A Liberal Economist Remembers Tom Landry (...Again.)

In the run-up to last week’s Superbowl my Facebook feed was just like yours: Positively vibrating with un-contained buzz for a sporting event about which I neither could, nor plan to, care any less. I haven't been interested in the Superbowl for years, except perhaps as a source of lament for the ever lower stoops it represents at the riverside of American popular culture. Last year at the same time I had to be told by one of my students who was playing.

As an unashamed progressive, aspiring artisan, *and* professional economics teacher, the two-week hypestorm of the Superbowl can be a gauntlet of spirit-crushing alienation—the yours-truly equivalent of all the scary desolation that befalls other single people around Christmas. To stave the blues I even make an annual ritual of tossing-off the same joke to my college classes, in which I lament that the conference alignments have permanently prevented Detroit from ever facing New Orleans in the ultimate contest. …And every year I have to explain all over again why there should be any irony whatsoever in the mental image of a nationally enthralled audience, rapt before the telecast of a contest between “Saints” and “Lions.” Pretty generally the kids still don’t get it. Point being, I may actually be the only person among my first, second, or even third circles of real-life friends who is officially all out of fucks to give about the Superbowl and its smorgasbord of unsavory capitulation to the engines of kleptocracy.

Not that there's been much of anywhere to hide: For fourteen straight days in January my Facebook feed was a veritable who’s who of people I’m supposed to look up to, preening in anticipation of an evening of diabetic sloth and Orwellian prostration in patronage of two corporate monoliths trying to ruin each others’ employees’ lives with leg sweeps and armored headgear. Somehow it felt even worse this year, though this of course could be more about me, than it. But mixed in with the usual dreck about which team was better positioned for the game, which commercials were going to be the best and worst, and how the halftime show was expected to come off (remind me again who Katy Perry is?), there were some noteworthy flourishes of genuine interest--and two of these items ultimately came together in my consciousness in such a way as to merit a sugar-free thought or two of my own.

The first was a quiz making its way around Facebook about which NFL team a person should support. Perhaps you’ve seen it: After the usual handful of benign questions and a few seconds of thoughtful machination, the website hosting the quiz purports to tell you which NFL franchise is best suited to your personality and temperament. With many better things to do, I took the quiz and was told I would make a very good Patriots fan. Go figure.

My immediate reaction to the thing when it popped up in my feed was to comment on precisely this flaw: Sports affiliations in general, and NFL allegiances in particular, are highly durable to one’s otherwise evolving tastes and values. To tell someone he ought to be a Patriots fan after an eight-question quiz is less like telling him he should try Pepsi and more like telling him he’d be happier as a Rosicrucian. Cute, maybe, but it ain’t gonna happen. Like our political values, we form our NFL connections early and with a great deal of nostalgia-tinged influence from our local environments, typically while we are still children. And because the choice of team we support has no real consequence for us or anyone else, it is in consequence all but indestructible once it sets: a slab-on-grade foundation, if not of who we are then of who we were when we came into it. Impervious to changes of geography, parental influences, broadcast rights or lists of fellow supporters, however unpalatable the company. Our sports allegiances in this world are as inviolate as our lifelong distaste for the man down the street who threw rocks at us for cutting across his lawn on our bicycles.

Now hold that thought while I explain that the other blip above the din of Seattle-Boston hate week was a reprint of Sarah Vowell’s improbably touching memorial to Tom Landry, who passed away in February of 2000. 

You probably know that Landry was for over a generation the steely-eyed, granite-impassive head coach of the Dallas Cowboys. What you may not know is that he was what we would now call a Christian-Conservative Republican, or that, at the time, so was I. For Ms Vowell to have eulogized him in such a touching way was at once both the perfect complement to my early reactions about the quiz, and a bittersweet moment of regret for an earlier time in all our lives, regardless of one's favorite team. 

For me the default NFL-football allegiance was, has always been, and more-or-less remains, with the Dallas Cowboys. I’m not a million miles from ashamed to admit that lately but it’s still true. And it is precisely that combination of the youthful certitude with which I imbued my initial choice, and the changes that have happened since—to me, to the Dallas Cowboys, to the country we both used to love—which have made Ms Vowell’s remembrance of the passing of their former head coach Tom Landry so difficult for me. Not for what it says about him, or me, or even her, but for what it says about us.

