What in the world is the matter with the Republican Party?
This is an election year when pretty much everything should be going the GOP’s way.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference--a combination trade show and political rally for College Republicans--conservatives express hope that the Repubican Party will be united behind a candidate before the general election in November. (Feb. 11)
A Democratic president is facing the worst reelection environment in a generation. The conservative base is fired up to defeat him and should be riding high after securing the largest GOP House majority since the 1940s. Looser campaign finance restrictions have unleashed the ability of the party’s wealthiest donors to spend unlimited amounts.
But instead of a smooth ride, the party is experiencing the bumpiest presidential primary season in anyone’s memory, one that has at times seemed more a carnival than a coronation. It is all happening at a moment when the party knows it has little margin for error, given its fervor to bounce President Obama from office and its desire to incorporate the burgeoning tea party movement into the GOP fold.
The latest bump came last week, when former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum won three contests in a single night, a surprising sweep that revived his flagging candidacy and — once again — ignited angst about front-runner Mitt Romney and whether the party would ever unite.
Given Obama’s vulnerability, “it’s a nomination worth getting, but nobody’s really satisfied with who is in the field,” said Matthew Dowd, who was a top campaign strategist for George W. Bush. “There are these real fissures in the party now, and nobody is capable of unifying them.”
The old cliche has it that when it comes to picking their candidates, Democrats fall in love while Republicans fall in line. But this year it would seem that Republican voters are doing neither.
The GOP rank and file have a palpable lack of enthusiasm for Romney, who thus far has lost more states — five — than he has won — four.
Meanwhile, turnout has begun to fall off as the tone of the race gets uglier.
The GOP’s image is also taking a beating. In the latest NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, respondents expressing strongly negative feelings about the GOP outnumbered 3 to 1 those with strongly positive feelings. They aren’t thrilled with the Democrats, either, but the intense animosity is not running nearly as high.
Party leaders say that turmoil and division within the Republican ranks is nothing new — that, in fact, it’s how the party has evolved and grown. Along with the growing pains, however, have come some lost elections.
In a speech last week at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, celebrating what would have been the former president’s 101st birthday, former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour noted that as far back as 1912, Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected because he “got to run against two Republican presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, so great was the rift within our party.”
And in the decades since, the party has split into wings as often as not — Thomas E. Dewey’s vs. Robert A. Taft’s; Nelson Rockefeller’s vs. Barry Goldwater’s; Gerald Ford’s vs. Reagan’s.
What’s troublesome now, Barbour said, is that “some voters are seeking purity in their choice. In politics, purity is a dead-dog loser. You need unity, and purity is the enemy of unity.”
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