How the GOP Can Right Itself

2009-06-09
By G’Ra Asim

With the announcement of Rep. John McHugh as President Obama’s nominee for Army secretary, the Republican Party suffers yet another crippling blow to its already declining relevance.  Having recently tapped Republicans Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman and former congressman Ray LaHood for Cabinet positions, Obama’s choice of McHugh is but the latest in a series of politically expedient selections of leading moderates that both bolster the Obama Administration’s bipartisan posture and further deplete the GOP’s dwindling cache of potential rising stars. Whatever one’s personal leanings, it is to the country’s collective benefit that the Republican Party regain its footing and act as a formidable check and balance to a popular president and a potentially filibuster-proof Democratic Congress.

Developing at least some parity between conservative and liberal ideological influence in Washington would also be keeping in line with President Obama’s purported willingness to entertain alternative points of view, a notion well equipped to accommodate an increasingly diverse electorate. Paramount to reinvigorating the mainstream right is a successful and sustained courtship of minority members of the Millennial generation. However, because the party graybeards are probably too proud and too oblivious to write to MTV’s Made for a shot at a “I Want to Be a Viable Option for Young Brown People” edition, they are unlikely to find out what members of that coveted demographic are thinking.

Otherwise they’d know that while the calculated insertion of non-white conservative faces into the public arena is not a bad start, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and RNC Chairman Michael Steele are not going to connect with Millennials on the strength of melanin alone. We’ve grown up in a vastly more multi-cultural society than our forefathers, so our racial sensitivity is sophisticated enough to distinguish diversity from tokenism. Many of us have lived and been educated as tokens ourselves, so undue emphasis on conservatives of color without a substantive reevaluation of the Republican platform is more likely to strike us as patronizing than pleasing. The knee-jerk condemnations of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor as a “racist” are but one example of the exclusionary tone and in-group worldview that undermine perfunctory attempts at rechristening the party brand.  

Exchange race for technology and we still aren’t going for the bait and switch; Newt Gingrich’s ideas don’t become fresh and vibrant just because they’re on Twitter rather than Meet The Press. Instead, the GOP must work to elucidate how its advocacy of free markets and reverence of personal responsibility has the possibility to enrich Americans of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds. President Obama’s most effective appeals to Millennials revolved around inclusion and a refutation of the idea that cynicism is realism. Framing Republican values in a similarly uplifting context is vital to broadening the base.

Much has been made of President Obama being the so-called first hip president, and while fickleness and transience are as intrinsic to the definition of cool as conservatism is its opposite, the GOP can’t afford to wait around for the inevitable backlash against Obama’s status as semi-deity. For the moment, positioning the party as diametrically opposed to the sitting President is equitable to huffily taking a seat at the out crowd’s table in the political cafeteria. To save Republicanism from a coolness quotient roughly equal to Billy Gilman’s, a more nuanced contrast to the party in power is wise. The right should project an image of being a fresher, more cutting-edge version of postures Obama and the left have already claimed, but in a way designed to ultimately portray Democrats as on the right track but a yesteryear sensation. Or, in Millennial terms, the GOP would do well to strive to be the Facebook to a Democratic MySpace, the Gym Class Heroes to progressives’ The Roots, a Family Guy that overshadows The Simpsons.

That may sound like a tall order, but an improved presentation of the Republican agenda presently outweighs the need to overhaul basic policy. They may mock Obama’s storied eloquence but in truth, the Commander-in-Chief became an idol with Generation Y by veiling partisan sentiments in feel-good generalities, not by hammering centrist-leaning college kids with a Marxist insistence on redistributive economic change—which he may very well believe in.  Instead, Obama simplified one of the most ambitious policy proposals in American history into a three-word mantra and taught the world to sing it in unison. Now, in the midst of their darkest days in recent memory, his adversaries must overcome their reluctance to repeat it to themselves.

EbonyJet.com contributor, G’Ra Asim, 22, is working on a novel.