In January of 1978 I had just turned eight years old and my mother and I were living in a dreary apartment in Wappingers Falls, New York. I remember the big day as just the sort of cold and rainy winter Sunday that often besets the Mid-Hudson Valley for weeks and sometimes months on end. All afternoon a blustery drizzle had fallen over the vanishing snow drifts outside our window and speckled them in a pepper-crust of dirt. With all my friends inside for the evening and no appetite for a solo assault on the weather, I decided more or less by default to join Mom on the couch for this thing they called the Superbowl. I had never seen an NFL football game before. And I was hooked. Permanently, or so I thought at the time. Indeed hooked before I had any real notion of what was going on. To say I was changed by the moment is the sort of understatement people usually reserve for car crashes.

The precedent for such naïve zealotry had come three and a half years before, with my bitter disappointment over President Nixon’s resignation, and later with the eventual outcome of 1976 Presidential election. At age four I had known very few things, but I knew I was a Republican. I knew in the very broadest terms what this meant but the connections to my own daily life and potential livelihood were as distant as the nearest quasar and there was precious little appetite among the available adult influences to try to set me straight. 

The idea that I could have been a Republican was just fine with my Democratic-leaning Mother, who thought it was cute that her precocious and ever-nattering young son should bother to have a political identity of any kind. She’d been aggressively over-handled as a young child herself and come whatever consequences she was damned and determined that the legacy of her constriction would be a fierce independence in her progeny. (She succeeded.) 

Meanwhile my by-then-estranged father was far too busy ignoring me for our seven yearly ski trips at the far end of the Taconic State Parkway, to notice. Had he received the news of my politics he would have validated them--but this would have called for a level of interest sufficient to register me as anything beyond a consumer of lift-tickets, and this requirement placed such potential simpatico firmly beyond our collective reach. Which is another thing that never really changed—if also a topic for another column. Point being, I was as staunch a Republican as a person can possibly be at an age when he can’t be relied upon to pedal a bicycle without supervision. 

There wasn’t really much of a choice about this, either. In the mid-1970s nobody reeled from the abrupt disappearance of Richard Nixon as I did. His presence on the television had peppered my earliest childhood with just the sort of butch-gravel voice and haughty command most young boys can easily find at the other end of their family’s living room. To me he was the ultimate man’s man: Listening to him speak was an exercise in the receiving of dulcet toddies—as if Santa Claus had been cast in the role of a 747 pilot, narrating the surely-smooth landing to us over a crackly P/A. Walter Cronkite had painted a terrifying world against the eyeballs of a four year-old watching the evening news unsupervised in 1974, and the main force in my life that had made it less so, was Richard Nixon. How bad could things possibly be, when I could count on the thick tongue and stern visage of the CIC as he spelled out to me why it was so important to continue bombing Cambodia? To me Nixon hadn’t been a Republican, or even a politician of any kind. He’d been, simply, The President. The only one we’d ever had in my lifetime and, presumably, the only one we ever would have, either. And then he’d resigned. And I—knowing positively nothing of which I spoke—had blamed the Democrats in Congress.

The grown-up realization that I wasn’t alone in this misapprehension lessens the shame of its remembrance, if only a little. After all, by this time a series of full body blows had landed on both me and my country with an almost eerie verisimilitude: On the very day that the North Vietnamese captured the Saigon Independence Palace, indeed at the very moment that Sandy Gall was narrating the tank breakthrough at the iron fence, it was explained to me what a marital separation meant, and that soon I would have to move and change schools and learn how to live with one parent at a time. Surely all of this had to be someone’s fault, and the obvious choice was the political movement that had reduced our trusty and benevolent jumbo jet-pilot to a whimpering wreck on national TV the previous summer. In my teens and twenties I would write three separate term-research papers about Watergate—one each in high school, college, and graduate school—and to re-read them now is to witness a fractious and painful transformation from the certitude of Executive Privilege to the necessity of the Rule of Law.

