I've been listening to a thought-provoking presentation from Ken Mehlman, former Republican National Committee chairman and Campaign Manager for Bush/Cheney in 2004. A lot of what he said has echoes of our own party debates over the right way forward.
He started by saying that this election was a historic one in a number of ways. It's the first since 1952 where no incumbent President or Vice-President is on the ballot. It's the first since 1976 without either a Bush or a Clinton on the ballot. And it's the first since 1826 (sic) that an election has followed two back-to-back two-term presidencies.
For either Obama or McCain to win would be to overcome recent historical precedents. Obama's problem is that since 1964, the only Democrats to win the Presidency have been Southern moderates with an appeal to swing voters and at times when national security had receded as an issue. McCain is trying to win a third successive term for his Party, something only achieved since Truman by Bush senior in 1988.
He identified three target groups for the GOP: blue-collar Democrats (Obama lost primaries like Pennsylania and West Virginia); Hispanics (Arizona and Texas will within ten years be states in which whites are a minority and Hispanic voters will be key in states like Florida, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada), and moderate ,suburban independents (for small government but socially tolerant) who like McCain's maverick image.
Mehlman sounded positively Cameroon when speaking about the issues on which the GOP should focus. He explicitly endorsed the politics of "and" rather than "or", saying that GOP success had been built by leaders (Reagan, Gingrich with the "Contract with America", George W Bush in 1990) who reached out to new groups of voters, focussed on new issues that had come to matter to people and used new technology to communicate their message. Today, the party should focus on quality of life issues: infrastructure, energy and education .Family values voters would (as the Virginia gubernatorial elections showed) vote for a candidate who promised to fix the transport system so they could get home quicker to their children over one offering tax cuts.
The party had to recognise that for people under 40, the environment was a value not an issue. If you banged on about climate change being a myth, those voters would stop listening to you.
New technology empowered ordinary people, enhanced choice and fostered entrepreneurialism. Republicans should embrace this world.
They should also be welcoming to anyone who shared conservative values. The "Tiger Woods generation" would be turned off by politicians who froze someone out because he was black or gay.
Finally, he argued that Republicans needed to remember that most people spent very little time thinking about politics and certainly didn't hate or deride people who happened to have different political views. Overly strident, partisan rhetoric was a turn-off for voters.
Well, it certainly rang a few bells for me!
