Recently in Republicans Category

Kos' new poll of Republicans shows a party committed to the equality of women--and some other, less liberal ideas. Probably to the surprise of the pollsters, 76 percent of Republicans think marriages are equal partnerships, as opposed to believing that men are leaders of their households. And 86 percent think women should work outside the home. Sorry, Saudis, no allies there.

On the big culture wars issues of our time, the Republicans are locked in: 76 percent think abortion is murder and 77 percent oppose same-sex marriage. In the stupid question department, 77 percent think public school students should "be taught that the Book of Genesis in the Bible explains how God created the world." Well, I've got no problem with teaching kids what's in the Bible either.

It's interesting that 43 percent of Southern Republicans think that Barack Obama was born outside the United States and that 33 percent of Southern Republicans want their states to secede from the Union. Could it be that those 33 percent want their kids to be like Barack Obama? Nah.

Perhaps of greatest note, Republicans turn out to be a lot more religiously exclusive than Americans generally. Fully two-thirds "believe that the only way for an individual to go to heaven is through Jesus Christ." By contrast, a Pew poll of a year ago found that two-thirds of all Americans believe that many religions can "lead to eternal life." If Republicans are, say, 25 percent of the population, then upwards of 80 percent of non-Republicans believe that heaven is open to non-Christians. Call it the Pearly Gates gap.

In a post on who gets the vote of "religious conservatives," Steve Waldman writes:

That leaves Huckabee. As a former Baptist minister himself, he has standing to criticize Palin without being cast as anti-Christian. Mainstream media mistakenly assume that Huckabee failed last time because his base was too limited to religious conservatives. Actually, he fared no better among Christians than McCain and Romney early on. He was distrusted by many in the party for being too liberal, not for being too conservative.

This is entirely misconceived. As any examination of the exit polls from last year's GOP primaries will show you, Huckabee did fail because he had trouble drawing beyond his base of white evangelicals. They loved him. The distrust came from so-called leaders of the religious right, whose suspicion arose, at least in substantial part, because they didn't think he could win. His "liberal" moment was over after Iowa. As for faring no better among Christians than McCain and Romney, that's only if you include all Christians--Catholics and and Mainline Protestants and Mormons as well as Evangelicals. Huckabee couldn't win the former, for sure. But Catholics and Mainline Protestants do not constitute the conservative religious base of the GOP. C'mon, Steve!

The big question for GOP big shots at the moment has to be whether Mitt Romney can manage to garner enough rank-and-file evangelical support to marginalize Huckabee. So look for Romney to play a big role in fighting the Proposition 8 repeal referendum. Where has Romney just bought a new home? La Jolla, California.

Update: I don't appear to be the only one with this thought.

Today's Gallup poll on The First Hundred Days suggests that Obama has shrunk his religion gap. Whereas 41 percent of weekly worship attenders and 61 percent of seldom or never attenders supported him just before the election, now the numbers are 69  57 percent and 57 69 percent respectively. Thus the gap between the two groups has narrowed from 20 points to 12 points. Since Obama has improved his numbers markedly with both groups, the best way to understand this is to say that of those who didn't support him six months ago, he has gained 27 percent of the weekly attenders as compared to 21 percent of the seldoms and nevers. What explains the differential?

In my view, it's that Obama has succeeded in calming the fears of religious folks sufficiently to enable a disproportionate number of them to support him for other reasons--mainly economic. (According to yesterday's NYT poll, Americans support his handling of the economy by 55 percent to 24 percent.) He's done this by reaching out to religious conservatives, rolling out pro-choice policies quietly, taking a couple of middle-ground positions (stem cell funding limits, abortion reduction), and putting off some hot button issues such as reversing the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. In a word, he's so far managed to keep his social liberal base happy without scaring the conservatives.

Which brings us to Sen. Olympia Snowe's lament for the Republican moderates of yesteryear, in the course of which she puts the blame for the GOP's current woes on social conservatism:

There is no plausible scenario under which Republicans can grow into a majority while shrinking our ideological confines and continuing to retract into a regional party. Ideological purity is not the ticket back to the promised land of governing majorities -- indeed, it was when we began to emphasize social issues to the detriment of some of our basic tenets as a party that we encountered an electoral backlash.

It is for this reason that we should heed the words of President Ronald Reagan, who urged, "We should emphasize the things that unite us and make these the only 'litmus test' of what constitutes a Republican: our belief in restraining government spending, pro-growth policies, tax reduction, sound national defense, and maximum individual liberty." He continued, "As to the other issues that draw on the deep springs of morality and emotion, let us decide that we can disagree among ourselves as Republicans and tolerate the disagreement."

This analysis works pretty well for New England, where Republicans have not fared well as social conservatives. But it's a pretty poor account of how the GOP prospered in the last decades of the 20th century as well as of what happened to Arlen Specter. It was through enlisting social conservatives in the Republican Party in the South and West that the party achieved its recent ascendency. And it wasn't Specter's pro-choice stance that cost him his party; it was his vote on the stimulus package. The opponent who was kicking his butt in the polls was Pat Toomey, president of the Club for Growth.

