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Dear Mitt:
I am a registered independent who was a Democrat much of my life. The last time I voted for a Republican was for Senator Jacob Javits in New York, a good man and a moderate. That was a long time ago.
I am writing you for two reasons. First, when I see organizational dysfunction, I enjoy the challenge of figuring out ways to fix it. Second, and more substantively, I don't want to see one party rule in this country even by Democrats, so a strong second party is a necessity (I would rather have a parliamentary system with six strong parties, but that's another conversation). Much as I believe that government is a technology people use to solve problems (such as health care for all), I think there is a virtue in a party fighting for smaller government and fiscal responsibility.
You've probably already had the insight that your campaign and John McCain's were two iterations on the same theme. You were both, at the outset, moderate Republicans who didn't in your hearts believe in many of the tenets of the so-called Republican base: you weren't anti-immigrant, you were flexible on abortion, you weren't behind that "Christian nation" crap, the Second Amendment wasn't where you wanted to put your time and energy. Both of you got savaged in the primaries by the wing nuts who claim to embody the wacky beliefs of the base. You each had to skew hard to the right to stay in it, pretending to endorse beliefs that weren't really important or comfortable to you. You reached the nomination wounded and staggering, and had to appoint a VP to placate the base, forgoing a major opportunity to captivate the rest of the electorate via your choice. Here you did slightly better than McCain: he chose one of the worst of the wing nuts, as if he didn't care what happened to America if he died. And he didn't even understand America's women well enough to know they wouldn't vote for Palin just because she was female. You chose a white-bread, far right candidate who at least has read a book and knows how to formulate an English sentence.
The most important thing I want to tell you: your party, in order to recapture the Presidency, has to jettison the crazy Republican base. The word "base", by the way, implies a numerically significant group of people who through their numbers provide a core or foundation, while the so-called Republican base, numerically inferior, is more a junta which has hijacked your party. Something is way out of whack when the "base" is large enough to dictate policy, but not enough to win elections.
Think of the holodeck in "Star Trek: The Next Generation". It was supposed to be a kind of archive of memories and tropes, a place you could relive historical experiences, learn, or play, like the public library. In theory, it contained the soul of Star Fleet, and was a place to work out moral and tactical problems via simulation and brainstorming. But, every third episode, it threw forth an evil genius like Professor Moriarty, or trapped the crew within itself so they couldn't escape. The holodeck was constantly trying to take over the ship, and each time they had to defeat it, at least once if I recall correctly by using the transporter to beam the holodeck out of the ship. Which is exactly what you need to do to the Republican base.
The base consists of aging white men with social beliefs that are no longer held by the majority of Americans, and which are strange bedfellows with the rest of the Republican belief-set. Small government and anti-abortion, religious fundamentalism, activist campaigns against climate science, evolution or what have you, don't go together. Ken Cuccinelli, the crazy Virginia attorney general, is the embodiment of what I am talking about: when he uses his governmental authority to harass and frighten climate scientists working in his state, that is a nightmare vision of big, aggressive government at work. There are people in your party who want government to be as big as possible, as long as it restricts itself to forcing their beliefs on everybody. The law wich would have required women seeking abortions to undergo vaginal probes is another dark and egregious example.
The base promotes hatred and bigotry, and its time the Republican party confronted that and put an end to it. I believe you must have personally suffered knowing that you were expected to respect and even honor people whose beliefs made you writhe in private--birthers, haters of immigrants, and the Murder Lobby crowd that forced you to include a statement in the Republican platform, so soon after the Colorado movie theater shootings, that you would protect everyone's right to carry extended magazines.
How did it feel, when you really just wanted to talk about adjusting the size and role of government, to lead the party of Sherriff Arpaio and Donald Trump?
The core, as a homogenous stand alone, has all of the makings of a cranky, dangerous minority party, like the neofascists currently causing alarm in Greece. On the whole, they are more dangerous blending in with you--standing behind rational businessman and moderate Mitt Romney--than they would be off on their own, where we can see them more clearly and keep track of them in the light. Wasn't it odious to be a beard for these people?
Imagine if the Democrats included, welcomed, shielded people who vaunted Stalin and called for armed, bloody revolution? That's the way the Republicans look to me today--Donald Trump tweeting about revolution while the vote was still being counted, all that "reset switch" crap. Why is it OK for significant forces in your party to disregard the Constitution, and lambast our democratic process as a failure, because it elected a candidate they don't like?
Here's what you should have done. Once you had the nomination, you could have acted boldly and instead of throwing the right a bone by appointing Paul Ryan as vice presidential candidate, you should have picked Olympia Snowe. Or Condoleeza Rice. Both are whip smart Republican women. Snowe is a moderate, Rice is probably farther to the right but still significantly more human, fairer, than Ryan.
What do you think would have happened? Your fear probably would have been, if at four in the morning you lay awake considering an option like the one I'm describing, that the base would desert you out of pique, refuse to go to the polls or vote for the Libertarian candidate. I think the base would still, in overwhelming numbers, have turned out to vote for you out of desperation, as a lesser evil than Obama. And you might have picked up enough of the female and the independent vote to win the election.
