http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/gop-establishment-114806_full.html#.VNDUrS6GNOUThe GOP Elite Puts Its Foot Down
For 2016, only the strongest candidates need apply.
By BILL SCHER
February 02, 2015
Shots have been fired. The GOP herd is beginning to be culled. In less than a week, the establishment hounded Mitt Romney out, and the conservative movement wrote Sarah Palin out. The message from Republican insiders is clear: We cannot let our primary become another clown show.
Meanwhile, the nascent Hillary Clinton campaign has signaled it wants to push back its planned entry from the spring to the summer. “If you have the luxury of time, you take it,” one Democratic insider told POLITICO. But these Republican moves indicate that she may not have that luxury. Here’s why.
We already knew the Republican National Committee, led by Chairman Reince Priebus, was trying to exert some adult supervision over the primary process.
Priebus and every other leading Republican strategist knows that recent GOP nominees have been weakened by a primary debate stage dominated by fringe characters—along with front-runners doing too little to distinguish themselves from the extremes. The resulting spectacle presents a horrible image of the party to general-election voters, weighing down the eventual winner.
Priebus’ recent declaration that candidates will have to perform above a certain threshold in polls to warrant inclusion in debates, a threshold that will get stiffer later in the campaign, suggests he is aware that he needs to get as many fringe characters off the stage as possible. But he can’t be confident that the poll respondents will oblige and elevate only mature candidates above the bar.
However, if Republican insiders have the wherewithal to contain the support and attention given to their circus acts, then that could greatly aid Priebus’ project. The twin falls of Romney and Palin last week are solid evidence that the party wants to shape up and jettison any distractions. That’s a warning for Democrats to stop laughing at the prospect of another GOP clown show a la 2012 and start preparing to grapple with a more serious opposition.
The rejection of Romney 3.0 wasn’t just because he’d worn out his welcome. Clear-eyed Republicans knew they were going to have a hard enough time fighting a campaign on the Democratic turf of economic inequality; the last thing they needed was to have the face of Republican callousness toward the “47 percent” inject his reputation for inauthenticity into the cause of reducing the income gap.
But the dispatching of one damaged establishment candidate is a simpler matter than the more corrosive problem of a field top-heavy with frightening Tea Party candidates. That’s why the conservative buzz coming out of Iowa’s Freedom Summit, a presidential cattle call organized by anti-immigrant zealot Rep. Steve King, was potentially more consequential than Romney’s fold.
Not only did conservative opinion leaders widely pan Palin’s ramblings, extinguishing whatever fire she may have had for a run, but they also saved the bulk of their praise for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker—a governor with a record, not a grenade-throwing pundit or a grandstanding senator. Even Rush Limbaugh was effusive: “Scott Walker wowed them in Iowa. … Scott Walker has shown the Republican Party how to beat the left. Scott Walker has the blueprint for winning and winning consistently and winning big in a blue state with conservative principles that are offered with absolutely no excuses.”
Conservative die-hards may not agree with the establishment Republicans who believe the party needs some ideological recalibration on issues like immigration. But they do seem to be getting on board with the notion that Republicans need to elevate serious presidential timber over the silly self-promoters, no matter how good they are at stirring the pot and making liberal heads explode.
Still, it’s an open question whether conservative opinion leaders are able to lead conservative voters. Typically in Republican contests, “base” voters remain enamored with ideological perfection and splinter among several implausible candidates, allowing an establishment favorite to win early primaries with mere pluralities. Attempts by conservative activists to “Stop McCain” in 2008 and “Stop Romney” in 2012 were busts, failing to coalesce around a single alternative. But if 2016 is different, if the conservative rank and file is fed up enough with losing, and can be persuaded by their leaders to rally around a qualified, substantive candidate, they could dictate the outcome.
Take the latest Fox News poll. Without Romney, Jeb Bush leads the pack, but with a middling 15 percent. Right behind him are Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee with 13 percent each, followed by Ben Carson with 10 percent. Few believe any of those last three—with enough controversial comments to fill warehouses of opposition research—would have a prayer against Hillary Clinton. Yet combined they hold 36 percent of the Republican vote. Meanwhile, Walker is knocking on the door of the top tier with 9 percent. If the conservative elite put their collective weight behind Walker, he could scoop up much of that Tea Party vote and zoom past Bush.
And Bush’s grip on the establishment mantle may prove shaky. He has the head start on donors and staff. But his poll numbers are far from intimidating. If he stumbles in a debate, an interview or a random interaction with a voter caught on YouTube, he wouldn’t be the first front-runner in history to choke.
Romney’s exit presumably makes things easier for Jeb. But Romney’s statement, that he hopes "one of our next generation of Republican leaders" will become the 2016 nominee, was interpreted by some as a parting shot at the son and brother of the past two Republican presidents. He could make mischief from the sidelines, divide the millionaire class and activate his donor network on behalf of a Bush rival. (Romney raised eyebrows by having dinner with Chris Christie on Friday night.)
There are plenty of establishment alternatives waiting in the wings, including Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Lindsey Graham. They may all start the race at 5 percent or less, but they can all see 15 percent from their house. They have every reason to jump in and see if they can catch a break. Romney’s withdrawal may have marginally decreased the chaos quotient of the primary, but it has by no means eliminated it.
But a chaotic primary is not preordained to be a divisive and debilitating one, and here is where Hillaryland should start paying attention. As any free-market advocate knows, open competition sometimes lets the cream rise to the top. The key for Republicans is to ensure that the cream really does rise up this time—rather than what happened last time, which was a race to the bottom. Republicans could try something new and engage in a healthy intraparty debate of ideas, striving to one-up each other with fresh solutions on how to reduce the income gap or make education affordable. Or they could revert to past form and win the nomination ugly by pandering to the lowest common denominator.
While Democrats might assume Republicans are incapable of enlightened debate, Jeb Bush is certainly trying to set a highbrow tone in his initial stumping, even if his underlying substance has yet to match the hype. He may force his competitors to keep up the intellectual pace, or risk joining Palin in the conservative scrapheap.
Sizing up the Republican appetite for substance is not an academic matter for the embryonic Clinton campaign, as it gauges when is the right time to launch. One factor Hillary is likely considering is that the longer she is on the sidelines, the more the spotlight is on the Republicans. Which party that is good for depends on whether voters like what they see.
If the conservative clown show returns with a vengeance, Hillary will be more than happy to have a truckload of Iowa popcorn sent to Chappaqua. But if Republicans are getting media attention for new policy ideas that are intriguing to the public, she may conclude she can’t let those ideas get a free pass for very long.
Republican leaders realize there are some things they can’t directly control: who gets in, what they say and how voters respond. They also know the risks of subtle pressure, as unruly Tea Party types often haven’t appreciated lectures from party poobahs about how to win elections. The moment Priebus jacks up his poll threshold may be the moment that these party divisions boil over anew.
But, as the Republican recoiling at Palin suggests, there comes a time when even the ideological purists tire of losing. If Republicans were to follow the trajectory of the Reagan-era Democrats, they would have to lose the presidency three times before they were ready to make major adjustments, like accepting the death penalty and time limits on welfare assistance. After losing only twice, Republicans don’t seem quite ready to make any big breaks from conservative orthodoxy. But perhaps two times is enough to at least conclude it’s time for all of their presidential candidates to behave like grownups, and put their party’s image ahead of their desire for self-promotion.