I remember very little about Nixon’s successor other than the tears I cried when he, too, was taken from us—albeit via more conventional means. In the summer of what should have been our national zenith of jingoistic masturbation over the bicentennial, an unknown and almost preternaturally inexperienced smarty-farty had galvanized the cynical Washington press corps around a message of sweeping change, and bullied his way to the Democratic nomination by making shrewd use of the caucuses to compensate for less stellar results in the primaries. Tenaciously opposed in Congress and lacking even the most basic agenda for his tenure, he had quickly retreated into rudderless platitudes, unforced gaffes and mealy mouthed equivocation. (Stop me when any of this starts to sound familiar.)

True, no one yet knew what an Ayatollah was, but still I may have been the only seven year-old ever to be threatened with removal from a U.S. classroom over the hand-back of the Panama Canal. It was only the new President’s first summer at the head of our affairs, but clearly this guy and his ilk had to go. Later that same season I’d started looking into the matter in earnest, and by late autumn I knew the country’s future could stand no better chance than with the tall and straight-talking career administrator and former chair of the RNC, one George Herbert Walker Bush, whom I supported steadfastly in favor of his Hollywood-flack opponent for the Republican nomination (a man whose name escapes me just at the moment). Eventually I would cry on the third night of the 1980 Republican convention, too—if not over the eventual outcome until much, much later.

All of which brings us back to the moment I sat down on that couch in Wappingers Falls to view the spectacle of two NFL franchises slamming away at each other for the most coveted of prizes: SuperBowl XII, in January of 1978, Dallas vs. Denver. I had at this point already chosen George H W Bush for 1980, and I had never seen football before. I didn’t even know the rules. If this much doesn’t tell a person everything he needs to know about my childhood, nothing will.

On game-night itself it was the pageantry struck me first. The New Orleans Superdome was in its gawky infancy and it’s hard to remember what a glittering spectacle of cocky commercial gravitas it was, given what has happened there since. When the two teams were introduced they took the field between flanking plumes of color-coordinated smoke and confetti which erupted from canisters that looked like nothing so much as mortar tubes. The National Anthem was sung by Phyllis Kelly and even before she started there were American flags everywhere. Everywhere. The halftime show was called “From Paris to Paris, Texas” and was performed by the Apache Belles—a majorette corps from the two-year college in Tyler, Texas. The play-by-play commentators were Pat Summerall and Tom Brookshire. A thirty-second commercial spot on the CBS telecast cost $162,000. The Cowboys were favored by six.

Now, if you’re eight and you’ve never seen a football game before, and you’re me, the first thing you have to do—even before you work out what a quarterback is or how to keep the score—is decide which team will be yours. And you have to do so with the death-grip passion of a summons to jihad. Good news, that, because for an eight year-old me still smarting over Watergate and the apparent theft of our ’76 freedom-fest by a spineless peanut farming wimp, this was the easiest decision I’d encountered. Possibly ever.

Nobody had to tell me that the Cowboys were “America’s Team,” or that their hometown would soon rise to prominence as the Martha’s Vineyard of the Republican Party. No one had to tell me that Dallas had a higher payroll or even that they were favored. All of this was at once inescapable and irrelevant: Dallas would win because they walked like they deserved it. They would hold the field because they took it expecting to. They would prevail because right-minded decent folk who polish their act and cross their T’s and don’t try to squeeze by on corner-cutting guile, were the ones who were always rewarded in our society and always deserved to be. The Cowboy team was more poised, more fit, way better looking, and far more polished in their execution.

And so it came to be, at least then and there. The 27-10 final score was if anything under-representative of Big D’s total dominance. The factious and nerve-crippled Broncos would eventually commit eight (!!!) turnovers, and even a doe-eyed little kid who didn’t quite know what was happening could have essentially called it from the opening kickoff, and felt good about it. After all, what could have been more just? If you trusted in the basic elegance of markets and the fundamental correctness of their outcomes, you knew to pick the Cowboys in Superbowl XII before Randy White had barreled through the line to force the first bad snap. People won because they did their homework and had their shit together. Might didn’t make right; it flowed from it.

