The GOP’s Massive Win Doesn’t Solve Its Identity Crisis at All

The Republican Party’s victory
last night is certainly not to be dismissed or downplayed. The
latest
results have them picking up seven Senate seats and losing
none, and picking up 15 House seats and losing only one (there’s
still some undecided races, though).

But this wave was not a result of a unified public movement.
That’s not to say it wasn’t organized or that the Republican
machine didn’t work hard for these outcomes. But it lacked a
“Contract with America” or populist Tea Party movement to indicate
to voters what they should expect once they “threw the bums out.”
Instead it ended up being an election about
rejecting President Barack Obama. It wasn’t an election about
advancing any particular Republican position, and that has
reinforced the narrative of the
“election about nothing.”

Forget saying the Republican Party doesn’t have a “mandate” (an
oft-misused word) with its win, it doesn’t even really have
marching orders other than to not be Obama. It shouldn’t come as a
surprise then that the news out of the beltway today is that Sen.
Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) are
not acting like they’ve been put in charge of a revolution. From

The Washington Post:

The remedy, they have decided: Act quickly to send President
Obama bills with bipartisan support to fast-track international
trade agreements, repeal an unpopular tax on medical devices and
approve the Keystone XL pipeline.

While Republicans will also stage more votes to repeal Obama’s
Affordable Care Act, party leaders readily acknowledge that they do
not have the votes to overcome a presidential veto — making an
all-out assault on the ACA a quixotic campaign, useful primarily as
a rallying point for the party’s base.

Note further on in the story:

When lawmakers return to Washington next week for a lame-duck
sessions, the two leaders are also planning a series of joint
appearances, joint memos and op-ed articles to signal their
decision to work together and to discourage more
intra-party drama.

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), chairman of the GOP conference, said
House Republicans and Senate Republicans have been quietly building
their relationships for months over dinners and meetings.

“Our fortunes are tied,” he said in an interview Wednesday.
“We’ve got to hang together and that approach starts at the top
with Mitch and Boehner.”

Emphasis added. Note the lack of interest in discussing anything
that could possibly provide that intra-party drama like how best to
approach ISIS in Syria and Iraq or how (or if!) to reform National
Security Agency surveillance rules. They don’t want to ruin their
big win with squabbling between the party’s libertarian-leaning
elements and its neoconservative members.

But it’s an issue that’s obviously not going away. Sen. Rand
Paul was front and center throughout the evening both for his
relationship with McConnell and the general understanding that he’s
going to be running for president (though no, he hasn’t announced
yet). Yet, Tom Cotton, the Republican who won a Senate seat in
Arkansas last night, is an archetypical neoconservative and Vox.com
(perhaps a bit hyperbolically) calls him “Rand Paul’s worst
nightmare.” He wanted New York Times reporters put behind
bars for exposing a U.S. surveillance program, and he is an Iraq
War vet who supports
military intervention:

“I think that George Bush largely did have it right,” Cotton
said, “[in] that we can’t wait for dangers to gather on the
horizon, that we can’t let the world’s most dangerous people get
the world’s most dangerous weapons, and that we have to be willing
to defend our interests and the safety of our citizens abroad even
if we don’t get the approval of the United Nations.”

Cotton’s foreign policy hawkishness, and his backing from the
neoconservative establishment it’s brought, have helped shape his
political persona. “Cotton has staked his young political career on
a staunchly assertive, activist view of American military power,”

Politico‘s Alexander Burns wrote in a 2013 profile. For
conservatives who support an aggressive foreign policy, “there is
no Republican under the age of 40 with more riding on his career
than Cotton,” Burns concludes.

The Republican Party is now going to have to hash out what it
stands for while it’s in a position of some strength. Neocon
columnist Jennifer Rubin is
insisting that last night’s results aren’t because of the
popularity of a libertarian message. She will no doubt continue to
insist the case even if Paul lands the nomination in 2016, but
nevertheless it is true last night’s election didn’t affirm any
understanding of where the Republican Party is going.

Of course, it’s also extremely clear the same is true of the
Democrats, perhaps now even more so. Up until this point in Obama’s
presidential career the party has rallied around him and served
him. Whatever Obama stood for is what the party stood for. Without
Obama, the party is left with a bunch of progressive platitudes and
outcomes that they find desirable (raise the minimum wage, reduce
college debt) and no strategy on how to get there, especially now.
When identity politics play much less of a role in an election
outcome—note the lack of gay marriage issues on the ballot—they’re
struggling. Illinois Democrats manufactured some
progressive-friendly “advisory” votes in order to try lure out
voters, and yet their incumbent governor still lost. In President
Obama’s speech today he attempted to point to the successes of

minimum wage initiatives in several states today as a win for
him, but the fact that Democratic candidates also lost in these
very same states suggest the party needs to be thinking beyond
begging young people to vote and thinking they can somehow defeat
conservative philosophies and purge them from the polity
forever.