The Republicans now: an assessment

A little more than five months before the mid-term election, how do things look for our Republican opponents? As I see it, they have one major factor working in their favor, but several working against them.

Polls taken soon after the passage of Arizona's controversial illegal-alien law showed that a majority of Americans favored it, despite the consensus of the political elite against it. More recent surveys show that support for the law is increasing; Arizona's Republican Governor Jan Brewer, who signed the law, has seen her support in the state rise above 50% for the first time and is now decisively ahead of her likely Democratic opponent in the next election. It's no wonder that Republicans all over the country are now scrambling to advance similar legislation. The right wing knows it has a winning issue here.

Serious border controls and an ID system to differentiate illegals from citizens and legal residents would bring the US into line with how most democracies enforce immigration laws. Given the scale of the illegal-alien problem in the US, such normalization is likely inevitable. Experienced Democratic politicians are moving toward a more mainstream position, although their plan still includes a "path to legal status" (amnesty) for the present illegals and is thus unlikely to be sellable to the public.

I've discussed here how the Arizona law and the left's disastrously-bungled response response to it are creating a golden opportunity for the right wing (please read it if you haven't already -- this is important). This is not the eighties and it is not Europe. Calling people racist for opposing illegal immigration doesn't intimidate them into silence, it just makes them get mad at us. As with the teabaggers, there are certainly some racists involved, but they aren't the mainstream of the movement.

But the right continues to be plagued by the weaknesses which have become so characteristic of it: a tendency toward extremist and nutty positions and candidates, divisions caused by a quest for ideological purity, and bad leadership.

The first problem is exemplified, of course, by Rand Paul. I myself used to be a libertarian for several years and I understand the ideology; Paul's stance on anti-discrimination laws applying to private business is a good example of why I abandoned it. People who take such a stance are thinking in bloodless abstractions and absolutes, divorced from the real-world impact on actual human beings. Just as "pro-lifers" (another revealing euphemism) prefer to talk about "protecting unborn life" rather than about forcing women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, so defenders of Paul's view talk about the absoluteness of property rights rather than about the endless humiliation of black Americans being told they were not good enough to eat at the same lunch counters, sit in the same part of the bus, etc. as whites.

And Paul has plenty of other baggage, such as nutty conspiracy theories and extremist associations. Moderate Republicans are seriously worried about him.

Paul also serves as an example of the problem of divisions over ideological purity. In the primary he was supported by the tea party movement, while the Republican establishment favored his more moderate opponent who would have had a better chance to win the general election. Sarah Palin may now be creating a similar debacle in Washington state. In the Florida Senate race, hard-right support for Marco Rubio drove the more moderate and electable Charlie Crist to simply leave the Republican party and run as an independent. The hard right likes to claim that ideologically-pure right-wing candidates are more likely to win general elections than moderates; a statistical analysis of recent elections has confirmed that just the opposite is true. Again, moderate Republicans worry about the "party of no" image.

As for those leadership problems, the party chairman is a one-man gaffe machine, the RNC has just dumped one of its most effective leaders, the new "America Speaking Out" website is a fiasco, and fund-raising is a disaster.

Again, the November elections will probably turn mostly on job growth, which is continuing to do even better than economists forecast. But we can't afford to get complacent or make mistakes. That's what happened in the recent Massachusetts Senate race.