Last week’s election results left Republicans and Democrats talking about the impact on their parties’ playbooks. If Joe Scarborough is right, the GOP must now focus on choosing candidates that will win big, rather than “feeding endlessly on base resentments that offend crossover voters.” He will be discussing this premise of his new book, The Right Path: From Ike to Reagan, How Republicans Once Mastered Politics — and Can Again (Random House, November 2013) tomorrow at Politics and Prose at 4 p.m.
Scarborough highlights 20th century Republicanism as a collective political institution that was not a driving force on every issue, but aimed to “bend the world to overarching conservative purposes.” He interprets the party of today as an “ideological institution,” embodying “a pure creed and [ignoring] the harsh political realities that lay before them.” Though “ideology is dramatic and seductive,” he says, “politics is about history and people and the messiness of the world.”
The Right Path argues that if conservatives return to their pragmatic roots, they will again see the likes of Eisenhower and Reagan in office. The book points to some events that led the GOP astray, such as Republican Senator Barry Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act in 1964:
Goldwater’s vote on civil rights carried a historic significance not just in 1964 but also for the five decades that followed. Just four years before … Richard Nixon had carried 32 percent of the African American vote, traditionally a GOP stronghold since Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves a century earlier. But after Goldwater became the party’s nominee, his opposition to LBJ’s civil rights legislation helped contribute to a massive falloff of support from African Americans. Goldwater carried 6 percent of the black vote that year and in the fifty years that have followed, Republican nominees for president have rarely seen their support from African Americans rise above 10 percent.”
If Scarborough and likeminded conservatives influence GOP messaging, future primary elections may look pretty different. With so much political common ground, Scarborough asks, shouldn’t the Republican party’s “big tent” house both neoconservatives and realists, libertarians and moderates?
Scarborough’s brief but thoughtful read offers lots to think about before 2016. The former Republican congressman’s voice is recognizable from his MSNBC show “Morning Joe” and his first two books, The Last Best Hope and Rome Wasn’t Burnt in a Day.
The talk is free to the public, and a Q&A and signing will follow.