This is what being a Republican used to be about.

This is why, when those of us of a certain age think of Tom Landry, we can’t help transport ourselves back to a time—yes, I’ll say a more innocent time—when the Jack Kemp’s and Tom Kean’s and Bob Dole’s of the world could smile a hale greeting for you and shake your hand until it hurt and look you straight in the eye and tell you they saw things differently. And if you disagreed you didn’t hate them for it because they’d given you no reason to. They knew in their hearts they were right, just as you knew in your heart that they were not, and neither of you was pandering for the TV-soundbite or the disingenuous red meat to fan his base. No one was winning after having cast the other guy as a cartoon character. You disagreed, but you did it in good faith. Both of you. A person could say this about Republicans once, an increasingly long time ago.

And of all the people you could say this about, you could perhaps say it first about Tom Landry: a Christian Conservative before it was fashionable to capitalize either of those two words, and a Republican the way most of us breathe oxygen, but never with the faintest hint of antagonism for those who would come at things from a different perspective. In sport, as in politics, there was always much to hate about the larger group, but personally I never heard anyone say they hated Tom Landry the man. They hated his team. They hated that he won. But these are not the same thing. No matter how you felt about his record or his politics, you didn’t hate him personally. So, okay, never mind the current crop of politicians for a moment; can you say the same about any Republican-leaning athlete of the modern era? Can you say it about Curt Schilling? About Lynn Swann? About Tim Tebow? …Really?

This is what happens to us when we spend too much time on Facebook, of course: Eventually we find two little blips, backed more or less against each other in our feed, and the combination sparks some otherwise improbable thought which completely commandeers our day. In this much, at least, I am not alone. And so it is that the tragedy of loss I feel over Sarah Vowell’s memorial isn’t just a typically nostalgic reverie for the innocence of youth; it is a nostalgic reverie for the country we all used to share. I don’t just mourn for the loss of Landry, or for the loss of the youth I enjoyed when he and I were in our primes; I mourn an entire era when the sharing of our national discourse meant good-faith disagreement and mutual commitment to proportionate governance. And I mourn it because it’s just as gone as he is.

You of course know where the story goes from that rain-swept evening in 1978—not just for the Cowboys, and the nation, but for me as well—even if you don’t know me personally. As the giddy Republican resurrection of 1980 petered out and a once promising vanguard of the moderate wing lost his bearings under the cult of his boss’ outsized persona, a cabal of increasingly nervous Texas businessmen banded together in suburban Dallas to give rise first to Lee Atwater, and then to Jerry Jones, and eventually to a progressive liberalism in the bosom of your present author, in retaliation for the other two developments.

The sadness I feel, in other words, isn’t for the realization that I have changed: It’s for the realization that, really, I haven’t; it’s the country that’s changed. The country, and the Republican Party, and the poisoned well of social discourse which they’ve wrought to consolidate their ugly grip on power. With the reprint of Landry’s eulogy, I can again remember not just a legacy of championship-level excellence, not just a corresponding chapter from our own lost innocence, and not just one of those grainy historical contexts which always manages to seem greater in our memories than any of them ever really were. I can remember a time—not that long ago, really—when an NFL football coach could be an avowed Christian, an avowed Republican, and almost universally respected for the class, and dignity, and above-all the good faith with which he hurled himself at everything he did. I remember Tom Landry once again, fifteen years later, as the Republican You Could Disagree With, and Not Hate.

He’ll be missed.

Dave O’Gorman
“The Key Grip”
Gainesville, Florida  

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What a New Republican Party Might Look LIke

A Person would have had to be living on Mars (or at the very least, not so politically minded as to have routinely checked for the past four months to see if there are any new entries on this blog), to have missed the news that things are going badly for the Grand Ole Party -- and on any of a wide and growing assortment of fronts. According to the most recent polling data on the subject, about twenty percent of respondents now self-identify as Republicans, the lowest that number has ever been in history. A plurality of Americans now support gay marriage, the impending retirement of Supreme Court Justice David Souter will come at the precise moment that the GOP is scrambling to fill its most senior position on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Newt Gingerich is in a shooting war with his own party chair, and Lindsay Graham, Steve Schmidt, and Megan McCain are all running around talking in various ways about the need to embrace some of the least likely talking-points for Republicans to consider embracing since Nixon reached out to the south. Meanwhile, a certain Governor of Alaska has suddenly and inexplicably gone to ground during all of this "re-branding" talk--presumably since re-branding the GOP away from its current forumla of lowest-common-denomenator hate-baiting would render her instantly obsolete. All of which begs the question: Assuming the Republican party survives at all (incidentally, not an automatically safe presumption), what would a competitive version of it look like, moving forward?

