The GOP shrinks

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

Incumbents who preside over the kind of economy President Barack Obama has endured over the last four years rarely get reelected. Add to that the fact that there is a significant number of Americans who never would vote for a Democrat and/or an African American and it sounds grim. Yet here is Obama, heading into the final stretch of the campaign, leading Mitt Romney in the national polls and in most of the key swing states. What in the world is going on?

Grover Norquist, the anti-tax zealot who has intimidated almost all Republican members of Congress into swearing never, never to raise taxes under any circumstance, once said his goal was to make government so small you could drown it in a bathtub. Norquist hasn’t quite achieved his goal, although he must be happy over the brutal dismissal of hundreds of thousands of state and local workers since 2008. On the other hand, the Republican brand is well on its way to achieving the kind of shrinkage Norquist wished upon government.

The GOP, in continuously moving further and further to the right, and in constantly pandering to the most reactionary sectors of the party (who are the ones who vote in the primaries and decide who will be the party’s presidential candidate), finally have exceeded what even many of the citizens of what has been described as the “right nation” are willing to tolerate.

Notwithstanding all the double-talk by the Romney-Ryan ticket about the benign implications of their proposed changes to Social Security and Medicare, the polls show seniors aren’t buying it. They sense in their bones the truth: that the Republicans’ goal is to do away with the two most popular and successful social programs in the history of the country, ones the GOP did not support from day one.
That’s why Paul Ryan, speaking to the AARP, the leading organization of older people in the country, got a reception just short of what a Holocaust denier might get at an American Jewish Congress convention.   

Obama is saddled with an economic debacle he did not create but is blamed for not fixing. He has been blocked at every turn from doing something about it by fierce and systematic Republican obstructionism. He’s also been counseled away from taking bold actions to checkmate the Wall Street “masters of the universe” by advisers friendly to the Street and inherited from the Clinton administration. Based on these facts, the President should have no chance in November. Yet, according to the latest surveys, he has a very solid chance.      

Part of the explanation lies with Republican overreach on a wealth of issues, from Medicare to women’s health care. It’s a measure of today’s GOP’s arrogance that they ignored the warning that messing with Social security and/or Medicare is political suicide. They went there, and they are paying for it as polls show elders leaning toward Obama.  

Another component is that while twenty-first century Republicans were moving further and further to the extreme right, the ground under their feet shifted. The aging of the population has proceeded substantially from the time George W. Bush tried to sell partial privatization of Social Security and got nowhere. Now there are more elders to punish politicians who threaten the programs they depend on.

Also, women are more empowered than ever, and while the Republicans deny they are engaged on a war on women, many female voters don’t believe them. Obama has an 18-point lead over Romney among women. That’s a potential killer for Romney as women make up more than half the electorate.

Then there is the Latino vote. It’s grown in the last few years, and the Republicans in general and Romney especially have done an outstanding job of alienating them. Latinos sense the ferocity of the Republican base’s attitudes regarding immigrants when they see a John McCain, once a champion of humane immigration reform, renounce his former stance out of fear of being outflanked on the right by a Tea Party candidate. And Latinos know that Mitt Romney was the most rabid among a field of virulently anti-immigration Republican primary candidates. They also realize that many of them would be included in Romney’s irrelevant, irresponsible 47 percent. Not surprisingly, Latinos favor Obama by a whopping margin.

The issue goes beyond the fact that Mitt Romney has turned off so many different constituencies that the party that once thought of itself as a big tent is in danger of becoming a tiny umbrella. The Republican Party has a structural problem. The composition of the electorate is changing dramatically but the GOP appeals not to the growing but to the fading sector of voters. This might be the election in which this reality finally catches up with the Republicans and overrides the formidable drawbacks facing Obama – the economy, the flood of money being invested in Romney by right-wing fat cats, and the racism that keeps the Deep South a solid Republican bastion and that lies behind much of the highly personal animus toward Obama himself.