David Corn: GOP: Got Leaders?

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/gop-got-leaders


GOP: Got Leaders?
Beyond Boehner, McConnell, and the 2016 wannabes, can anyone put this party on a better course?

—By David Corn
| Fri Nov. 9, 2012 10:17 AM PST


There's an old Mormon prophecy—of questionable origin and not accepted as official doctrine by the church—that in the latter days, when the US Constitution is hanging "like a thread," a Mormon will gallop in on a white horse to save the day, and Mormons will take the reins of the US government. That prophecy—legitimate or not—was not fulfilled this year. The white horse, wherever it may be, remains riderless. And such is the state of the Republican Party. After voters rebuked Mitt Romney—and a variety of Republican Senate candidates and a handful of GOP House members—the party, once again, is leaderless.

Political parties often end up in this position after losing a presidential election. Following Al Gore's (kind of) defeat in 2000, there was no central figure in the Democratic Party. (Hillary Clinton, a newbie senator at that point, was keeping her head down.) Leaders, though, do eventually arise, if only because presidential elections occur every four years and some guy or gal has to be nominated as the party's standard-bearer.

Yet this time, it seems the Republicans may especially suffer from a vacuum at the top. The party remains caught in the gravitational pull of the tea party (which might have become something of a political black hole). Though not all Republicans see it this way, the tea partiers pulled Romney and the GOP so far to the right that an opening was created for President Barack Obama. In the Obama campaign's final conference call with reporters—held two days after the election—strategists David Axelrod and David Plouffe both emphasized one piece of exit-polling data: Obama won 56 percent of the voters who had identified themselves as "moderate." That suggests that the tea-party-fueled rightward lurch of Romney and the GOP took them out of contention.


At the grassroots, there doesn't appear to be an organized countervailing force to the tea party. And without a strong counter at the top of the party, it may be tough for Republicans to escape the clutches of their diehard ideologues. Can either House speaker John Boehner or Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell grab the steering wheel of the bus and guide it off the shoulder and back on the road? Last year, during the debt-ceiling showdown, Boehner was unable to tame the passions of the tea partiers within his caucus. He had to dump the possible grand bargain deal because he could not convince his own members to vote for it. And neither Boehner nor McConnell possess the PR skills and communications talents to function as stellar emissaries to the general public for the GOP in the wake of this defeat. (An intriguing sideshow for Washington observers will be the relationship between McConnell and Boehner, as the two contend with Obama's efforts to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff. Will McConnell, once again, upstage Boehner as the congressional Republicans' adult-in-the-room?)

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Without strong leadership at the top, the Republican Party will find it rather arduous to sort out these issues and resolve (or paper over) its internal conflicts. As the dust continues to settle, there is no white horse or rider on the horizon.