BREATHING
FIRE
Chicken Littles. The GOP’s 2012
version has been a particularly intense session.
“Our party is dead unless
there’s a shakeup,” said Carlos
Sierra, a Texas operative who ran
insurgent Republican presidential
candidate Buddy Roemer’s campaign, at a November conference
hosted by Harvard University to
assess the election.
In the immediate days after the
election, there was talk on the right
of soul searching. Yet the conservative soul has gone relatively unexamined. Most of the conversation
within the party has fit into a series of machine-minded buckets:
tactics, message and policy. The
GOP needs to overhaul its ground
game and its use of data to vastly
improve the way it communicates
its principles and policies, and will
have to shift its stance on a few issues, namely immigration and gay
marriage. In addition, it will need a
far more dynamic candidate at the
top of the ticket in 2016.
But constituencies build like a
snowball, and they need critical
mass to keep on growing. For any
significant number of black voters (or Latino voters, or struggling
middle class voters) to start considering the Republican Party, they
HUFFINGTON
01.20.13
will need to see others they know,
or others they can relate to, moving that way as well.
It’s possible that Marco Rubio is
the closest thing to a silver bullet
for the GOP: a charismatic and hip
young Latino with great communication and political skills. If he
were to win the GOP nomination
“WE’VE LACKED
THE NARRATIVE
THAT CAPTURES
THE MORAL
IMAGINATION OF THE
AMERICAN PUBLIC.”
four years from now, and then the
presidency, the GOP’s image would
almost certainly be dramatically
transformed. Maybe it’s just all
about candidates.
But an inspiring, non-white
candidate, on top of an improved
message, better ground game and
revamped positions only goes so
far. At the grassroots level, ordinary people are influenced most by
those they know best. The Obama