By Elvin Lim
In recent weeks, factions within the Republican party have begun jostling for power within the conservative movement. This is the bitter-sweet inevitability of being more than the party in opposition, but also a party recently co-opted into power. Whether the disagreement is between Rick Santorum versus Sarah Palin, or the Family Research Council versus GOProud , or Tea Party members of Congress and moderate Republicans debating the budget, or William Kristol and Glenn Beck on democracy in Egypt, these differences are only going to grow as we head toward Republican primary season.
There are, of course, differences in priorities within the Democratic fold as well. But the source of the president’s incumbency advantage derives from the fact that these differences will not be played out during the primary season. He will likely enjoy the benefit of not being challenged. So when Republican candidates are invariably jostling for advantage, the president can simply go about his business, looking presidential (and raising money.)
The reason why Ronald Reagan’s historical legacy has been revised upwards in recent times is because the children of his revolution know of no better way to hold themselves together. Or put another way, the celebration of Reagan only reveals the dearth of leadership in the conservative movement, which is still looking to the past because they cannot yet see anyone who can take them to victory in the future.
At this time in the 2008 cycle, Barack Obama had already declared his candidacy, alongside a formidable front-runner, Hillary Clinton.
Today, there is a long, lackluster, and uncommitted list of potential candidates on the Republican side (so much so that even Donald Trump managed to steal the show at this year’s CPAC Conference), but no major candidate has taken the plunge. Why? Because whoever takes the first plunge would become the universal target of all those not yet declared, and will suffer the irony that the first-mover advantage becomes the first-victim-of-infighting disadvantage. The more potential candidates predict infighting, the later they will declare, so that they can stay above the fray for as long as they can. No one candidate feels confident enough to pull the three major strands of conservatism – the libertarians, the social conservatives, and the neo-conservatives – together, and this is why Reagan is still the godfather revered.
Watch the lesser known candidates be among the first to declare as they would be able to secure some national media attention when the Reagan Library hosts the first Republican primary debate for the season on May 2, 2011. The better known candidates have more to lose and less to gain by declaring early.
In particular, s/he who waits until the situation in Egypt as well as the budget battle between the President and Congress unfolds would better be able to pivot toward the emerging priorities of the conservative movement. If Egypt transitions into a democracy friendly to US interests, then neo-conservatives of the Kristol variety would have won the argument
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks a Reagan and the Tea Party Movement. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.
In 1966, Ronald Reagan won his first political campaign in a landslide victory against the two-term Democratic Governor of California, Edmund Brown. What is sometimes forgotten is that the preceding Republican primary had been a highly contested one. According to Reagan, it was “very bitter at times, largely because of the lingering split between conservatives and moderates in the state party.” The intra-party attacks became so heated that state Republican chairman, Gaylord Parkinson, proposed the Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican,” a rule that Ronald Reagan obeyed ever since because the intra-party strife he experienced in his first political contest left him with a bitter taste in his mouth. Henceforth, his political career was dedicated to building coalitions and fitting as many people as he could squeeze under the Republican tent.
Forty years later, on the day on which Reagan would have celebrated his 99th birthday, Sarah Palin called on his memory when she delivered the keynote address at the first National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, TN, rehearsing a litany of bumper sticker lines that the Old Gipper would have approved. But Sarah Palin is no Ronald Reagan.
While like Palin, Reagan exuded charm and a common touch; unlike Sarah Palin and the general tenor of the Tea Party movement, he was not categorically, viscerally, or paradoxically anti-establishment. While Sarah Palin has admitted to being a pittbull with lipstick, Ronald Reagan was no pittbull. He was as as mellow and as measured as politicians came. He didn’t feel dispossessed or victimized. And if he felt it, he never showed the one sentiment – even if it had been legitimate – that permeates the Tea Party Movement: anger. Red, hot, seething, Glenn Beck Fury.
Most illustratively, Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers do not believe
in the 11th Commandment. Next week, Palin is off to campaign for Texas Governor Rick Perry against his primary challenger, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson. Palin has already campaigned against Dede Scoozzafava running for election in NY 23, where she had supported Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman because he had “not been anointed by any political machine.” At Nashville, she reiterated her support for intra-party competition: “Despite what the pundits want you to think, contested primaries aren’t civil war. They’re democracy at work, and that’s beautiful.”
