Where Do We Go From Here?
With 2008 slipping into the history books, I am now making sense as to how the results of the 2008 election turned out the way they did. From what yours truly can explain and understand, it is neither worth writing home about nor whining and complaining over. It is not a step forward or a step back. And it is definitely not a comparison of one America versus the other America. Instead, it served as the lesson of a year where the overwhelming desire for change and forward progress in America overtook the status quo of experience and jaded reflections of our glorious past.
The Democrats emerged victorious on November 4th with the capture of the White House and the pickup of several GOP seats, some of which elected Republicans for decades. They also made gains in the Senate, gained the Governor's Mansion in the swing state of Missouri, and broke into many reliably Republican suburbs, while sweeping Republicans out of New England in the House, shutting Senate Republicans out of the West Coast, and cutting into vaunted GOP strongholds by the likes of Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana, generally restricting Republican victories to Southern states such as Texas and Georgia and Appalachian states by the likes of West Virginia and Kentucky, and stealing one of Nebraska's five electoral votes in the process. With a bad economy, infighting between Republicans over the presidential ticket, and fatigue from a presidency that was anything but inspiring, I knew it was going to be a disaster waiting to happen, but in the end the disaster turned out to be milder than I thought it would be while also providing the prospects of a new Republican future.
A Personal Reflection
For me, 2008 began with a focus on the GOP primary for the 22nd Congressional District here in Texas. Sprawled out over a narrow strip of four counties (in geographical order): Fort Bend, Brazoria, Harris and Galveston, and taking a mixture of working-class small towns, minority enclaves, and affluent suburbs (one or two of these three clusters is definitely rising in population), it was the "accidental representative" in Democrat Nick Lampson versus a field of ten Republicans whose bases were largely derived from their experiences - and their roots. Shelley Sekula Gibbs was the seat warmer in Christmas of 2006 after a colorful career on Houston City Council, but she already damaged herself with her sloppy handling of the dismissal of Tom DeLay's staff, which is not uncommon with new members of Congress.
Ten candidates filed on my side of the fence to take out Lampson. In the early stages, the candidate I endorsed was Dean Hrbacek, the former mayor of Sugar Land whose six years were marked by a time of prosperity for Fort Bend with the beginning stages of Sugar Land Town Square and a host of other economic development initiatives and continued a long line of steady Sugar Land leadership and growth that continues to this day. While the campaign was short-lived (fifth place courtesy of terrible results in the Harris portion), the effort and hard work espoused by me, his supporters and his staff was nothing less than our 110 percent. In the end, I threw my support in the runoff and general election behind Pete Olson, a former Senatorial aide to Senators Phil Gramm and John Cornyn who quickly locked the establishment vote after the ten candidates were set in stone.
But despite the attention given to this race, the primary was overshadowed by the 2-to-1 Democratic edge in Fort Bend and many other large Texas counties thanks to a competitive primary between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and efforts by talk-radio kingpin Rush Limbaugh and others to entice Republicans to cross over and aid Hillary. I knew this problem was evident at my precinct convention in a wealthy Sugar Land neighborhood where many of the guests were walking into the Democrats' convention (though this has more to do with the fact that Texas Democrats have a hybrid primary/caucus fusion versus our plain GOP primaries, and I know very well that there are some Democrats who want to do away or at least tinker with the Texas Two-Step). The only thing that differentiated us from the crowd was the fact that we generally wore suits, slacks and leather shoes versus the usual commonwealth cloths of the Dem caucusers. My uncle, who can best be classified as a libertarian-leaning, anti-Vocal Fringe Republican but cast his vote for Hillary, neither attended their caucus nor wanted to join my convention.
The problems were further exacerbated by the county convention, where our predominantly affluent and Republican precinct fielded a mere 27 delegates out of 40, and some precincts - even ones that John McCain won - even reported ONE delegate. "If you don't like McCain, get over it" became a rallying cry. Of course, John McCain was not my first choice, for my political capital was behind former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani to begin with, and then after Rudy left the race, rallied to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney on Super Tuesday until he dropped out as well. In my first-ever county convention, while I applied for a state-level delegate slot and lost out to more experienced Republicans, my shortcomings can be seen as only the beginning of my political career as I represent the future of the party.
While I did not campaign between the end of the convention and Election Day (for personal and non-political reasons I am not going to state), I continued to contribute whatever efforts I could through the internet. My curiosity with the nature of the House races and the competitiveness waged by many Democratic candidates inspired me to launch my own research into the most important election in our lifetime. My massive project, cleverly titled The Nifty Fifty House Party, was the end result, and it took an enormous chunk of political capital to do. (As a measure of clarity, the ratings as I predicted then are not what I predicted in the end, for I accidentally erased my final predictions on Election Night.)
