Republicans Reassess, Reflect, Reconsider
Intellectual resurgence budding at the GOP grassroots
Wed, 28 Jan 2009 13:40:00
A few weeks ago, Ed Cox and Bill Powers were sitting on the set of Fox & Friends—the morning gabfest on the cable home of conservative politics—when conversation turned to the intellectual sclerosis affecting the Republican Party.
“Give me one good idea,” Cox, son-in-law of Richard Nixon and chair of the McCain campaign in New York, challenged Powers.
So Powers—the gravelly former Marine, state party chair and Al D’Amato avatar—tried one out: Mandatory arbitration for medical malpractice claims. The state should mandate, Powers argued, that patients take their claims against hospitals to independent arbitrators, rather than through the courts. Such a system, he said, would immediately wipe away exorbitant rewards for patients and discourage frivolous lawsuits, bringing down health insurance costs in New York.
The idea needed vetting. It required careful kneading, poll testing and translation into political language. It was also bound to agitate any number of interest groups—tort lawyers, patients’ rights advocates, labor unions—and would need to be padded with features that would make it more digestible for voters.
But it was an idea. And, they believed, a viable one.
The conversation was just one of many touched off within GOP circles across the state after the party was cast out of power in November—and not just among Republican power brokers on sound stages. The chatter has bubbled up on the Internet, at dinner tables and, as one party operative put it, “in dark little corners of restaurants.”
An intellectual resurgence, at the lowest levels of the party, has begun to sprout. Sort of.
Now that their party has lost the majority in the State Senate—that was the last stronghold in the state—Republicans readily rattle off a litany of well-publicized missteps that caused the collapse. Among the main contenders: the awkward alliance that Gov. George Pataki (R) struck with labor unions in 2002; big-spending county executives in places like Nassau and Erie that drove local governments deep into debt; and harping on volatile social issues, such as gay marriage.
Politically adept Democrats, meanwhile, co-opted many of the Republicans’ signature issues, such as property tax reform, government efficiency and spending restraint, even seizing the old intellectual pipelines through which new Republican policies have tended to flow.
“We are constantly having meetings with elected officials and party officials who come to us looking for ideas,” said Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute, which made its name funneling ideas to the Rudolph Giuliani’s administration when he was mayor of New York. “And overwhelmingly, these days, those people are Democrats.”
However, now that Republicans have been pushed from power, some detect an opportunity to reengineer the conventional role of the opposition party and generate new and innovative policy ideas, freed from the constraints on a party in a power.
As one state senator, walking into a post-election meeting in Albany, put it: “I can be a Republican now.”
Republicans across the state have begun to patch together a new intellectual framework to reassemble the channels through which policy ideas flow—or, at the very minimum, create the space for an internal debate about what the party should stand for.
“I think there’s going to be some differences, but I think that’s healthy because we really do want to be a party that’s viable statewide and show that we are alive,” said Jay Dutcher, chairman of the Ontario County Republican Party.
In order to show voters and the political establishment that the party still has life, Republicans have to at least do something worth noticing, say Dutcher and his allies, even if this means scraping and clawing over the ideological essence of the party.
Dutcher and a group of Rochester-area Republicans have sketched the initial blueprints for what they believe will be the first generation of a new intellectual infrastructure for the party. He is currently planning, along with state party leaders, a series of caucuses and receptions scattered throughout the state to act as mobile think tanks, putting policy experts, party leaders and grassroots activists together in one room.
Dutcher acknowledges that the regional fractures running through the party may make that a messy process. But the most effective salve for what ails the Republican Party, he said, is a vibrant intellectual debate—even if it exposes the party’s ideological fissures.
“It’s so the state leadership will have an opportunity to hear from people outside the Albany-New York City orbit,” explaining the thinking behind the effort. “The party needs to be a statewide party, not just focused in a couple of areas.”
Whether Dutcher or any other revolutionary can be effective while Senate Minority Leader Dean Skelos (R-Nassau) and state Chair Joseph Mondello remain in charge is an open question. They have looked toward their own solutions, like Mondello’s December appointment of former state Tax Commissioner Andrew Eristoff to head a commission with the official mission of providing “a clear assessment of where we are now and help develop a blueprint to move forward.”
Eristoff himself admitted, however, that the commission’s main purpose is fundraising, and that searching for new ideas is not much of a focus. To some frustrated Republicans, this is symptomatic of state party leaders’ traditional unwillingness to engage in open ideological debates for fear that these might fracture the party along regional and cultural lines and expose those divisions to the rest of the political establishment.
But after their string of losses, Mondello, Skelos and their allies may no longer have the credibility necessary to deflate such efforts—a weakness other power brokers clearly sense.
Cox, who is speculated to be interested in a run for office himself in 2010 or possibly a bid for state chair, and 2006 gubernatorial candidate John Faso, for example, have assembled their own political action committee, which they will operate, along with a clutch of fellow Republican big-wigs, parallel to the state party infrastructure. They hope to use it as a think tank as much as a fundraising arm, taking ideas like Powers’ health care proposal and turning them into policy proposals that can be branded as Republican and fed to candidates throughout the state—and that the public can easily digest.
“The key to this is to continue to work to make sure that you’ve got a coherent governing philosophy and political strategy to make sure that folks know what you stand for,” Faso said. “And that’s where I think we’ve collectively fallen down.”