Obviously any exercise in visualizing a future Republican party is going to be speculative on two important levels: it must presume omniscience with respect to the thought processes of the people who will actually carry it out, of course, but it must also presume enough precience about future events that major re-invention continues to seem necessary long enough for it to happen. If the United States should suffer another terrorist attack on its own soil this coming September, for example, and if--as happened the last time--it should turn out that the President was briefed about the danger in advance, there can be no question but that Republicans will cheerfully embrace the hypocrisy necessary to scapegoat the Administration and run the midterm electoral table by making blood-soaked hay with the whole affair.

On the other hand, this author has been thinking for quite a long time now that there are certain innate inconsistencies in the Bush/Dole/Bush/McCain incarnation of Republicanism, that these inconsistencies are not (for the most part) mirrored with offsetting hypocrisies on the part of the Democrats, and that cleaning up some of the mess might render the decision of which party to support a much more interesting one in the hearts and minds of those white males who are capable of thinking in complete sentences about anything more serious than Monday Night Football. Here, then, is the list of changes that The Key Grip believes are inescapable prerequisites to a revitalized and nationally competitive Republican Party in a post-Bush twenty-first century:

1) They must abandon the 1988 playbook. Many people have spoken very eloquently about the incomperable genius of Karl Rove as an electoral tactician, and that's a curious thing in this author's judgment, since Rove was a first-circle protege of Lee Atwater--the man who gave us the first of the post-Reagan, slash-and-burn, lowest-common-denomenator hate campaigns, back in 1988. In the absense of a washed-up movie actor who could still use a teleprompter to plagiarize his commemoration of a space shuttle disaster, the Republican agenda was essentially dead in the water. Most people don't remember it now, but in early summer polling Michael Dukakis was leading Reagan's default successor by seventeen points. Nobody doesn't remember what happened next: With breathless speed, the Atwater operation descended on Dukakis' character with what became the textbook Republican one-two punch of questioning the man first, and then the policies. Dukakis was shown riding in a tank, and then Willie Horton was... well... just shown, if it comes to that. The whole thing was cynical, odious, and intentionally tailored to the "low-information voters" whose emotions (not to say their racism) could easily be manipulated by images on television. And it worked.

It worked in 2002 and 2004, too, when the deep and searing anxiety about September 11th so overwhelmed the American public's capacity for reason, that the man who'd been reading nursary rhymes to schoolchildren when the whole thing happened could somehow argue that he was the only person in the country who could keep us safe. On the Democrats' opposition to what we all now realize was a trumped-up war being argued on false pretense with tenuous connections to the attack, he ran up his numbers in the '02 midterms. On the Democratic nominee's representation of himself as a strength-and-security alternative, the incumbent's Atwater-protege campaign strategiest trotted out the Atwater playbook to maximum effect: Question the character first, and then, once the character is questionable, question the policy. And it worked. At least in part because the guy they were doing it to, is a douchebag. But that's another column.

Point being, a lot has changed in the world since 2004--and not just the replacement of security as the top issue concerning most Americans, either. In 2008 and 2009 and beyond, the primary vehicle for political discourse simply isn't television anymore; it's the new media. It's the internet. It's blogs like this one. And the thing is, hot-button catch-phrases just don't work in a comment-driven medium like this one. John McCain runs an ad saying that Barack Obama wants to teach sex education to kindergarteners, and the story gets blurbed in the political news websites all over this country, after which the comment forums directly beneath the stories overflow with meticulous dissections of the ad for the hate-baiting drivel that it is. The hot-button defenders weigh in, but are quickly shouted down by an avalanche of reasoned, thoughtful, one might even say nuanced counter-argument, until eventually they give up and go back to listening to their AM-radios at the vacuum cleaner store.

