Barrel Strength

In a recent missive to the Barrel Strength audience Dalwhinnie asked, “Does the US need a British-style Conservative Party?” If by that one means a party ready and committed to some genuine soul-searching and reorganization, then yes.

That is not to say that the GOP has to go wobbly. I remember how queasy I felt when I heard David Cameron make his execrable “hug a hoodie” pitch. But the Cameron organization did make an effort to learn from the mistakes of recent British Tory leaders. They have pursued a more professional campaign organization and made sincere outreach to communities thought previously outside the Tory fold. The Cameron Tories have grown themselves beyond the fringes of the “country pursuits” set to become a competitive responsible alternative. We had to undergo a similar experience in Canada, and we know that some have never cottoned to Harper’s reshaping of twenty-first century Tories.

American conservatives, thankfully, do not face quite the formidable systemic barriers that have necessitated the Long March approach adopted — thus far successfully — by Harper. They do have to try and rediscover who they are and how they tell that story to more people.

The tragedy of the GOP nomination race was it that never gelled around a solid Republican brand. For all of his honourable deeds and strong character, John McCain could never figure out what to do after years of “fighting the Man” and then becoming “the Man”. He won over independent voters in the primary race but ended up providing no solid reason for the rest of the Republican Party to back him (I am still perplexed and disappointed at how the man whom I still consider the soundest conservative in the pack, Fred Thompson, ran such a lazy last-minute campaign).

While McCain was never able to serve up a coherent set of priorities, the answer is not to whip up a list of au courant issues. The strength of the GOP that Reagan defined was not simply to tell people what he would do, but to state clearly why. The disparate camps in the wake of the defeat will have to demonstrate some real flexibility to arrive at a new core GOP set of principles.

Others have focused on drawing from the Dean/Trippi strategy of exploiting new technologies like social networking. But that will be for nought if the GOP can’t overcome the lingering problem from this election: from the time of the conventions polling showed a massive gap in the levels of committed/strongly committed supporters for Obama and McCain. All the Twittering in the world would have fallen short with such unenthused supporters. Sorry, Marshall, but this time around the medium is not the message. Give Americans a compelling story of how economic freedom and justice make for a winning society — and finally explain the Democrats’ hand in starting the subprime mortgage crisis — against a backdrop of the One’s likely failures to fall short of his Chavez-like agenda, and they will respond through whatever channel in which they have been engaged.