--
ABOVE: Grassroots Republicans and several former leaders are preparing to challenge state GOP leaders to have full-fledged debates about ideology.
“Give me one good idea,” Cox, son-in-law of Richard Nixon and chair of the McCain campaign in New York, challenged Powers.
So Powers—the gravelly former Marine, state party chair and Al D’Amato avatar—tried one out: Mandatory arbitration for medical malpractice claims. The state should mandate, Powers argued, that patients take their claims against hospitals to independent arbitrators, rather than through the courts. Such a system, he said, would immediately wipe away exorbitant rewards for patients and discourage frivolous lawsuits, bringing down health insurance costs in New York.
The idea needed vetting. It required careful kneading, poll testing and translation into political language. It was also bound to agitate any number of interest groups—tort lawyers, patients’ rights advocates, labor unions—and would need to be padded with features that would make it more digestible for voters.
But it was an idea. And, they believed, a viable one.
The conversation was just one of many touched off within GOP circles across the state after the party was cast out of power in November—and not just among Republican power brokers on sound stages. The chatter has bubbled up on the Internet, at dinner tables and, as one party operative put it, “in dark little corners of restaurants.”
An intellectual resurgence, at the lowest levels of the party, has begun to sprout. Sort of.
Now that their party has lost the majority in the State Senate—that was the last stronghold in the state—Republicans readily rattle off a litany of well-publicized missteps that caused the collapse. Among the main contenders: the awkward alliance that Gov. George Pataki (R) struck with labor unions in 2002; big-spending county executives in places like Nassau and Erie that drove local governments deep into debt; and harping on volatile social issues, such as gay marriage.
Politically adept Democrats, meanwhile, co-opted many of the Republicans’ signature issues, such as property tax reform, government efficiency and spending restraint, even seizing the old intellectual pipelines through which new Republican policies have tended to flow.
“We are constantly having meetings with elected officials and party officials who come to us looking for ideas,” said Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute, which made its name funneling ideas to the Rudolph Giuliani’s administration when he was mayor of New York. “And overwhelmingly, these days, those people are Democrats.”
However, now that Republicans have been pushed from power, some detect an opportunity to reengineer the conventional role of the opposition party and generate new and innovative policy ideas, freed from the constraints on a party in a power.
As one state senator, walking into a post-election meeting in Albany, put it: “I can be a Republican now.”
Republicans across the state have begun to patch together a new intellectual framework to reassemble the channels through which policy ideas flow—or, at the very minimum, create the space for an internal debate about what the party should stand for.
“I think there’s going to be some differences, but I think that’s healthy because we really do want to be a party that’s viable statewide and show that we are alive,” said Jay Dutcher, chairman of the Ontario County Republican Party.
In order to show voters and the political establishment that the party still has life, Republicans have to at least do something worth noticing, say Dutcher and his allies, even if this means scraping and clawing over the ideological essence of the party.
Dutcher and a group of Rochester-area Republicans have sketched the initial blueprints for what they believe will be the first generation of a new intellectual infrastructure for the party. He is currently planning, along with state party leaders, a series of caucuses and receptions scattered throughout the state to act as mobile think tanks, putting policy experts, party leaders and grassroots activists together in one room.
Dutcher acknowledges that the regional fractures running through the party may make that a messy process. But the most effective salve for what ails the Republican Party, he said, is a vibrant intellectual debate—even if it exposes the party’s ideological fissures.
“It’s so the state leadership will have an opportunity to hear from people outside the Albany-New York City orbit,” explaining the thinking behind the effort. “The party needs to be a statewide party, not just focused in a couple of areas.”
Whether Dutcher or any other revolutionary can be effective while Senate Minority Leader Dean Skelos (R-Nassau) and state Chair Joseph Mondello remain in charge is an open question. They have looked toward their own solutions, like Mondello’s December appointment of former state Tax Commissioner Andrew Eristoff to head a commission with the official mission of providing “a clear assessment of where we are now and help develop a blueprint to move forward.”
Eristoff himself admitted, however, that the commission’s main purpose is fundraising, and that searching for new ideas is not much of a focus. To some frustrated Republicans, this is symptomatic of state party leaders’ traditional unwillingness to engage in open ideological debates for fear that these might fracture the party along regional and cultural lines and expose those divisions to the rest of the political establishment.
But after their string of losses, Mondello, Skelos and their allies may no longer have the credibility necessary to deflate such efforts—a weakness other power brokers clearly sense.
Cox, who is speculated to be interested in a run for office himself in 2010 or possibly a bid for state chair, and 2006 gubernatorial candidate John Faso, for example, have assembled their own political action committee, which they will operate, along with a clutch of fellow Republican big-wigs, parallel to the state party infrastructure. They hope to use it as a think tank as much as a fundraising arm, taking ideas like Powers’ health care proposal and turning them into policy proposals that can be branded as Republican and fed to candidates throughout the state—and that the public can easily digest.
“The key to this is to continue to work to make sure that you’ve got a coherent governing philosophy and political strategy to make sure that folks know what you stand for,” Faso said. “And that’s where I think we’ve collectively fallen down.”
--
ABOVE: Grassroots Republicans and several former leaders are preparing to challenge state GOP leaders to have full-fledged debates about ideology.
