The Great Brown Hope

One of the favorite pastimes of a party out of power is imagining the hypothetical perfect candidate for returning that party to power.   With the GOP currently leaderless and the top prospects for 2012 all sporting obvious flaws, it makes sense that conservatives would be engaged in this kind of daydreaming.  Over at The Corner, Jonah Goldberg writes:

Okay, so what if we could build a candidate? You know, from scratch? As longtime readers should know, I loathe identity politics. But, again, my preferences are irrelevant for this exercise.

For starters, I think the ideal Republican candidate just might be Hispanic — and tough on immigration. The way our politics work, you need some kind of authenticity, some kind of membership, to go after sacred cows. Not just in the Nixon to China or Sista Souljah sense, but in the sense that only members of a "special group" can challenge the orthodoxies of the self-appointed (left-wing) leadership of that group. Blacks can challenge racial quotas in ways whites can't. Women can attack feminism in ways men can't. Jews can criticize Israel, Catholics can challenge the Church, gays can question gay marriage, and so on. Yes, they'll still be attacked for their heresy. But the chief weapon — charges of bigotry — is severely blunted when "one of your own" leads the assault. I don't like it, but it is what it is.

So, with that in mind, I think an Hispanic Ward Connerly could do wonders for the GOP. For starters, he could set the immigration debate right in a way that fixes much of the GOP's so-called branding problem. He — or she, though my sense is it would need to be a he — could make it clear that legal immigration is good (though in need of reform) and that illegal immigration undermines not only continued legal immigration, but assimilation. More important, he could allow the GOP to reclaim at least some of the extremely good and noble narrative of immigration as a story of individualism, entrepreneurialism, and patriotic assimilation rather than group victimization. An Hispanic businessman could shake things up in all sorts of ways. He could send the signal that the GOP is still the party of opportunity and self-reliance. He would help with the deteriorating Catholic vote, with the Western states, and even some Eastern urban areas.

But most of all, an Hispanic candidate would help win back Republican moderates. Remember how important Colin Powell and the diversity pageant at the 2000 GOP convention were. It was never the intent to win over huge numbers of black voters. Rather, it was to send the message to soccer moms and the like that it wasn't "racist" to vote for the GOP. An Hispanic candidate could have the same effect. The trick, however, is for the Hispanic to be a conservative who sells conservatism to Hispanics and others, not a Hispanic who tries to convince conservatives that La Raza is basically right and that Republicans need to get over their alleged racism.

There are all sorts of obvious problems with this (admittedly hypothetical) recipe for GOP renaissance--the most obvious being that the real Ward Connerly hasn't exactly done wonders in bringing African-Americans over to the GOP--but what really strikes me about Jonah's daydreaming is how closely it resembles the kind of thinking that afflicted Democrats for much of the last three decades.

In the quest to win back the White House, Democrats were always fantasizing about the perfect candidate to carry their message to the American people, someone who had the credibility to withstand the standard litany of Republican attacks. The ideal candidate would be Southern, because the Democrats were weak in the South; a military veteran (preferably a war hero or retired general) to rebut charges that the Democrats were weak on defense. He needed to be a governor, because senators never win. Someone with a long record of accomplishments. And because the Democrats were always accused of being pointy-headed elites with funny-sounding names, the ideal candidate would obviously be someone who had real "regular guy" appeal and a strong, true blue American name.

You see where I'm going with this, right? After all that daydreaming about the ideal Democratic presidential candidate, the guy who eventually brought the Democrats their most decisive victory was a black, urban, Harvard-educated Northern Senator (and former professor) with no military record, very little experience, and a Muslim-sounding name. It's still pretty hard to believe that happened.

If anything, Obama reinforced Democratic stereotypes. But he won because he was a smart politician, an effective communicator, and he had an inspiring, appealing message. It's funny that in the wake of Obama's political success, Republicans are falling into the same kind of thinking that led many Democrats to be wary of nominating Obama in the first place.