http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/opinion/sunday/ross-douthat-the-fight-republicans-need-now.html?rref=opinion&module=Ribbon&version=origin®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&pgtype=articleThe Fight Republicans Need Now
NOV. 8, 2014
FOR the second time in four years, the Republican Party has won a sweeping midterm victory without having a policy agenda to match. The party has a more-than-comfortable House majority, a solid Senate edge, and it faces a lame-duck president sealed in a bubble of sour self-regard. But if you look for consensus on the ends to which this new power should be turned, you’ll find ... well ... um ... repeal of the medical-device tax?
The good news for Republicans is that they’re closer to having a positive agenda than they were in the backlash year of 2010. Now, unlike then, actual flesh-and-blood Republican politicians have proposed substantial policy ideas on issues as diverse as health care and transportation, higher education and taxes, the safety net and sentencing reform. The party as a whole hasn’t rallied around these proposals, but they’re there and waiting to be taken up.
The bad news for Republicans is that America’s permanent campaign is about to shift into a higher gear, because with the midterms over You Know What is coming next. This means that policy debates in Washington will soon be swallowed up by presidential insanity — and if the next Republican primary campaign is like the last one, the conservative conversation could soon become an idea-free zone.
But there is reason to hope that this time might be different, that the 2016 primaries might feature not only actual ideas but a transformative debate. And that hope seems most likely to be realized if the primary field is winnowed early, and we end up with a contest that gives special prominence to Marco Rubio and Rand Paul.
Rubio and Paul are not necessarily the most qualified of the Republican contenders — they are relatively young, they lack executive experience, and their legislative records are modest. But they are both deeply engaged with the challenges that would await a Republican president in a way that most of their potential rivals currently are not.
Those rivals have either been out of national politics for a while (Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee), or they have been wrestling with state-level issues that don’t necessarily map onto national policy debates. There is, of course, plenty of time for Chris Christie or Scott Walker to raise his sights above pension fights and union battles. But Rubio and Paul are well ahead when it comes to thinking seriously about what a 21st-century conservatism should stand for and pursue.
Seriously, and differently. Rubio has gone further than any other likely 2016 contender in embracing what’s been dubbed “reform conservatism” — a vision of domestic policy that would overhaul the tax code and safety net to support work, family and upward mobility. For the Florida senator, the details of that vision include tax reform that would expand the child tax credit, more substantial wage subsidies for childless adults, a Social Security reform that would open the program’s Thrift Savings Plan for federal employees to more Americans — and a reform of Obamacare (still in the planning stages) that would try to cover similar numbers with less-comprehensive coverage.
Paul, meanwhile, embodies a more libertarian approach to conservative reform, in which the Republican Party would shed its “party of the rich” branding and reach out to new constituencies (minority voters and millennials, especially) by focusing on issues — criminal justice reform, civil liberties, corporate welfare — where a critique of big or heavy-handed government might be unexpectedly resonant.
There is overlap between his vision and Rubio’s, particularly on combating crony capitalism. But there is also a real philosophical difference between the two men on how much government should do to address social problems.
On foreign policy their contrast sharpens, because Paul casts himself as the heir to the realist tradition in Republican foreign policy, while Rubio’s record and statements are more in line with the neoconservatism of the Bush era. To use specific Obama-era examples, a Paul-led G.O.P. would presumably oppose Libya-style humanitarian interventions and eschew gambits like our effort to aid Syria’s rebels, while a Rubio-led G.O.P. might be willing to put American boots on the ground in both situations. These are not small differences, and they might be magnified in larger crises.
This is the point in the column when I would normally signal, subtly or clumsily, whose vision I find more attractive over all. But the reality is that I’m divided. I admire Paul’s outreach to minority voters, and I was very skeptical of the immigration bill Rubio shepherded through the Senate last year. But I have agreed with practically every domestic policy stance the Florida senator has taken since, and his reform agenda seems more sensible on substance and more plausible as politics than Paul’s more stringent libertarianism.
But then on foreign policy my sympathies reverse. Paul’s ties to his father’s more paranoid worldview are problematic, but the realism and restraint he’s championing seem wiser than the G.O.P.’s frequent interventionist tilt. To imagine Rubio as a successful foreign policy president, I have to imagine an administration in the mold of Ronald Reagan’s, where hawkish rhetoric coexists with deep caution about committing U.S. ground troops — and I think there’s reason to worry we’d get incaution and quagmire instead.
I suspect that the Republican electorate would also have mixed sympathies ... and that is exactly why the party should want to see these men debate. Maybe that debate would end with one victorious and the other clearly vanquished; maybe it would encourage a kind of partial synthesis, perhaps offered by a savvy rival like Christie. But however the debate turned out, it would involve exactly the issues the Republicans need to work through before they’re given control of the White House once again.
One potential alternative to a Paul-Rubio tilt, meanwhile, is almost too grim to mention: a campaign in which neither man gets traction precisely because they’ve staked out too many positions, and instead the establishment money flows to a candidate (Jeb, Christie, even Romney redivivus) who plays it safe while Ted Cruz and Ben Carson and others have an empty scrum on the right to see who gets to finish second.
Such a campaign, in addition to being deeply tedious, would set the Republican Party’s intellectual clock back to 2012, with predictable results for the party in its inevitable collision with La Hillary.
Whereas to move forward, to win and govern, the G.O.P. needs to figure out exactly what kind of party it should be — and that may only happen if its brightest senatorial stars battle in the open, with a presidential nomination as the prize.
