Humanizing the GOP
Aug31
By John Feehery
The ideological fight between the Republican Party and President Obama is a tug of war. The harder Mr. Obama has tugged the rope to the left, the harder the Republican Party has had to tug the rope to the right.
The Republican convention goal was to serve two purposes.
One was to convince its most ardent supporters that the party was going to continue to tug harder to the right, so that the country wouldn’t be pulled over to the left in a heaping mess.
The other was to convince folks in the middle that the party wasn’t nearly as conservative as it was letting on.
Achieving these twin goals is not easy. Indeed, it is darn near impossible.
But I think to a large degree, the GOP convention did a pretty good job.
Many pundits believed that the purpose of these past four days in Tampa was to humanize Mitt Romney.
But outside of Anne Romney’s speech and the Romney bio-pic, this convention was not about Mitt Romney. It was really about the wide diversity of the Republican Party.
Condi Rice gave the best convention speech. Not once did she mention Barack Obama by name, but she let everybody know that you can be an African-American female, have a level-head on your shoulders, and still think that Mr. Obama is a lousy President. That’s a good message.
Susana Martinez gave the second best speech of the convention. In a similar fashion, she let Hispanics know that it not only perfectly rational for a minority like her to feel comfortable as a Republican, but it is preferable.
Martinez and Rice didn’t exactly toe the evangelically libertarian line espoused by the nation’s radio talk show hosts. But that’s okay.
Even Chris Christie, who was widely panned for a speech that focused mostly on Chris Christie, served an important purpose. You can be a Republican governor in Northeastern state, one who is clearly not an ideologue on things like abortion or gay marriage, and you can still get the keynote address for the Republican convention.
Even Clint Eastwood, who ad-libbed his way into convention history, served a valuable purpose. He let the world know that not every Hollywood actor is a left-wing radical, something that many of us still find hard to believe.
Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan, of course, gave the speeches most ideologically consistent with the rightward pull of the intellectual rope. But even they did so with a wider goals in mind.
Rubio is clearly the best orator in the Republican Party. His speech, which focused almost exclusively on his own biography and philosophy, consistently hit the mark for those who distrust too much government in their lives. But he sang the song of the immigrant, a song of expectation that they will succeed in America if they work hard. That song is always compelling.
Ryan, as the Vice Presidential candidate, sounds more rigidly ideological than he really is. At heart, Paul is a pragmatist who consistently wins reelection in a democratically-leaning district. He looks younger than he is (mostly because he keeps himself in such a good shape), and let’s face it. Chicks dig him. And that can’t be a bad thing.
For many years, the Republican party has been condemned as primarily the political party of southern white evangelicals. That is no longer the case.
Reince Prebius, the party chair, is a Wisconsin Catholic. The Permanent Chairman of the Convention, John Boehner, is an Ohio Catholic. Christ Christie is a New Jersey Catholic. Condi Rice, while Presbyterian, went to Notre Dame and a Catholic boarding school and of course, she is not white. Susana Martinez is Catholic of Mexican heritage. Marco Rubio is a Cuban Catholic.
It is hard to say that the GOP is simply a party of rich, white Protestants because that is simply not accurate. The Republican Party is geographically and ideologically diverse.
The Republican brand was refurbished during this convention, which will only serve to help Mitt Romney during the election. Many observers thought that the primary goal of convention organizers was to humanize Mr. Romney. It turned out that the convention humanized the Republican Party.
I think that the many average people who spoke about what Romney did for them on his own time humanized him the most and they should have introduced him during prime time where more people could have seen them. They did a great job in my opinion when Wolf Blitzer commented about what those average people said about Romney “I think this is going to help in the general election:”
http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1208/30/sitroom.03.html
THE SITUATION ROOM
Mitt Romney’s Big Night; Isaac’s Aftermath
Aired August 30, 2012 – 18:00 ET
WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: “It has sometimes been a delicate issue during the campaign. But Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith is expected to be part of tonight’s lead-up to his acceptance speech.
Our chief political analyst Gloria Borger is here.
You did an excellent documentary on this, but you had a chance to go in depth. He seems to be coming — a little bit becoming more comfortable talking about his faith.
GLORIA BORGER, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes, he is.
And in doing that documentary, Wolf, I spoke with someone named Graham Bennett. He worked with Mitt Romney when Mitt Romney was what they call a bishop in the Mormon Church in his home of Belmont, Massachusetts.
And the Mormon church has no paid clergy. When they say bishop, what they mean is somebody that’s actually leading the congregation but comes from the congregation. Let’s play a little about what Graham Bennett had to say about Romney in the ’80s.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GRAHAM BENNETT, FRIEND OF MITT ROMNEY: When Mitt was the bishop, there were about 60 youth in the ward and the expectation is that you interview the 12-, 13-, 14-, 15-year-olds once a year, but the 16-, 17-, 18-year-olds twice a year.
So Mitt said I’m going to dedicate every Tuesday night, I am going to arrange my schedule to be at the chapel and from 7:30 until about 9:00 I’m dedicating that to interviewing youth.
And so as his counselor, we would print out a list of birthdays of the youth. We would then have the responsibility for contacting them, inviting them to come in and meet with Mitt. Well, over the course of his term as bishop, if you run the numbers, 250, 275 30- minute, 40-minute one-on-one discussions with members of the congregation, and the discussions are along the lines of how’s life going, how is your relationship with your parents, what are you thinking about education, are you planning on college?
How are you doing in your own search for faith and for meaning? And it really is in consistently following through on that kind of action that I think he made a significant difference.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BLITZER: Yes. And he’s letting reporters come in now, see what’s going on.
BORGER: Right.
BLITZER: I think this is going to help in the general election. The Republican primaries, I was always convinced he didn’t really want to get into that whole issue, but now he is feeling so much more comfortable. I think the American public is feeling so much more comfortable.
BORGER: Wolf, he spent 15 years of his life leading his church in one way or another, either locally or in the state of Massachusetts as state president. That’s a lot of time, and effort, and energy.
BLITZER: He’s very charitable to the church and other causes as well. BORGER: Tithing.
BLITZER: What does he need to do tonight?
BORGER: I have been speaking with some people in the Romney campaign. They tell me a couple of things.
First of all, the big question that he needs to face is will people coming away from the speech believe that I care about people like them? They know people understand that he is a wealthy man, but they want to make the case that despite his great wealth, he understands their problems.
They also say they need to really understand that he is a man of character. What they have to do, they don’t want to move the needle. They don’t expect to move the needle that Mitt Romney will somehow jump ahead in the polls. What they want to do is move the needle on the question of cares about people like me, because that is really dragging him down compared with President Obama.
BLITZER: We will see how he does. We will know soon enough. You will be with us throughout the night as well…”