The GOP’s hidden agenda

Plus: Gorbachev’s world

Republican senatorial candidate Blake Masters (Getty)
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Hidden agenda
The Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby, who helped deliver victories for a generation of conservative politicians both Down Under and in Britain, had a mantra with which he would urge his clients to focus on the core message: “Get the barnacles off the boat.”

The idea isn’t exactly revolutionary but it’s an important reminder of good political practice: voters only pay so much attention — and so to maximize your chances of victory, don’t waste time on policies and promises that distract from your core message to the electorate.

In recent days, a number of Republican…

Hidden agenda

The Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby, who helped deliver victories for a generation of conservative politicians both Down Under and in Britain, had a mantra with which he would urge his clients to focus on the core message: “Get the barnacles off the boat.”

The idea isn’t exactly revolutionary but it’s an important reminder of good political practice: voters only pay so much attention — and so to maximize your chances of victory, don’t waste time on policies and promises that distract from your core message to the electorate.

In recent days, a number of Republican candidates have brought their boats ashore, fired up the high-pressure hose and blasted a few barnacles off the hull. In Arizona, Blake Masters has toned down the abortion language on his website. Yesli Vega, who is running against moderate Democrat Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, has downplayed her connections to Donald Trump on social media.

But if more and more Republicans see discussion of the former president and the abortion debate as unhelpful “barnacles,” what is the boat? It’s one thing to identify losing issues and unflattering stories as distractions. But distractions from what?

For many Republicans, the answer to that question is simple: Democratic misrule. But is that enough? As the GOP reckons with lowered expectations for November, a brace of articles make the compelling case for the party to set forward a substantive platform of its own. In the most recent issue of National Review, Yuval Levin argues that “a politics that is about nothing but why the other side shouldn’t win has increasingly turned both parties into losers.” (It’s worth noting that the Democrats aren’t better than the Republicans here, with Joe Biden now describing his opponents as existential threats to American democracy and “semi-fascist”.)

In the Wall Street Journal, Joseph Epstein argues that “the lack of positive policies or programs leaves Republicans open to the old argument that the party stands for little more than the defense of rich and the maintenance of the status quo.”

So why are Republicans so reluctant to stand for something? The causes are complicated. They include Mitch McConnell’s cautiousness and Donald Trump’s self-obsession. But behind these proximate factors is the big-picture fact of the ongoing realignment in American politics. We are at a moment when voter loyalties are changing, when the relationship between the parties and class are flipping and when the battle for control of the conservative movement is very much unresolved.

In other words, it is one thing to explain the need for Republicans to set out a substantive agenda. It is quite another to actually agree on what that agenda should be. That is a hard conversation to have — and not one to be entered into on the eve of a major election. But with that midterm caveat out the way, the Republican Party must eventually resume that debate. The alternative is, at best, nothing more than loyal opposition and, at worst, a kind of mindless partisanship that spells electoral trouble.

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Gorbachev’s world

Mikhail Gorbachev has died at ninety-one. Writing for The Spectator, Russia expert Mark Galeotti remembers the man who came to power hoping to save the Soviet Union but ended up overseeing its destruction. Gorbachev failed — but in the best way possible. It was “a failure for all the right reasons,” writes Galeotti. “Gorbachev’s greatest virtue was arguably his capacity to fail productively, to fail yet to learn. Unlike so many leaders, he evolved. He came to power convinced all the system needed was a little modernization and a light rebranding, that the party was his greatest ally and instrument — and eventually came rightly to see it as the greatest obstacle to reform.”

While Gorbachev is a figure from another era, he looms large in the minds of two of the key actors on the world stage today. While Vladimir Putin may not be trying to rebuild the USSR (instead reaching further into the past to justify his aggression), he has called the humiliating end to the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the century.” Similarly, for Xi Jinping, Gorbachev represents a kind of “how not to” case study in weakness: a defining example of what to avoid when running a modern authoritarian regime. In China, young apparatchiks are shown documentaries on the Soviet Union in which Gorbachev is the villain.

The death of the last Soviet leader has brought with it a wave of cheery end-of-history nostalgia (complete with Pizza Hut commercials). But much of this triumphalism strikes a bit of a bum note given the ominousness of the present moment.

Biden knows where to find the best basketball

Joe Biden has form when it comes to dubious race-related public statements. (“If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”) The president was at it again yesterday during a campaign stop in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where he made some less than advisable comments about where to find the best basketball in Delaware.

Read it and cringe:

My deceased son, Beau, he was the attorney general of the state of Delaware. And what he used to do is go down, in the east side, the — called the “Bucket” — highest crime rate in the country. It’s a place where I used to — I was the only white guy that worked as a lifeguard down in that area, on the east side. And you know where the — you could always tell where the best basketball in the state is, or the best basketball in the city is, it’s where everybody shows up.

What you should be reading today

Amber Athey: Stop telling people not to go to college
Jacob Heilbrunn: Trump flails around for a lifeline
Madeleine Kearns: Porn again
Ari Schulman, New York Times: Why many Americans turned on Fauci
Eliza Griswold, the New Yorker: The evacuation of Afghanistan never ended
Eric Boehm, Reason: Democrat Josh Shapiro’s lockdown U-turn

Poll watch

President Biden job approval
Approve: 41.6 percent
Disapprove: 55.1 percent
Net approval: -13.5 (RCP average)

Weed versus cigarettes
Percentage of Americans who say they currently smoke marijuana: 16 percent
Percentage of Americans who say they currently smoke cigarettes: 11 percent (Gallup)

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