RNC chairman Reince Priebus has promised to establish dialogues with groups such as LULAC La Raza and the NAACP which strikes us as unhelpful and willfully blind to the fact that such groups are ideologically opposed to Republican principles.
The Republican National Committees Growth and Opportunity Project" the widely commented-upon 100-page autopsy of GOP defeat released on Monday is quite the technical feat as the report itself is wont to boast: 52000 contacts made" 800 conference calls" 50 focus groups" 3000 group listening sessions" with project co-chairs extensive polls of women and Hispanics and so on. But for all the analytic exertion has the document lighted on the source of the GOPs recent electoral woes or plausibly plotted a course correction? Unfortunately the answer on both counts is not really.
The report opens with a prcis of the agglomerated conventional wisdom of the last several months: The Republican party is out of touch; people think it doesnt care"; it preaches to the choir instead of appealing to potential converts; it needs to reach out to minorities women and young people. There is truth in each of these which is how they got to be platitudes. But the action items recommended to address these issues are heavy on committee formation (e.g. a Growth and Opportunity Inclusion Council" with representatives from the African-American Asian-American Hispanic Native American and other" communities) and tokenism (the reports No. 1 recommendation for reaching out to minorities is to put minorities in charge of outreach). To implement this aspect of the document RNC chairman Reince Priebus has promised to establish dialogues with groups such as LULAC La Raza and the NAACP which strikes us as unhelpful and willfully blind to the fact that such groups are ideologically opposed to Republican principles. A truly conservative minority-outreach strategy would severely weaken these groups by challenging their claims to represent their respective ethnicities.
In reality selling the Republican partys appeal is more about the appeal than about the selling. And there are narrow limits on what organizational rejiggering can do to make the party more attractive. The heavy lifting is going to require imagination and an appetite for risk and it is going to have to be done by strong candidates and policy entrepreneurs.
Where the report does get into policy most notably on the issue of immigration reform its analysis is shallow and its recommendations opportunistic. Much is pinned on the empirically dubious claim that George W. Bush won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004 and a nexus is drawn between this factoid and the former presidents conciliatory rhetoric on immigration. But nowhere does the document offer a substantive argument in favor of the kind of comprehensive immigration reform on offer in Washington or even come close to demonstrating that support for such a program would accrue Republicans more votes than it lost them considering that Hispanics are often ideologically liberal for reasons beyond immigration.
Still the partys proposals for consolidating the primary calendar and erecting reasonable limits on the number and frequency of debates are worthy of close consideration. The 2012 primary was unwieldy its sheer length exacerbated the Democrats incumbent advantage in fundraising and organization and the debates produced diminishing returns. Moreover the reports extended look at campaign mechanics data collection and new opportunities for fundraising marks the start of a critical retooling process for the party. The good news about the fact that the size of the 2012 loss was significantly due to technological and organizational disadvantage is that this is correctable. And in the end the most important contribution of the national party apparatus may be to correct it.
Whether it can do more than that is a much bigger question. But little in the report suggests it can.