Opinion

The GOP establishment’s bid for change

The Republican National Committee issued a remarkable document yesterday — unprecedented in the depth of its self-criticism and the rapidity with which it was issued in the wake of a disappointing election result five months ago.

Or is it? Does the report represent a truly honest internal examination of the party’s soul — or is it mainly a not-so-veiled attack by Establishment Republicans on conservative ideas, conservative voters and conservative organizations?

In fact, it’s both.

The “Growth and Opportunity Project” takes a meat cleaver to the GOP. The party is strong at the state level, it says, with its 30 Republican governors. But it’s been weakening as a national party since 1992, having won the popular vote in only one presidential election (2004).

And the weakening threatens to turn into a withering, since women, young people and minorities all speak unfavorably of the GOP — a sense reinforced through online surveys, interviews, focus groups and the project’s face-to-face meetings with an astonishing 52,000 people.

What it finds will come as no surprise to anyone who has been following the internal discussion on the right since the election. The anecdotal evidence and survey data match the exit polls from November. Hispanics feel unwelcome in the party; it has no appeal to Asians and Pacific Islanders. And while Mitt Romney won married women by 11 points, Barack Obama won unmarried women by 36.

Most important, perhaps, is this simple data point: Romney won Americans over the age of 30 by 1.8 million votes. Obama won Americans between the ages of 18 and 30 by 5 million votes.

As a rueful senior Romney adviser told me after the election, those first votes cast are powerful ones, and they inaugurate a lifetime of voting: The best indicator of whether you will be a voter in the future is whether you have voted in the past. The two Obama campaigns have created millions of Democratic voters who won’t turn Republican easily, to put it mildly.

So yes, the GOP is on a downward slope, and, yes, it has become unappealing to exactly the people who are likely to dominate voting patterns well into the future.

Most of the panel’s recommendations concern the internal workings of the Republican National Committee and are very basic — they involve aggressive efforts to recruit organizers, leaders and spokesmen among minorities and extensive outreach efforts (though I gather you’re not supposed to call it “outreach,” which indicates that those you are reaching are “out” rather than “in”).

The more important advice involves the effort to repair the ruinous primary process that cost Romney six months of time and money he desperately needed to begin the campaign against Obama in earnest. These involve limiting the number of televised debates, which turned the primary process into a horrifying reality show in 2011-12, and favoring primaries over caucuses, which limits the power of activists.

The report’s authors say they’re not offering policy prescriptions, but the overall thrust is that the GOP must moderate itself ideologically. It goes into great detail about framing an economic message but is deeply uncomfortable with social conservatism. It says the party must embrace comprehensive immigration reform, and show gay Americans “we care about them too.”

The words “abortion” and “pro-life” never appear, and the only mention of “gun” comes when the report suggests recruiting voters at gun shows. Also missing: the words “national defense.”

The problem with this approach is that it suggests the party’s mainstream isn’t willing to look at its own weaknesses with the same enthusiasm with which it has delved into the ways in which the party’s rather harshly voiced conservatism might be hurting it.

Until it’s willing to call itself out more critically for its own failings — for its lack of conviction, for being so squeamish about the moral convictions that animate the Republican base that it can’t find a way to help broaden the social message outward — the Republican mainstream will remain an impediment to the party’s salvation, rather than its guide out of the wilderness.