A Mixed Blessing
On Election Day, I clicked the vote for McCain on the hope that the old McCain (the earmark-busting maverick who fought for what was right even as his colleagues skewered him) would come back in place of the McCain that emerged (a Bush 43 clone who ditched his maverick image and began to back a great number of the President's flawed "compassionate conservatism" ideals). The campaign received a boost with Sarah Palin who galvanized the conservative base and is now being pegged as the leading GOP candidate for 2012. However, that boost was short-lived as McCain's feeble attempts to galvanize the so-called "base" turned off some more principled conservatives who balked at McCain's support for the artery-clogging $700 billion bailout, while some more sensible Republicans who found fault in Palin's "attack dog" mantra and hardline conservatism shifted their votes to Obama or a third-party candidate. Not all is lost, for Palin will have four more years to cultivate and salvage her image as will many other Republicans who are waiting for their big moment. After all, we may even get a relative unknown to step up to the plate in 2012 just as we did with Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul. Whether or not a resurgence will happen by then depends on GOP efforts in the next four years and Obama's record at the White House.
That being said, this is a historic time for America. Barack Obama has broken barriers that some envisioned would never be broken, and even inspired many of my fellow Republicans, some of whom may have crossed the line to cast their ballots for the Illinois Senator. As someone who had the blessing of attending a high school whose largely affluent student body came from a variety of ethnic, cultural, social, economic and political backgrounds, had enormous respect from various faculty members and parents, and had a variety of friends that ranged from cheerleaders and football players to band leaders and drama superstars, guitar aficionados and hip-hop aspirants to computer buffs and DECA marketers, I celebrate the arrival of a new era in America that is defined by what unites us as one country instead of what divides us, and thus far Obama has put together a blue-ribbon team of Cabinet appointees that spans across the political spectrum. At the same time, the failures of 2008 serve to spark the beginning of a much-needed renewal for the Party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.
The race was a wake-up call for my entire family, which usually votes Republican, albeit in a rather negative fashion. My great-aunt, a former GOP precinct chair in Montgomery County north of Houston, or Monco as I personally like to call it, thought young people who turned out strongly for Obama should not be allowed to vote. Another uncle of mine, himself an intelligent business conservative, thought the GOP may have lost the business vote because of the social conservatives' influence. And my cousin, who like me was somewhat undecided before swinging towards McCain in the end, asked me if I was freaking out. The answer? I definitely did not because it is just plain stupid to assume the sky is falling when the vote doesn't go my way. To me, I saw Barack Obama's historic victory not as a shortcoming of GOP efforts, but rather as a mandate on the negative connotations of a stale, outdated GOP brand in need of a good dose of WD-40, and judging from the Facebook status updates on Election Night, a lot of my old high school friends, Republican and Democrat, espoused many views from being scared about having a Democrat (or in one case, a "babykiller") in the White House, to savoring an Obama victory and declaring "It's a beautiful night". For what it was worth, the election was nothing more than a mixed blessing.
The Meaning of Being Republican
The GOP's problem went well beyond the presidential race. The blame game was alive and well even before the final votes were counted. Moderates want to say that social conservatives' litmus tests and purity police are responsible for the party's decline, while conservatives argue that the party is simply not being conservative or "American" enough. In fact, they are both wrong...they both lost for a variety of circumstances. Some of the moderates that lost either faced difficult situations (especially in regards to the Obama vote and external economic issues which played a role in the defeat of Michigan's Joe Knollenberg and Connecticut's Christopher Shays) or caved in to the Religious Right (as Iowa's Jim Leach did in his support of anti-poker legislation, which I found rather stupid and most likely led to his defeat in 2006). But many moderates also retired as well, among them names like Ohio's Ralph Regula, Minnesota's Jim Ramstad and Virginia's Tom Davis. Meanwhile, for conservatives, it is rather silly that they revel in the increasing conservative ranks of the GOP when in fact a lot of their own went down in defeat as well, from Colorado's Marilyn Musgrave and Idaho's Bill Sali out west to Tim Walberg in Michigan, who was elected in 2006 with help from hardcore conservative groups who helped defeat a more moderate Republican.
Republicans will also have to deal with shifting winds in one of its most reliable voting blocs. The evangelical community is moving more towards a Christian Democracy-inspired platform that diversifies beyond gay marriage and abortion to include the environment, poverty and other issues that unite younger evangelicals. Mike Huckabee is one such example. To go further, I would have cast my vote against Prop 8 if I were in California, to the detriment of my own socially conservative family, because we are long past the days of Jim Crow. Imposing a ban on a certain segment of the population for superficial reasons (i.e. our children will lose their innocence, our children will be indoctrinated, etc.) would have created a sheer ripple effect across the deserts and mountains of California on down to its glorious coastline, and it would have also depressed California's already nightmarish financial situation with companies being forced into anti-discrimination lawsuits, among other irregularities. And I personally would never be a homosexual in any way, shape or form.
Going even further into perspective, on my views on abortion lies a fine line between a social conservative and a Religious Right conservative - I am none of the latter and some of the former in the form of my free subscription to the Consistent Life Ethic which contradicts some of the GOP's platform on issues such as the death penalty, and my middling stance on Planned Parenthood (which should focus more on other services such as emergency contraception, cancer screenings, STD testing, and menopause treatments). And if the Vocal Fringe keeps on bastardizing social conservatism and conservatism in general to the point where conservatives of any stripe are seen as a "hate group", then just like Lyndon B. Johnson once told an aide "We have lost the South for a generation", Republicans might as well lose the coastlines, the well-informed, the youth, and more troubling, the business vote and the suburbs, for a generation, and nothing would boil my blood more than for this to happen. To put it in perspective, the government is one nation under God and will continue to be, but the government is not supposed to be God. The Religious Right is more interested in money and power than ministry and scripture.