For all the huffing and puffing over abortion, gay marriage, and the like, the party's real problem is its doctrinaire economic world view. Consider the sad case of Mike Huckabee. His initial appeal as a national candidate beyond his social conservative world lay in daring to challenge Republican orthodoxy on immigration and economic policy. He even made so bold as to refer to the Club for Growth as the Club for Greed. And he had his head handed to him by the GOP powers-that-be. Today, he's a chastened, shrunken, party hack version of  his former self. Meanwhile, Obama is sitting pretty, eating the GOP's lunch.

So Southern California moneybags Howard Ahmanson, the Christian Reconstructionist supporter of the Discovery Institute and Proposition 8, has withdrawn the hem of his garment from the Republican Party and joined the Democrats. "The Democratic Party in California," he writes, "is now so big and diverse and all-inclusive that it has ABSOLUTELY NO PRINCIPLES WHATSOEVER." Dismissing the GOP because of its single-minded opposition to taxes, insisting that he has changed none of his opinions, Ahmanson is, like Diogenes, in search of a few like-minded Democrats to support. This strikes me as an exercise in Orange County idiosyncrasy, signifying very little beyond the continuing implosion of California Republicanism.

Michael Steele goes all "individual choice" and states rights on abortion. Not to mention "nature" not "choice" on homosexuality. In GQ.

Update: ...and the walk back.

The sharpest point Matt Bai makes in his NYT Magazine profile today is to note that while Gingrich likes to place himself in the grand tradition of Republican progressives, he lacks their readiness to rethink party doctrine.

And yet, at the same time, Gingrich pointedly declines to do what Roosevelt and La Follette did, which is to directly confront the Republican orthodoxies of their day. Those reformers demanded their fellow Republicans make a choice between ideas and ignorance. By contrast, Gingrich doesn't really challenge any core ideological precept of the Bush era -- only the strategy of "base mobilization" that underlay it...

At a moment when the role of religious fundamentalism in the party is a central question for reformers, Gingrich, rather than making any kind of case for a new enlightenment, has in fact gone to great lengths to placate Christian conservatives.

Underneath the bluster, Newt is still the chubby little myopic nerd who collects reptiles and wants to be loved by his peers. That's why he was so successful at unifying the long-suffering GOP members of the House in the early 1990s, and also, I suspect, why he succumbed so readily to the charms of Bill Clinton.

In 1995, Reaganism was still relatively fresh and Gingrich was Speaker of the House. Can Think Tank Newt lead the GOP out of the much deeper wilderness in which it finds itself today? I doubt it.

Over at Religion Dispatches, Michelle Goldberg offers an analysis of Republican elites desperately seeking to rescue their party from the religious right--an effort she sees as doomed to failure. Sympathetic as I am to looking at internal Republican dynamics in terms of the social conservative base, her bifurcated elite/rank-and-file model obscures more than it reveals. Thus, Goldberg sees Mike Huckabee as part of the Sarah Palin/Joe the Plumber non-elite GOP forces. But Huckabee did not enjoy the support of the religious right leadership, which (once Fred Thompson proved an empty vessel) seemed inclined toward Mitt Romney. At the same time, the neocon intelligentsia was instrumental in getting Sarah Palin on the ticket. Then there is the Club For Growth-type economic conservative elite, which hated Huckabee (who famously called them the Club for Greed) and liked Drill-Baby-Drill Palin just fine.

There are, in short, different Republican insider elites, all of whom are prepared to make a play for religious conservatives so long as it doesn't mean putting their own agendas (including for power) at risk. The GOP problem has to do not with such elites but with how to increase the size of its rank and file--among the expanding minority population and socially moderate white suburbanites. The former are repelled by anti-government, anti-immigrant ideology; the latter, by the "moral values" agenda.

JTA's Eric Fingerhut reports that Michael Steele enjoyed good relations with the Jewish community in Maryland. Neil Rubin of the Baltimore Jewish Times sees it a little differently. There was that unfortunate incident where Steele compared stem-cell research to Nazi experiments. Rubin also calls attention to Steele's role as head of President Bush's faith-based operation in the state, when he was less that forthcoming about how that was to operate. The main point Rubin makes--and it's picked up by James Besser over at the New York Jewish Week, is that by the standards of Maryland Republicanism, Steele is a real social conservative. That is to say, he's a far cry from your standard, pro-choice Northeast GOP governor type.

But the question, for my money, is less what Steele's own positions may be (or have been) than how he conducts party rebuilding. If he's serious about the task, he's got to get social moderates back under the tent. And in that regard, Jewish Republicans may be a useful bellwether. No one believed Obama would win close to 80 percent of the Jewish vote in November, and so long as the GOP is known as the POP (Party of Palin), they're not coming back.

It's over. No doubt there will be plenty of effort expended trying to make the social conservatives happy. But Steele's agenda is going to be big-tent, which will mean an official welcome mat for pro-choice Republicans. And that will not make the Dobson wing happy. At all.

Steele up. Social conservatism down.