If Massachusetts Republicans want to communicate their commitment to spending restraint, they should invite the public to a caucus of Republican state senators. There are only four GOP state senators. They can meet and conspire for hours, all for the cost of one cheese pizza and a few bottles of water. Take that, you spend-thrift Democrats.
Representing about 11 percent of registered voters, the state’s GOP leadership could take a rather relaxed approach to the game of politics. There aren’t going to be headlines anytime soon proclaiming “GOP Sweeps Commonwealth; Statue of Reagan Erected on Capitol Grounds.”
Yes, you will get your occasional Mitt Romney elected governor, where he can veto and veto and veto, all to no avail. You will get your occasional (very occasional) Scott Brown elected to the U.S. Senate, if the Democrats nominate someone spectacularly inept. But, at the end of the day, the confluence of Northeastern political, “progressive” sob-sisterism; ethnic traditions in dying mill towns; and sufficient state wealth to sort-of-sustain the worst excesses the Democrats have to offer suggests a battleground that will forever be littered with GOP corpses.
Give the GOP boys and girls credit; they don’t give up. During one election cycle, Gov. Mitt roused himself in a Bain sort of way to assemble a pretty good state-wide recruitment and fundraising apparatus to launch local GOP candidates and excite some of the Young Turks. Of course, come Election Day, the results were disappointing, but the exercise was not without its charm.
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Earlier this month, GOP activists – under cover of darkness, meeting in underground caverns – held a GOP Growing Grassroots conference in Milford, to mull the mysteries of social media and create a roster of the next generation of sacrificial lambs sent out to battle the Democrats.
Is there a way to make these Republican spasms more than an entertaining hobby? In a strange way, the Massachusetts GOP, and the state election scene in general, have the makings of an exciting laboratory for a new kind of politics. In this new framework, a party (in this case, the poor Republican Party) can wave the white flag, not in surrender, but as a battle flag for something very different than the traditional approach that would get them nowhere at all.
The Tea Party approach won’t work. Sen. Brown may have benefitted from it a bit, but the notion of Paul Revere riding through Massachusetts, shouting “The Socialists are coming! The Socialists are coming!” isn’t convincing as a tool for Republican, or even Populist, transformation of the commonwealth.
J.M. Bernstein, no friend of the GOP, had an amusing essay in The New York Times last year, chiding Tea Party conservatives for their “deeply held fiction of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency.”
To suggest that individual autonomy and self-sufficiency may be depreciating assets in ObamaLand is not necessarily to say that those attributes aren’t worthy of protection. There is a sense of Libertarian fervor in all of us, even as we cash our Social Security checks and squabble about Medicare rates.
This may be where the GOP in Massachusetts has a chance to be relevant – or, at least, to have a good time. Criticizing “big government” in Massachusetts won’t get Republicans anywhere, but focusing on competent, limited government is an idea that even some of the knee-jerk Democrats could embrace.
Massachusetts will educate us about the potential harm from marijuana, but we will cut back even further on the nonsense criminal enforcement. Massachusetts will educate kids about the risks of too many cheeseburgers, but they won’t be arbitrarily banned from the school cafeterias.
Massachusetts will check the Yellow Pages for vendors who can, who will, who already perform functions that government staggers to provide at high cost and low efficiency. Massachusetts will not merely tolerate, grudgingly, charter schools, but will embrace them, market them – and add a little voucher experiment in one or two lousy urban districts – just to see what happens.
This is the stuff of a Republican renaissance in a place such as Massachusetts. Such a portfolio of funky, “freedom” initiatives won’t win many statewide elections, but it would establish the GOP as a coherent, constructive resource to curb the inevitable Democratic regime.
