Bring on the GOP Slugfest

Jeb Golinkin has been a strong advocate for selecting Congressman Mark Kirk as the GOP standard-bearer for the 2010 Senate election in Illinois. Kirk, Golinkin writes,

is the best vote-getter and fundraiser that Republicans have in Illinois. He won outright majorities of the vote in his North Shore district in 2006 and 2008 – despite a 61% Obama landslide in his district.

Golinkin is right about Kirk’s strength in an increasingly Democratic state.

The last Republican Senator, Peter Fitzgerald, won (in 1998) only because he faced a scandal-ridden incumbent Democrat, Carol Moseley Braun. And Fitzgerald’s successor, Barack Obama, was elected with some 70% of the vote.

Even dull Democratic party apparatchik Dick Durbin captured 68% of the vote last year when running for his third term in the Senate.

Question though: Is there anything to say about Kirk beyond electability?

Political parties, after all, exist not just to elect politicians to office; they exist as vehicles to advance substantive ideas and public policies.

In fact, articulating and championing reformist ideas and public policies is especially crucial for the Republican Party, given the GOP’s manifest failures while at the helm of government during the Bush-Gingrich years.

Golinkin fears a “bloody primary fight that divides the party and weakens its nominee.” Such a fight, he laments, “will leave smiles only on the face of Illinois Democrats and the Obama administration.”

I’ll acknowledge that a primary contest which devolves into an idealess food fight is a real risk, and one the GOP should avoid. However, a substantive contest of ideas should not only be countenanced; it should actively be encouraged: because it will help to invigorate and strengthen a GOP that urgently needs new ideas and new public-policy proposals, and for both substantive and political reasons.

Substantively, the GOP needs to address the great and pressing issues of our time: fractured countries and failed states, international terrorism, nuclear proliferation, a weak and fragile financial system, runaway entitlement spending (which threatens to bankrupt our country), chronic under- and un-employment, a lack of economic growth, et al.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the presidency because he offered up to the American people a positive reform agenda of marginal-rate tax cuts, military rearmament, an assertive U.S. foreign policy, and economic and cultural renewal.

Also in 1980, not coincidentally, the GOP won control of the Senate for the first time in a quarter-century, while picking up 35 seats in the House of Representatives.

The reason for the Republicans’ newfound success was recognized by no less a figure than Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who in 1981 said: “The Republicans are now the party of ideas.”

Moynihan’s christening of the GOP as a wellspring of policy ferment is significant because he himself had come to Washington in the 1960s as part of President Kennedy’s “best and brightest” generation. Indeed, Moynihan was a renowned public intellectual and academic (but not political) neoconservative who had done much in his own right to transform the public-policy landscape.

But where are today’s GOP policy gurus? Where are the party’s bold and innovative ideas? It’s telling, is it not, that in making his case for Kirk, Golinkin does not so much as specify one new or innovative idea. Instead, he touts Kirk’s academic credentials and biography.

He has a bachelor’s degree from Cornell, a Law degree from Georgetown, and a master’s degree from the London School of Economics. Beyond having been elected to Congress, Kirk has worked in the upper levels of the State Department for not one but two presidents.

Kirk has fought for his country in three different conflicts, and he is one of two congressmen that remain active in the reserves.

As a reservist myself, and as a proud Marine vet of the Iraq War, I agree, of course, that military service is laudatory and noteworthy. But military service in itself does not demonstrate that a candidate has any real idea about how to address vexing public-policy questions.

Nor necessarily do academic credentials. Graduating from elite colleges and universities is laudable; it is a serious sign that a candidate may have real substance and promise. But potential does not equal achievement; promise does not equal fulfillment.

America faces a host of vexing problems ranging from nuclear proliferation and international terrorism to a fragile financial system and runaway entitlement spending — and these problems simply do not lend themselves to easy or facile solutions.

Thus, we will need, in the coming years and decades, leaders with intellect and imagination and a practical, worldly bent. We will need the very best that our nation can and does produce. We will need true independent thought and analysis. And the time to demand that is now, within the political primaries.

For these reasons I say, contra Golinkin: Bring it on. Let’s have a good old-fashioned intraparty donnybrook over ideas and public policy. Now.