What of the GOP?
The divided Nevada Republican Party failed to mount much of a get-out-the-vote campaign this fall. National Republican forces, wary of a party whose largest county organization is dominated by a disgruntled Ron Paul insurgency, did an end run around the state GOP apparatus (such as it is), pouring in money to support Mitt Romney’s candidacy here through their independent “Team Nevada.”
That effort failed. TV buys were not enough.
Republican Dean Heller did manage to hold onto his U.S. Senate seat, narrowly defeating Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley, who was weighed down by a House ethics probe. Nevada voters also re-elected Republican Reps. Joe Heck and Mark Amodei, and the GOP won three of five closely contested state Senate races – though Democrats preserved their 11-10 majority in the Legislature’s upper chamber.
The temptation now is to urge all Nevada Republicans to kiss and make up – to slap a Band-Aid on the old wounds and get busy raising money for 2014 and 2016.
But, at the risk of stretching the metaphor, papering over a deep and fundamental wound rather than cleaning it out is hardly a sound basis for future health.
The more libertarian, Ron Paul wing of the party makes some good points. They ask what good it does to close ranks behind candidates who may be fine men in their own right, but who fail to engage, fail to inspire, who dodder along the campaign trail too gentlemanly to give statism the evisceration it richly deserves, reading canned scripts as though punch-drunk – Bob Dole, John McCain, perhaps even Mitt Romney.
Mr. Romney, after all, signed into law a state version of ObamaCare while he was governor of Massachusetts. This hardly gave him much of a podium from which to decry “a vastly expensive government takeover of the health care industry, which will bankrupt the nation even as it delivers inferior, rationed care, just as it did in the Soviet Union.”
And so he didn’t, and the election was decided, apparently, on whether Republicans would hand out free birth control pills.
Texas Rep. Ron Paul, 77, is retiring from the national scene. But his followers, ridiculed and stymied in their early efforts to be heard in Nevada’s GOP councils, did their homework, learned the rules and gained control in Clark County, only to be denied even the symbolic satisfaction of nominating Rep. Paul from the floor at the national convention in Tampa and hearing him make a speech before his inevitable concession to Mitt Romney, 90 days ago.
What did the Republican Party gain by telling those fervent, mostly younger, small-government activists to get lost?
The Republican Party needs new blood and a new way to cast its “less government, more freedom” message to appeal to younger voters. That message stares them in the face.
The Paul contingent points out the fruitlessness of electing people who happen to have an “R” after their names but who deliver little more than “Democrat Lite,” continuing to embrace bigger spending, bigger deficits, more intrusive regulations that make it hard to develop America’s plentiful energy resources, who go along with job-crippling regulations at home and vastly expensive, fruitless wars overseas, who cast a blind eye on the inflationary policies of the money-printers and the fact that the latest guy from Goldman Sachs always seems to end up running our economic policy (of the bankers, by the bankers, for the bankers), no matter who’s elected president.
Many of them also want to wind down the counterproductive war on drugs – an issue of tomorrow, not of yesterday.
Given a choice between actual, strident Democrats and a hesitant, apologetic “Democrat Lite,” they warn, voters will usually choose the real thing. But that’s not the message voters hear when the Republican Party fields the likes of U.S. Senate candidates Todd Akin of Missouri and Richard Mourdock of Indiana – who were traditional social conservatives, mind you, not wild-eyed Paulistas.
The money is here. Las Vegas Sands Corp. Chairman Sheldon Adelson contributed about $70 million in 2012. Wynn Resorts CEO Steve Wynn is another multimillion-dollar donor. The current struggle is over who will control that cash flow. But a party that can’t explain its principles clearly – and then field candidates committed more to those smaller-government principles than merely to “raising money and getting myself re-elected” – may discover such spigots don’t stay open forever.
The Nevada GOP needs a single, central message, and it’s not “Show us the money.” It needs to set a goal that involves transforming government, and thus transforming America, away from the suffocating blanket of statism, back to a land where hard work, risk-taking and entrepreneurship are cherished, celebrated, and allowed to reap the rewards bestowed by a free market – not reviled, condemned, and penalized.
From there, rebuilding local organizations can proceed on a sound footing.
Who will lead? Rather than ostracizing any element of the party, both Gov. Brian Sandoval and Sen. Dean Heller should now sit down with these disparate elements, including the Ron Paul supporters – separately, at first, and then together – to identify common ground, hammering out a platform and a course for the future.