fun thrown in to lighten things up (think JFK and FDR sharing a beer with Andy Stern, though this is my image, not hers). Republicans, on the other hand, are saddled with their aura of the stern grandfather (this is her image) who paid his bills on time and made sure his grandkids did their chores. That’s not the sort of image that will win hearts (though it can win minds), and it’s even worse when you don’t do it very well, which was the case for Republicans during the Bush-Hastert years. To sum her article up any further is both dangerous (she’s too good) and unnecessary (her piece is less than a 1000 words); read it here.
At one point, Republicans had a winning brand which coupled skepticism about government’s ability to improve people’s lives with a robust faith in private institutions — neighborhoods, associations, churches, the free market — to do the same. That brand, of course, was Reaganism. It was effective enough to win three presidential elections by landslides; in the 1980, 1984, and 1988 Presidential elections, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush won a grand total of 1440 electoral votes to 173 for Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis (this is not a typo). It propelled congressional Republicans in 1994 to their first House majority in 40 years, and it pushed George W. Bush (much more Reagan’s ideological progeny than his own father’s) to a victory in 2000 that a strong economy and world at peace should have made impossible.
Optimism carries with it a responsibility to be prudent, and Republicans lost their way in the last decade because they gave prudence a back seat. But I don’t think that’s the biggest thorn in the Republican brand’s side right now. Much more important was the slow freeze of the middle class economy over the same years, as homeowners and homebuyers substituted debt and leverage for income, finally cracking up entirely in 2008. The free market economy, which Republicans deeply and sincerely trusted to create a rising tide for the entire country, failed. And if trust in a free market economy is a lynchpin of your entire philosophy and brand, that’s a big problem.
My point here is that until Republicans wade deep into the fundamentals of today’s economy — driven much more by innovation, risk, and ideas than it has ever been — and how to make it work for our entire society, it will never again be able to project that confident faith in the future that made the Reagan brand so utterly compelling. That kind of examination will be uncomfortable; new thinking always is. Sacred cows will need to explain why they’re still sacred; blasphemies will need a chance to show they’re not so sacrilegious. But without it, as a party they’ll always be dependent for success at the polls on Democratic ineptitude. And that can’t last forever.
