Old ideas from young Republicans

By Frank Moraes

The other night on Colbert Report, there was Reihan Salam explaining how the Republicans are going to win the hearts of the working class. And he had the book he wrote with Ross Douthat, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. Ah yes, the Grand New Party. The book is described as, "Two of the Right's rising young thinkers call upon the GOP to focus on the interests and needs of working-class voters." The basic idea is simple: the Republican Party should reinvent itself as the party of the working class and focus on making the base of the party the married heterosexual couple.

There is a fundamental problem here: this is already what the party claims to stand for. All Salam and Douthat are calling for is a continuation of the same except that Republicans should stop getting us into wars all the time. While I admit that this would be an improvement, I doubt that it would do much to make the Republican Party more appealing to working class Americans. This comes back to the issue I talk about over and over again: it's the poor, stupid. The problem with the Republicans is not cosmetic nor is it focus. The American people didn't vote for Obama while thinking, "You know, if it weren't for Romney's hateful rhetoric and terrible foreign policy, I'd vote for him!" The Republican economic policies are toxic.

But this doesn't stop the mainstream media from going all gaga over young Republicans offering up a vision of a Republican Party that doesn't seem quite so horrible.


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