DAVID HILLS/COURTESY OF THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION
BREATHING
FIRE
A cultural shift in the GOP
— more youth and more real relationships with people outside
the traditional conservative demographic — will go a long way
toward fixing the party’s other
big problem: the idea that you
can persuade people by talking at
them, and not with them.
All of this is set against the
backdrop of a party at odds with
itself. Many in the GOP have recommended a more moderate tone,
yet one of the first marquee elections that will get national attention is the Virginia governor’s race,
in which the party’s presumptive
nominee is firebrand Attorney
General Ken Cuccinelli. Cuccinelli
has dismissed calls for “change,
re-evaluation, remake, retreat.”
On Capitol Hill, a big driver of
the fiscal cliff fiasco, for example,
and of potential further lurches
rightward on immigration, is the
GOP’s geographic divide. The House
Republican majority is built in large
part on domination of southern
states. But the pull to the right that
region exerts on the party works
against the GOP on the national level, where it must appeal to a broader cross section of voters if it wants
to seriously entertain the idea of
winning back the presidency.
HUFFINGTON
01.20.13
At the Heritage forum, Jennifer Marshall, an earnest, youthful
and intense woman who oversees
Heritage’s domestic policy shop,
gave brief remarks to the luncheon
crowd. She lamented that “when it
comes to fighting poverty, too few
Americans look to conservatives
for answers.”
“We’ve been missing a melody
that catches on,” she said. “We’ve
lacked the narrative that cap-
Jennifer
Marshall of
The Heritage
Foundation.