John Podhoretz

John Podhoretz

Opinion

Splintered Republicans must take their medicine

There is a path to sanity for the national Republican Party to be gleaned from the mixed election results on Tuesday night — not just sanity, actually, but victory.

The problem is that professional Republicans of all stripes will have to swallow some medicine — and as we know, everybody always thinks the other guy should take the medicine while he should get the candy.

The political world says the GOP is divided between those who believe in fighting Democrats where possible (the Establishment) and those who believe in a kind of rolling revolution against the corruptions and seductions of Washington as a whole at all times (the Tea Party).

What medicine does the Establishment need to take?

The answer was on display right across the river from Washington — in Virginia.

The Republican candidate for governor was the Tea Party favorite who leapfrogged over the more Establishment choice. And he proved to be a lousy choice, so clumsy on his feet that he went from 10 points up to 10 points down in a couple of months.

Sometime late in the summer, big donors and others who’d wasted tens of millions on other lousy Tea Party candidates in 2012 decided to save their money.

Then something happened two weeks before Election Day: the ObamaCare debacle.

The lousy candidate didn’t get much better, but by fixing on ObamaCare, he closed the gap with his rival somewhere between 5 and 10 points in two weeks and lost by 2.5 percent.

The Establishment had washed their hands of the guy. It shouldn’t have. It was clear in the middle of last week that something was changing fast in Virginia.

A major infusion of dollars and enthusiasm over the final weekend — the bad GOPer was outspent 4-1 in the final seven days — might not have made up 60,000 votes. Then again, it might have. And money has been thrown away on a lot less.

By staying on the sidelines, the Establishment will be and should be haunted by the possibility that it was responsible for the loss of a race that could have been won in a key swing state.

The lesson is partly managerial: In 1996, then-Republican National Committee chief Haley Barbour husbanded the party’s resources so that he’d have cash on hand specifically to take advantage of possibilities like Virginia, to great effect.

It’s also emotional: This is business. Don’t take it personal. Win where you can.

And that’s also the lesson for the Tea Party, many of whose adherents talk a tough-minded conservative game but are too often guilty of reducing politics to emotions. All too often, they are enraged when conservative pols reach out beyond them. That is a self-defeating attitude; all politicians outside gerrymandered districts must find voters beyond their base if they are to succeed.

Case in point: Chris Christie. Many Tea Partiers are still mad at Christie for standing with President Obama during Hurricane Sandy, and so they’ve decided against all evidence that this pro-life, low-tax, anti-teachers-union tough guy is a “Republican In Name Only,” no better than a liberal.

Viewing reality through such a distorted prism will make it difficult, if not impossible, for Tea Partiers to derive the right lessons from Christie’s staggering 22-point victory in an Obama-loving state on Tuesday night.

Which is to say: It’s not enough for a politician to hold views you like. The pol has to be able to talk to people other than you and make them feel good, too.

So the Establishment needs to improve its game. And the Tea Party needs to mature beyond its emotionally driven politics.

If both can do that, and both can, they can find new unity just at the moment when polls suggest things are going south for Barack Obama and the Democrats.