Democracy at work – grassroots movements without the backbone of a machine – has too often, in a dominant two-party system such as the US is, meant politicians out of a job. To survive after the surge of populist disaffection at a recession has subsided and to be more than a spoiler in elections, the Tea Party Movement must, paradoxically, go mainstream. And it should take it from a icon they have wrongly called their own. Ronald Reagan pulled the various factions of the Right together under a large, fusionist electoral tent that delivered him to victory. Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers are trying to do the reverse and (perhaps inadvertently) break this tent up in a battle fo
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and 
author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at the Republican Party. See his previous OUPblogs here.
A political movement is not the same as the party that claims to represent it. And the disconnect between the Republican party and the conservative movement is sharper today than it has ever been since the heyday of the Reagan revolution. Consider the rising star of Glenn Bleck – as if one Rush Limbaugh isn’t enough – and the marginalization of Michael Steele, who wasn’t even invited to speak at last weekend’s march in Washington and who was denied the opportunity to speak at a Chicago Tea party in April. The angry voices in town-halls and the national mall are not evidence that the Republican party has found its voice, but that it hasn’t. When citizens feel that elected officials don’t speak for us, we take up arms ourselves (sometimes, literally).
The Reagan coalition is fraying, because the libertarian faction of the conservative movement has had enough of sitting at the back of the movement’s bus. For too long, they bought Ronald Reagan’s and George Bush’s argument that expensive and deficit-increasing wars are a necessary evil to combat a greater evil, but the bailout of the big banks last Fall was the last straw for them. If Irving Kristol once said that neoconservatives are converted liberals (like Ronald Reagan himself) who had been “mugged by reality,” Tea Partiers are conservatives who have woken up to the fact that neoconseratives are no different from pre-Vietnam-era liberals chasing after utopian
dreams.
The reason why Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are the heroes of the movement, and Michael Steele is persona non grata, is because fiscal conservatives no longer trust the Republican party who for too long has placed their agenda on the backburner. This, in turn, has been brought on by the fact that neoconservatives have lost their privileged status within the movement because of the delegitimation of the adventure in Iraq and the onset of the economic recession. While the end of the Cold War vindicated neoconservatism, the events of September 11 gave it a new lease of life. Together, these two contingent facts of history contributed considerably to the longevity of the Reagan revolution, even as the botched and expensive adventure in Iraq put a screeching halt on the neoconservative ascendancy.
Americans today face a crisis in their pocketbooks and not with foreign nations. Tax-and-spend liberals are a worthy enemy, but they are nowhere as scary or as unifying as the “Evil Empire” or the “Axis of Evil.”
This is why Republican public officials are doing a lot of soul searching these days as they try to make sense of the disconnect between their ideology and party that has been brought on by neoconservatism’s decline. The lack of coordination and indeed the widening chasm between the party and the movement can be evidenced in Arlen Specter’s cross-over to the Democratic aisle, Senator George Voinovich’s complaint that his party was being “taken over by Southerners,” and in Olympia Snowe’s and Susan Collins’ overtures to Barack Obama.
Most people will agree that we know exactly what Barack Obama is up to, politically. The right-wing talk-show hosts will be the first to tell us. But we really do not know what the Republican party stands for or who could possibly lead it in 2012. This is because the party has lost its synthesizing logic and lacks a unifying hero. This weekend, a straw poll conducted at the Values Voters Summit put Mike Huckabee on top, with 28 percent of the vote, because the straw pollers are Values Voters, who constitute yet another faction within the conservative movement. But what was more telling is that even though Sarah Palin did not even turn up for the event, she nevertheless garnered the same endorsement as Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, and Mike Pence, at 12% each. This is conservatism in
search of a leader.
Because it is parties that win elections and not movements, Republican members of congress should not be taking any comfort from the passionate protests of the Tea Partiers. Instead, they should be embarrassed about the fact that they have been trying to play catch up with a movement that has lost hope in its elected officials. More importantly, the Republican party must find a new way to unite the neoconservative, libertarian, and traditionalist factions of the movement to have any chance of standing up against a president and party, who in 2010, could well be riding the wave of an economic recovery to electoral success.