I don't think selecting Marco Rubio would have had the same effect. Rubio is more aligned with the core. Just as women didn't automatically and mindlessly vote for McCain because of Sarah Palin, Latinos wouldn't necessarily have voted for you just because you picked a Latino. Choosing another moderate like yourself, sending a message to the country that you are not about the small-minded and hateful views of the core, would have made the difference.
You wasted a major opportunity with the Latino population in particular, a large chunk of which could easily find a haven in the Republican party if it were not the party of Sherriff Arpaio and his fellow travelers. As the former governor of Massachussets, as a businessman, you must have first hand experience with the disconnect between Republican business values and the anti-immigrant crap. Lets take the Hamptons as a case study. The whole area has become so expensive, a result of unfettered free markets at work, that middle and working class children born there can't afford to stay. Some move only sixty or seventy miles away--but nobody is going to commute that far daily to work minimum wage jobs. Since no homegrown work force exists to staff the hotels, shops, restaurants and nurseries, a largely undocumented Latino population has emerged to take those jobs. Even in less wealthy parts of the country, concerted efforts to chase out the illegals have resulted in farmers not being able to get their crops in. Rather than taking away American jobs, the Latino workers are doing the work Americans won't do. A pure business-like Republican perspective, unclouded by hatred, would look for ways to legitimate these people; otherwise, you are forcing businesses to close. Another solution would be of course to intervene to change the situation so that Americans do want those jobs: raise the minimum wage, unionize day labor, or subsidize employers who can't afford to pay a wage Americans would take. But those all sound like the antithesis of Republican initiatives.
Since the Republican party spends most of its time presenting itself as a business party, the only conceivable explanation why it has spent so much self destructive time and energy alienating Latino voters is pure unspoken, unexamined bigotry, the idea that "these people" are diluting our precious whiteness. Passing by in silence the possibility that there is nothing so great about being white (hmmm, have to use that as the title of a future Spectacle essay), that ship has already sailed. The demographic which re-elected President Obama is the nascent future of this country, and will only get stronger. White men already played a shockingly insignificant role in this election, and will become even less important, and have to live with it. If you imagine a United States one hundred years in the future with a Latin majority--humor me and do the thought experiment--I believe that it will (if we play our cards right) be a population which universally speaks English, respects the Constitution and votes enthusiastically. Millions of them will vote Republican if you let them. America is already more African American, more Irish, more Jewish, than the Framers anticipated; it is already more Latino. What difference does it make if roast beef is on the table or arroz con pollo, as long as we all share in a certain democratic understanding, a cultural identity, that Ernst Renan thing of shared memories (and forgettings)? The exercise today is to think about how to welcome the new people, create ties to them, include them in the polity, not how to keep them out. Excluding them is not only immoral, but also a gross tactical error--and has already failed.
If you got rid of the hateful (and by the way, loudmouthed and hypocritical) core---drummed out Newt Gingrich, cancelled Rush Limbaugh's license to bloviate on your behalf-- you would still have some problems. There's a meanness in your party that goes far beyond the core. A watershed moment was the town hall meeting during the primaries where a Republican audience applauded at the idea of someone dying without health insurance.
In recent decades, as the demographic changed, your party, to make its numbers, has tricked working and now even middle class people into voting for you. This became particularly stark after the "Great Recession" began--people making less than $100,000 a year who voted Republican in the midterm elections were essentially voting against their own jobs, mortgages and health care. Republicans fought like wildcats through-out the 20th century to prevent a variety of Presidents, including Republicans, from solving America's broken health system. Republicans championed the repeal of Glass-Steagal, and made sure that the derivatives used by Wall Street to bet against its own customers in the mortgage backed securities debacle, were unregulated. Those parts of your platform talking piously about restoring the security of American homeowners--by gutting Dodd-Frank among other things!--were insanely hypocritical.
Even if you jettison the core, you will still have the billionaire element, the Koch brothers, the Cato Institute half truths, the Karl Rove attack dogs, the miasma of Citizens' United to deal with, all of them forcing the party in a direction which will continue alienating the voters you need to return to or join your party.
In recent decades, American governance has been crippled by the triumph of words over substance. The Republican party in particular has fallen prey to a delusion that if you talk a good game, you don't have to back it up with action. That explains the idea that lower income people will continue voting for you-- you can't win elections without them-- even if you keep allowing Wall Street to kick them out of their homes. But this particular mental disease--the idea that words are a substitute for action, that words are action-- has crippled your party far beyond the mere politics of campaigns. Bush's conviction that he had dealt with Katrina merely by saying, "Brownie, you've done a heck of a job", or won in Iraq by hanging a banner "Mission Accomplished", were gross symptoms of the illness.
I believe that the American electorate, which for much of my life seemed content to be kept in the dark and fed shit like mushrooms, is now waking up again, and is less easily sold than before. This may be an immigrant influence, a minority influence, people who know that they have been lied to and tricked and are more vigilant than the somnolent formerly white middle classes. ("Don't pee on my leg then tell me its raining.")
The gist of this essay has really been advice on how to get part of the electorate back. But you also have to keep them. To do this, you must deliver stuff they really need--improvement in the lives of most people which must be something more than "trickle down" (that actually resonates in an interesting way with "don't pee on my leg"). Finding a way to help people get health care (as you did in Massachussetts, an achievement you've been trying to renounce ever since), and to keep their houses, would be an excellent start.
Sincerely,
J. Wallace