Grand New Party: Republican 'rebuilding' begins today

January 21, 2:14 PMConservative Politics ExaminerKathy Shaidle

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Washington, DC:

Built on a swamp by a Frenchman.

Gee, how could that go wrong?

Well, how about entrusting self-appointed beltway insiders and "experts" with the harrowing task of rebuilding a fractured, demoralized Republican Party?

New President Barack Obama's borrowed Lincoln Bible was barely back in the Archives when ex-Bush speech writer David Frum unveiled his contribution to the cause today: a website called NewMajority.com.

NewMajority is staffed by Margaret Hoover (yes, she's the former President's great-granddaughter) and other Establishment types with fancy pedigrees.
The first piece I read at NewMajority.com was a downright condescending scolding by one Michael K. Powell, who says the usual stuff about "youth" and "technology" (yawn) then declares:

"The Party also must be more sober about the demographic transformation that is taking place in America. We are a browning nation, but a Party seemingly incompetent in connecting with America’s diversity and its ascendant multiculturalism. We are stuck in antiquated notions of race."

Now, the United States is only "browning" thanks to lax immigration laws and enforcement (which is directly related to the Elite's fondness for cheap nannies and gardeners.)

The well-documented (if largely ignored) phenomenon of present-day Hispanic aliens' disinclination to assimilate is something patriotic Americans should condemn, not embrace.

Karl Rove's ill-fated strategy of courting the Latino vote didn't help Republicans much in the last two elections.  For every illegal alien cum "future GOP donor/voter", there are dozens of non-Latino, law-abiding, tax paying citizens sick of having to "press ONE for English."

Frum's NewMajority is just one of many online projects devoted to "rethinking" and "re-energizing" the Republican Party. (Plugged-in Gen-Y political junkie Wendy Sullivan is critiquing all these projects at her new blog Right Rants: Rebuilding the GOP from the Ground Up, in outspoken posts like "New Media vs. Old Farts.")

Alas, too many of these "rebuilding" enterprises share a misguided focus that's also bound to be the seed of their own undoing: that is, an obsession with "winning elections."

NewMajority's slogan, for example, is "Building a conservatism that can win again."

But what good is "winning" if the "conservatism" that "wins" is faddish, unprincipled and unmoored from traditional American, Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism?

I for one plan to side with the "conservative, but not necessarily Republican" camp, and leave the electioneering to the careerist beltway CPAC Establishment.

After all, back in the early sixties, it was grassroots activist and housewife Phyllis Schlafly's self-published, million-selling anti-GOP Establishment book, A Choice Not An Echo, that led to Goldwater, who led to Reagan.

Not bad for a small-town mom running an accidental movement from her kitchen table, without email, the web -- or any support from Party bigshots.

Unless the "new GOP" is run bottom up, by the grass/net roots, it is doomed to fail.

Deservedly so.