CONGRESS

GOP Leadership Might Have New Look After Elections

by Erin McPike

Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008


With Democrats widely expected to gain seats and add to their majorities in the House and Senate, Republicans acknowledge they have work to do in rebuilding the party after the 2008 elections.

Senate Republican Conference Chairman Lamar Alexander of Tennessee pointed to the House as one place the party might turn. "We'll have a lot of new Republican members," Alexander said Wednesday. "I think people overlook that... but we might have a large collection of brand new Republicans. And all it takes is one or two classes of new Republicans to give energy to a Congress."

Should Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois win the White House, Alexander said, "then the leadership really turns to the congressional leadership." The new GOP House members will "have an idea about what they want to do."

National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Cole of Oklahoma said much the same thing, noting "change is actually under way right now" by way of the new class that will come to Congress in 2009. "This is going to be a very large freshman Republican class. People seem to not, like, get that, and it's because there's 29 open Republican seats. We'll win most of the seats."

He predicted the GOP will have 20 to 25 new members on the basis of holding some of those open seats and picking off a couple of seats from freshman Democrats.

"If we have a difficult election, people will turn to these people and say, 'Now, how did you win in a difficult environment?' They will change the nature of the Republican Conference in about four to six years, pretty quickly as these things go," he said.

Cole noted that the new crew will be a crucial element in choosing the Republican leaders in Congress who will help shape the identity of the party in the coming years.

"They're going to have an agenda of reform and change, because they're running in an anti-Congress, reformist environment.... They just get it. That's who they are," Cole said. "They're coming to town to change the town. That will start with changing us in the Conference."

The GOP's vice presidential nominee, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, "may well be that same thing, interestingly enough," Cole added, while noting that the Democrats are simply working to reinforce a liberal majority rather than bring about change.

He compared the 1994 class of freshman Republicans to the 2006 class of Democrats and said the latter has been "ho-hum."

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who made a swing through the Republican convention site Wednesday, disputed that. "We would always have liked to have gone harder," he said, but he ticked off a list of legislative accomplishments since early 2007 that were "significant changes where we've actually done stuff."

Van Hollen summed up the Republican strategy as, "We've seen the enemy, and it is us." And he views his party as safe from Republican predators for now because the GOP has acknowledged that it is a party in trouble.

California freshman Rep. Kevin McCarthy, known to most House Republicans as a rising star in the party and co-chairman of the party's platform committee at the convention as a result, agrees -- to a degree.

"You don't go out and say this is my brand. You earn it. You can't earn it back in a short amount of time," he said. "You can't change your brand with the same old dog. To get people to look at a new brand, you have to change it. What they did with New Coke to the old Coke didn't work, did it? You've got to have something new and improved. It's got to be in a different package, a different look, a different way."

For that reason, he said in an interview before GOP nominee Sen. John McCain chose Palin, the senator's choice of a running mate needed to be surprising and shake things up. He said the same thing needs to happen with the congressional leadership.

McCarthy does not see one individual leading the way for the Republican Party and would rather see a group of people come together to guide it forward -- perhaps the Young Guns, a group in the House of which he is a member.

"We should view ourselves as a startup company," the Californian said. As for the cash-strapped NRCC, McCarthy contends the chairman should be appointed rather than elected.

But Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, McCarthy's platform committee co-chairman who nearly lost his first election to the Senate in 2004 to a former top Clinton administration official but who is highly regarded by his peers as extremely astute in politics and policy, is calmly confident about the future of his party.

Should Obama prevail, Burr warned, "I dare say we'd probably see the most massive tax increase we'd see in the history of the country," implying that in the long run, the Republican Party is not doomed.

In his eyes, the GOP needs to strip down its message and start looking ahead to the future. "People have to believe that you're serious," he said. "There has to be a degree of consistency."

He argued that the Republican Party's representation in Congress is diverse and stacks up well when matched against the Democrats with women and Hispanics, but he conceded that the party is trailing in black representation.

In interviews in Washington in July, both Burr and McCarthy singled out education as a policy area where if Republicans dig in their heels, they could gain an upper hand on the Democrats. Politically speaking, Burr noted, there is no better way to attract the attention of women in the 40-55 age bracket, a demographic the party has done poorly with, especially with the rise of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.

  •  
  •