The key player missing from most of the recent conversations about the future of the defeated Republican Party has been Barack Obama. But in truth, no one will have more to say about what the GOP should and will do than Obama.
The president-elect’s successes, failures, and policy pivots will help decide the national mood and, by extension, the areas of opportunity for the minority party.
Had Jimmy Carter not managed U.S. foreign policy like a Sunday school teacher, would Americans have been ready to push back against the Soviets again in 1980?
Had George W. Bush not run the government like a CEO fighting a hostile takeover bid, would Americans have embraced a confection made of hope, change, and unity in 2008?
Newt Gingrich can bombard all the conservative senior citizens he wants with automated phone calls and Tim Pawlenty could fill a Sam’s Club to the ceiling with “Pawlenty 2012” T -shirts, but until we see Obama running the country, it’s all meaningless.
And if Obama governs as he ran, the questions that divide Republicans struggling for relevancy won’t be about social issues or foreign policy, but whether to embrace the populist urges that have been lurking within the party since long before Pat Buchanan threw a scare into George H.W. Bush in 1992.
As Joe Biden said, Obama will be sorely tested on foreign policy in the first few months of his administration. But we can’t know if he’ll be provoked by Vladimir the Terrible in Russia, Mad Mahmoud in Iran or some other baddie.
On domestic matters, though, we generally know what kinds of challenges Obama will face. In another 68 days, the economy should be frozen solid. Even the horrible awe one feels watching three decades of progress disappear like a CEO with a fat severance package will be gone. President Obama will take the oath amid economic permafrost.
Still at the front of the line clamoring for a “stimulus” will be the auto industry, which would gladly accept nationalization in exchange for being spared the consequences of 40 years of bad decisions.
President Bush may be a gracious host, but it seems unlikely that he’ll leave a freshly signed Detroit bailout bill as a housewarming gift for the Obamas.
So how will Obama, a self-assured technocrat who likes the deliberate process of academia, react when the last bastion of old-fashioned big labor demands payback for an electoral helping hand?
The first rumbling was that Obama would favor a bailout if Detroit would agree to make green cars. It’s a perfect Obama-style win-win. Union jobs making green technology is the hypoallergenic shelter dog of the Obama economic plan.
When the biggest of the big three goes over the cliff, President Obama may be holding a confab with the boys from Google about making health records available online or on the phone with Warren Buffett about strengthening the World Bank. He’ll have to hang up quickly and figure out what in the world to do.
I suspect that we’ll see some modified version of a clean, green, nationalized auto industry, but with some hefty givebacks required from the United Auto Workers – a mass bankruptcy in which modest, transitional employment, not solvency and future success, is the eventual goal.
Sensing a moment of opportunity, the Mike Huckabee set of the Republican Party will begin talking about how it’s the foreign competition that has caused all this trouble and that what we really need is a good tariff. We’d also hear a good deal of Mexico-bashing and talk about the menace of illegal immigration.
So while the Republicans can content themselves talking about what they’ll do to recapture the American electorate, it will only be relevant once they have something to be reacting to.
That’s life in the minority.
Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