Additionally, some of these "conservatives" have either turned out to be hypocrites as evidenced by the falls of some social conservative champions. For starters, Idaho's Larry Craig was seen as a family values conservative but later became known for an act of wide stance cottaging in a bathroom stall at the airport in Minneapolis. And there are also many so-called "conservatives" who have been anything but conservative. For me, there is nothing conservative about record deficits, wasteful spending, and butting into the lives of ordinary Americans (whether in the form of religious theocracy or overzealous nanny statism) simply to please the interests of groups that lack patience such as parents who think it is better to invest their life savings in a concert featuring a tween pop sensation (but not necessarily the stars themselves) that will become only a memory come 2012 as opposed to investing in a college education which lasts a lifetime. People will think I am being an anti-family grinch for what I just said, but we must face hard reality: we cannot mortgage our country on our children's backs anymore, and this is NOT a Democrat or Republican position, this is a REAL conservative position. Parents must be parents, not friends, to their children, and must not be afraid to say NO. Yes, your kids might as well go ahead and cry their eyes out, but my TRUE conservative parents taught me to put what matters long-term ahead of any short-term trend that exists. In full, being a Republican is supposed to mean a belief in fiscal restraint, personal responsibility, a strong and prepared defense, and a hearty commitment to the American Dream, NOT attaching costly and unrelated riders to major bills, conquering and dividing electorates, misplacing economic and defense priorities for personal gain, and prodding into the lives of everyday Americans.
As Ronald Reagan put it:
"If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals–if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is."Additionally, Reagan also stated that "All great change in America begins at the dinner table". This is personally true for me as change in America begins with a simple family dinner and a nice family conversation, focused on a reinforcement of family tradition and a detailed foresight into tomorrow where good advice and the American Spirit are fostered. While Reagan serves as an inspiration to me and millions of Republicans, a need for a new brand of conservative leadership is needed to continue the conservative legacy. Reagan has died long ago and is not coming back. It is time to adapt the principles of our past to a new generation of Americans committed to the future.
- Ronald Reagan, from Reason Magazine, July 1975
A New Stage Is Being Set
Now if I were to play my cards, conservatism will be entering a new stage: where aiming to reduce the national debt (inevitable given the bailout bonanza on Capitol Hill), provide a clean environment that also benefits our economy (the Pickens Plan is a giant step forward), and offer an improved, efficient infrastructure (but definitely NOT in the form of the pork-laden Trans-Texas Corridor) will become integral parts of the platform, where constructive issues like immigration, education and health care will be offered in the form of sensible, efficient alternatives to the Democrats' expected bureaucracy and bungling courtesy of such committee chairs as House Ways and Means Committee boss Charlie Rangel, and where hot-button social issues will take a more pragmatic turn, including finding innovative ways to reduce abortion as opposed to the Prohibitionist mantra of simply criminalizing the practice, because given the sickening nature of abortion, there will always be women that have to have one regardless of any efforts that aim to put a stop to it.
Summing it up, the GOP needs to regroup and get its ducks in order. Blaming social conservatives will not work because not all are "easy to command" types dictated by figures like James Dobson, but rather tend to follow the same ethically sound message that I follow in what I call The Ethic. Booting out the business Republicans will further depress the ranks because they provide the innovation, charisma and entrepreneurial spirit that sews the fabric of our future (and in a sense, may force such voters to vote against their interests). Telling the libertarian Ron Paul Republicans to hit the road is elitist at best as they share many of the same values of freedom and liberty that many true conservatives do. Attacking moderates will do nothing more than burn down the big tent and will only serve to relegate Republicans to dreaded permanent minority status. And making us believe that "deficits don't matter" will boil fiscal conservatives' blood and force the GOP down the same road as the Whigs, a road that we are not willing to take and which will also doom the American Dream.
As a Republican who stands strong in the face of adversity along the lines of Lincoln, cherishes the benefits of a clean environment ala Roosevelt, praises the effectiveness of a top-shelf infrastructure that partially bears the namesake of Eisenhower, and espouses the sunny optimism and peace through strength as defined by Reagan, I find the party at a troubling crossroads. Members of my family don't even know the Republicans anymore, and it seems sometimes that I am the only Republican left. With that in mind, I am looking forward to helping rebuild the party and restore its commitment to freedom, prosperity and sound policy. The challenges I will have to deal with won't be easy, but I am very optimistic that with a broad coalition of committed Americans who want to see a return to reason, a restoration of common sense, and a renewal of the American Dream, the Republican Party can make a comeback.
Today, I no longer consider myself a Republican. I am a New Republican. And I am ready to make the commitment to bring a New Day to America. The Elephant Stampede will roar more than it ever has before. The big tent will rise again.