Man in the middle

As the consequences of the 2008 elections continue to reverberate, one Nevada politician who is grabbing headlines is John Ensign. Recent news stories have put Ensign front and center in the reclamation project that is the Republican Party. Indeed, despite the losses that the Republicans took under Ensign’s leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Nevada’s favorite veterinarian was rewarded with the chair of the Republican Policy Committee in the Senate; the number four spot in the leadership of a GOP caucus that has withered from 55 seats to at most 42 in just three short years.

So both in Nevada and nationally, Ensign finds himself in a pivotal position as he and his co-partisans search to redefine their party’s brand in the aftermath of an epoch that was notable for the Republicans’ inability to fulfill the most basic expectations of government, willingness to eviscerate the party’s most cherished principles to secure short term political victories, and culpability in enabling the dullard from Crawford to soil the country’s reputation abroad and bring the nation’s economy to the precipice of a total meltdown.  

Nationally, Ensign signaled the direction that he thinks the GOP should tack with his gratuitous dumping on Sarah Palin in the waning days of the 2008 campaign. Ensign’s remarks about Palin were reminiscent of the chorus of criticism that was heaped on Mike Huckabee after his strong showing at the start of the Republican presidential nomination campaign.  Huckabee, like Palin, appears to be less orthodox in his economic views than the GOP establishment might prefer.  And instead of using values issues as electoral clubs that are quickly forgotten once the votes have been cast, she actually lives her social conservatism.

At the same time, the rise of the peasants with pitchforks crowd within the Republican Party is not surprising. After spending decades cultivating socially conservative voters to sustain their majority, the GOP is now reaping what it has sown as the likes of Palin and Huckabee jockey for power. As Ensign knows, the takeover of the GOP by social conservatives would doom the party to perpetual minority status and allow the Democrats to make further in-roads into the Republicans’ most important constituencies, business and the wealthy.  

To wit, according to exit polls, Barack Obama won 52 percent of the votes of those with incomes greater than $200,000 (a 17 percent increase from 2004) and lost voters earning $100,000 to $200,000 by only a few points. Perhaps even more damning for the GOP is that industries that have traditionally funded the party are giving more and more to the Democrats. According to OpenSecrets.org, in the last election cycle contributions to Democrats from the insurance industry increased by 12 percent, donations from the commercial banking sector rose by nine percent, and giving by pharmaceutical companies to Democrats swelled 18 percent. All of these industries now contribute almost equally to both parties. And if technology is the future, then the GOP is in even more dire straits. After giving nearly equally to both parties during the prior two election cycles, in 2008 nearly two out of three dollars contributed by high technology companies and employees went to the Democrats.

The ability of Ensign and others who share his concerns to reposition the Republican Party as the party of business is going to be even more challenging for two additional reasons. The first is that as long as the Democrats are in the majority, they will be able to extract even more money from the business community; every dollar given to Democrats is one less dollar going to the GOP’s coffers. To make matters worse for the Republicans, the economic team that Obama is assimilating is centrist in its outlook, which will make it difficult for the Republicans to claim that the new administration is anti-business.  

The second problem is that with a few exceptions (such as Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine), the past two election cycles have eliminated any remaining moderates from the party; leaving the GOP caucuses in both chambers of Congress smaller, more reactionary, and more ideologically extreme, particularly with respect to social issues that many in the party still feel are the keys to the Republicans’ future.  The abandonment of the center by the GOP was on full display before the November elections as many Republicans fought tooth and nail against the bailout of the financial sector. While this may have been prudent in the short-term, it sends a powerful signal in the long-term to some of the party’s biggest financial backers.

Although Ensign’s work at the national level seems daunting, it is nothing compared to the task that awaits him in Nevada where he inherits a party organization that in the last election cycle was badly out-worked, out-funded, and out-organized, is light years behind the opposition in applying technology to the political process, and is saddled with a very unpopular governor who insists that he is going to run for reelection.  Moreover, Ensign needs to play catch-up in Nevada given that he has largely been absent from state politics the last couple of election cycles. In 2006 he focused his attention on routing the overmatched Jack Carter, and this past fall he spent his time continually talking down expectations about how the Senate candidates he helped to recruit and fund would perform.  

For the GOP’s sake, hopefully Ensign’s learning curve is not too steep and the Senator is willing to take on many of the unpleasant duties that come with party leadership. Among the thorniest issues facing the Nevada Republican Party are what to do about Jim Gibbons and the primary challengers that he is likely to face. Doing nothing and allowing events to happen on their own accord is not an option given that divisive primaries tend to be detrimental to a party’s chances in the general election.  

The second problem that Ensign faces in Nevada is closing the glaring organizational and enthusiasm gap between the GOP and the Democrats. Unfortunately, at this point the only segments of the Republican Party in Nevada that are engaged are bomb throwers such as Sharron Angle or the Ron Paul crowd. However, given that both camps seek to change the party from the bottom-up, they may not be the most reliable allies for moving the party back to the mainstream. An additional problem is the small issue of money. With the state GOP sugar-daddy Sheldon Adelson losing billions in net worth on a monthly basis, Adelson may not be so free with the purse strings as in the past, particularly after throwing good money after bad funding Freedom’s Watch.

While disasters may bring opportunities, I cannot imagine there are too many people envious of the opportunities that are before John Enisgn. Indeed, failure on any of these fronts may lead to a third straight plus election cycle for the Democrats in Nevada; an outcome that would be disastrous for the Republicans with redistricting coming quickly on the heels of the 2010 midterms.