The GOP Ground Game
A blueprint for where the Republican Party goes from here
In the age of Obama, the Republican party has thus far gone missing. So last week, I traveled to Kentucky, where I was an apprentice reporter years ago, to see if I could find it. I went to the corner of Sixth and Jefferson, in downtown Louisville, to a grassy park between the courthouse and the old jail, for a tax-day "tea party." The event I saw was a genuinely grassroots one, spawned on Facebook by a 23-year-old restaurant worker who managed to draw 1,000 folks on a blustery day. The speeches echoed the same apocalyptic themes the GOP will sound in the capital when Congress returns this week: that Obama and the Democrats are on a spending spree that will bankrupt the nation and rob us of all that's left of our freedom.
But it wasn't really a GOP event. Half the crowd was perennial Kentucky "aginners," who oppose the federal government on general principle, who like Ron Paul and the NRA and who don't like or trust either party on spending. Some others at the gathering praised Bill Clinton as a fiscal moderate. Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, the GOP leader in the Senate, was not at the rally—and he didn't sound as if he regretted it. Such events, he told me, "shouldn't be totally pooh-poohed." Key word: totally.
Tea parties, of course, will not revive the national party. So what will? There is no one-stop Republican inner council with all the answers. "When you're in the minority like this, it is every man for himself," says Charlie Black, a longtime consultant. But, essentially, this is what GOP strategy amounts to: focus on the mundane; play for time; look for ways to divide the Democrats' large, and perhaps unwieldy, majority; wait for the president's inevitable drop in the polls; and keep distant from Obama's budget, spending and programming. If the GOP is regarded as the "Party of No," so be it. If the economy improves markedly by fall 2010, Republicans aren't going to get credit anyway. If the economy doesn't improve, the president will get the blame. "If he does it by himself, he owns it," says McConnell.
McConnell seems poised for this grinding ground game. Facing 58 Democrats in the Senate, he and his allies appear determined not to cede the disputed Minnesota Senate race to Al Franken; McConnell claimed not to be paying close attention, but he knew every wrinkle of the legal arguments for federal appeal. Facing another daunting round of Senate races next year, Republican leaders are begging well-known figures to run, and hope to replace weak incumbents with stronger options. While McConnell will not say so publicly, Kentuckians think he wants his unpopular colleague, Sen. Jim Bunning, to head for the showers. When I reminded McConnell that Bunning has an approval rating of 28 percent, the response was … silence.
As Obama's $3.5 trillion budget moves toward final passage, the GOP will put some of these strategies to use, pointing out (read: amplifying) Democratic division. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid has less clout than his counterpart in the House, Nancy Pelosi, and he risks more defections. The official GOP line is to "work" with moderate Democrats—but it isn't clear Republicans really want to do more than make trouble for the other side.
In the meantime, says McConnell, the party can afford to wait for Obama to make some unpopular decisions and hope the rest of the country catches up to Sixth and Jefferson. "Do we really want to double the national debt in five years?" he asks. "Do we really want to spend so much and grow the government so much? Governing is a hazardous business, and not all of the decisions the president makes are going to be right." So if you're a Republican, perhaps you can rely on hope—if the word weren't already on somebody else's poster.
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Howard Fineman is Newsweek's Senior Washington Correspondent and Columnist, senior editor and deputy Washington bureau chief. He is the author of "Living Politics," a column that began on MSNBC.COM and Newsweek.com and that now also appears in the print magazine. An award-winning reporter and writer, Fineman also is an analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, appearing regularly on "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," "Hardball with Chris Matthews" and "TODAY." The author of scores of Newsweek cover stories, Fineman's work has appeared as well in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Republic. His 2008 national best-selling book, "The Thirteen American Arguments," was released in paperback by Random House in the spring of 2009.
One of the nation's leading political reporters, Fineman has interviewed every major presidential candidate from (then-vice president) George H.W. Bush in 1985 to (then senator) Barack Obama early and often in the 2008 campaign cycle. His current work focuses on the Obama Administration and its top officials, as well as on Congress and politics throughout the country. Although based in Washington, Fineman travels widely in the U.S. and has covered politics and other events in 49 of the 50 states.
Fineman's work has produced many milestones and awards. A cover story in November 2001 featured President George W. Bush's first extensive interview after 9/11. Another cover, "Bush and God," was part of a series of articles that won the 2003 National Magazine Award for General Excellence. His reporting has helped Newsweek win many honors from the Magazine Publishers Association and the American Journalism Review. Other awards include a "Page One" from the Headliners Club of New York, a "Silver Gavel" from the American Bar Association and a "Deadline Club" from the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). In 2006 he received the Alumni Award from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
As a reporter and writer, Fineman ranges widely. Besides campaign-year covers, other projects have included: race and politics, the impact of digital technology on society, the influence of Hollywood on politics, the rise of the religious right and of conservative talk radio. He has interviewed business leaders such as George Soros, Bill Gates, Steve Case and Robert Rubin and entertainment figures such as Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda and Jay Leno.
Although now under exclusive television contract to NBC, Fineman over the years has appeared on major public affairs shows, such as Nightline, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday, Larry King Live, Charlie Rose and the NewsHour. He was a regular panelist on Washington Week in Review on PBS (1983-95) and on CNN's Capital Gang Sunday (1995-98). He worked with Ted Koppel on Nightline specials, and has been a guest on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report."
A native of Pittsburgh, Fineman began his career at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, covering the environment, the coal industry and state politics before joining the newspaper's Washington bureau in 1978. He moved to Newsweek in 1980, was named chief political correspondent in 1984, deputy Washington bureau chief in 1993, senior editor in 1995 and senior Washington correspondent and columnist in 2008.
Fineman holds an A.B., Phi Beta Kappa, from Colgate, an M.S. in journalism from Columbia and a J.D. from the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville. His legal education included a year as a visiting student at the Georgetown University Law Center. He received Watson and Pultizer Traveling Fellowships for study in Europe, Russia and the Middle East, and has traveled to more than 40 countries, among them China, Vietnam, Japan, Ukraine, Israel, Turkey and the West Bank Palestinian Territories.
Fineman is married to Amy L. Nathan, a senior counsel at the Federal Communications Commission. They live in Washington with their two children, Meredith and Nicholas.
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