Lesson for the GOP: Find Your Inner Policy Wonk

What’s the real lesson learned from last night’s election results? Simple: First, last and always, substantive ideas matter most. Consequently:

• candidates (like New Jersey Democrat Jon Corzine) who espouse bad and unworkable ideas will be punished;
• candidates (like Virginia Republican Bob McDonnell) who articulate promising policy solutions to the great and pressing issues of our time will be rewarded; and
• candidates (like New York’s Doug Hoffman) who seem to embody political sentiment and emotion decoupled from practical policy ideas may capture many ideological conservative hearts; however, they ultimately will lose, because they seem to lack the gravitas necessary to govern.

The lesson for the Republican Party is clear: Follow Bob McDonnell. Stay true to your conservative principles; modulate your rhetoric; and find your inner policy-wonk.

Virginia

As McDonnell pollster Glen Bolger explains, McDonnell’s team:

set out early to establish Bob as different than Republicans have been in the past few elections — strong on issues that matter most to people…

Policy has always been important to Bob McDonnell; and his leadership on this segment of the campaign set the tone for the team… His proposals both helped people and garnered bipartisan support, which made the Deeds message about Bob being a rabid right-winger not ring true to voters [emphasis added].

The campaign organized issue teams, which put together a number of significant policy options for Bob to put together his issue priorities… ‘Bob’s for jobs’ [became] the central theme of the issue campaign [emphasis added].

Thus, the McDonnell campaign dominated the issue agenda in the campaign. Creigh Deeds, whose last ad ironically talked about substance over style, hardly ever talked about issues during the campaign. His was a campaign devoid of reasons why he should be governor, whereas the McDonnell campaign — from the candidate to the ads to the website — clearly communicated that Bob had a plan [emphasis added].

New Jersey

In New Jersey, as I’ve previously reported, the Republicans nominated a weak candidate, Chris Christie, who deserved to lose because he failed to develop a specific policy reform agenda. But fortunately for Christie, he was running against a truly awful candidate, the incumbent Democratic Governor Jon Corzine; and, in this election cycle, that was enough to propel Christie to victory.

The danger for the Republican Party, in New Jersey and elsewhere, is that it might think that running an idealess campaign devoid of substantive policy proposals can work. It can’t, except in highly unusual situations a la New Jersey circa 2009.

Indeed, the circumstances in New Jersey this year are unlikely to repeat themselves anytime soon. Corzine, after all, had the burden of incumbency and a truly awful record marred by financial mismanagement of the state, exorbitant state income and property taxes, and corruption.

Corzine also was burdened by being a multimillionaire and former Wall Street executive at a time when Wall Street is in disrepute because of last year’s historic financial collapse. Then, too, there is Corzine’s personality, which is grating and wholly without charm and charisma.

For these reasons, the Republican Christie won last night and was elected governor. But if the Jersey GOP is to make a real and permanent comeback in the Garden State, then it will have to prove that it can govern by delivering real results. This means articulating and legislating an effective reform agenda, which addresses specific voter concerns.

New York

In New York’s 23rd Congressional District, Hoffman suffered from too much rhetoric and outside theatrics and too little policy substance.

The rhetoric and theatrics from outside conservatives reinforced the notion that someone else — the GOP party bosses for Dede Scozzafava and outside conservative agitators for Hoffman — was trying to impose their respective pet candidate on us, the independent-minded voters. But independent-minded voters won’t accept bosses and outsiders telling them what to do — not in upstate New York or anywhere else in this, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Thus, the nationalization of the New York congressional race, while energizing for conservatives nationwide, in fact was harmful to Hoffman’s candidacy. However, the involvement of outside conservatives need not have been fatal had Hoffman simply demonstrated a greater command of public policy. This to show that he was his own man; that he was the district’s man, and not the champion of a crusade led by outsiders with outsized personalities.

Unfortunately, as David Frum has observed, Hoffman was long on rhetoric and short on specific policy proposals:

Conservatives rallied behind a leaden candidate who could not bother to study the issues that mattered most to his constituents: highways, waterways, and energy marketing; who did not live in the district and did not read the local papers.

Again, first, last and always, substance and ideas matter most. Hoffman is a good man with a great heart who aspired to do the right thing. His loss is heartbreaking for conservatives, including myself. But Hoffman fell short in this election because he failed to do his homework. Consequently, he “showed no grasp of the bread-and-butter issues pertinent to district residents,” lamented the Watertown Daily Times, which added:

In a nearly hour-long session [with this newspaper’s editorial board], Mr. Hoffman was unable to articulate clear positions on a number of matters specific to Northern New Yorkers rather than the national level campaign being waged in a three-way race for the vacant seat of now-Army Secretary John McHugh.

Mr. Hoffman spoke only generally about the need to improve the country’s economy and to create jobs but provided no details, which were also lacking as well in his broadly stated willingness to help our military personnel. Help in what way he could not say.

Warning to the GOP

GOP congressional candidates in 2010, and especially GOP presidential candidates in 2012, are forewarned: Saying that you are conservative and are not the Democratic incumbent is insufficient and inadequate. You must articulate what you are for and why; and you must explain what, specifically, you will do to address real voter concerns.

To be sure, the GOP may well ride a wave of voter angst in 2010 to achieve remarkable electoral gains in both the Senate and the House; but so what and to what end? Once elected, what will these newly elected senators and congressmen do? How will they govern?

In reality they will not govern, because they will have no mandate to do so, and the party will be back where it started — with bridges to nowhere, both literally and figuratively. Moreover, what might have worked in 2009 and 2010 certainly will not work in 2012. President Obama, after all, is not Jon Corzine. He is a far more articulate, charismatic and effective candidate.

Thus, the president will again wage a vigorous and effective campaign, He will again mobilize millions of repeat “new Obama voters.” These voters will be inclined to give their president the benefit of the doubt for trying to solve very difficult and intractable problems left to Obama by an inept and brain-dead Republican Party.

So for any GOP candidate to win 2012, she will have to pull a Bob McDonnell. She will have to be long on both rhetoric and substance. The nominee will have to stir conservative hearts, as did Doug Hoffman, while simultaneously assuring moderate and independent voters that he is a competent and pragmatic problem solver.

The good news for the GOP is that America is a big country with lots of very impressive people who could well and effectively serve as President of the United States.

The bad news is that none of the current crop of GOP candidates – not Newt, not Romney, not Huckabee, not Palin, not Pawlenty, nor any of the bunch — seems up to the task. Indeed, they all fall significantly short in one way or another. They all seem not to appreciate what the times and our country require. And they all seem to miss what it is that the voters — independent-minded general election voters not primary base voters — demand.