Meanwhile, the "low-information voters" whose television-based voting heuristics have, after a generation of being rewarded for lower and lower levels of information, inclined them to decide that all politicians are rascals, have responded in the only way they can: by sitting the whole thing out. Much was made about the comparatively small up-tick in voter turnout this past election cycle; it is my belief that the top-line data hides the story: there was an abnormally high "churn" in voter turnout, with television-watchers supplanted by normally self-disenfranchised new agers whose ire could no longer be suppressed by the latest album out of Windham Hill.

Like it or not (and this author at least does), the new political debate is one of substance over shock-and-awe. Internet forums don't let people shout emotion-fanning nonsense and have the last word the way television does. If the Republican party wants to revitalize itself, it will have to start with a repudiation of the anti-content, anti-intellectual, anti-agenda with which it has been auguring the country into the ground for the thick end of my lifetime. It'll have to stand for something more significant than repealing the estate tax and calling the other guy a socialist. Because the only people who vote anymore will be waiting to swat-down anything less.

2) They must embrace small-c conservatism. It's been said before by persons more articulate than I, on both sides of the political aisle, but there's a fundamental inconsistency inherent in calling one's group "the party of small government" on the one hand, and embracing runaway defense spending, on the other. And the irony is that the Republican party hasn't always been like this: in the days preceding the second world war, Republicans were clamorously non-interventionist, fearing that militarization of the national economy would unduly empower the federal government. Indeed after the war, none other than Dwight David Eisenhower used the opportunity of his farewell adress to warn the country of the growing power of the "military industrial complex" to set the national political agenda.

Forty-eight years later his words seem heartbreakingly prescient, and the party from which he hailed now holds the record for the largest explosion in military deficit-spending in history. A party that claims to be for smaller government can't withstand the glib, internet forum smack-downs that it so richly deserves for gobbling up our children's future to spend it all in Iraq. And unless and until the small-government wonks can gain the upper hand over the shoot-em-in-the-face crowd, a tea party to protest basic, Keynesian recovery-spending on roads, bridges and schools will ring hollow in the minds of anyone who bothers to scroll down and read the first four comments beneath the story. In 1993 the tea parties would've made for great television; in 2009 they make for self-caricaturing blog comedy--and the Republican brand just sinks lower and lower and lower. Not everyone would support a smaller-government party, but at least that party would be self-consistent with respect to the two biggest planks in its platform: taxes and spending. This would seem a relatively obvious prerequisite to re-branding the Republican party, regardless of who in the current coalition would have to be sacrificed in the process.

3) They must be more inclusive with respect to faith. I myself have no faith, indeed am proud to count myself among those who have no faith, but there is no particular reason why a political party whose agenda includes renewed commitment to faith-based living has to be fundamentally offensive to me the way the 2008-2009 Republican party is. The reason they make people like me so angry (and scare the hell out of everyone else) is not so much their embrace of faith but rather their rejection of it--specifically, their rejection of any faith that isn't extremist, born-again Crhistianity in its least christian and most aggressive forms. Granted, a re-branded Republican party could position itself in the other direction, toward a more "libertarian" approach on social issues, but there's a reason why libertarians are so few in number: They're either Republicans because they don't like taxes or they're Democracts because they don't believe in God.

I believe that a re-branded Republican party succeeds not by renouncing its faith but rather by re-positioning itself to focus on the objectives of that faith, a la Mike Huckabee: It could be the party that opposes not just abortion but also the death penalty. It could be the party that supports not just orphanages but ending world hunger. It could be the party that welcomes not just Southern Baptists and Joe Lieberman, but right-minded persons of all faiths, instead. I'd have a hard time supporting a party that wanted explicitly mulitdenominational religious instruction in our public schools, but I'd have a harder time being so angry and scared by the idea as I am by the existing intention to turn our nation's classrooms into hot-houses of extremist Christian-right-wing proselytizing.

4) They must find their roots on the subject of free enterprise. Your intrepid author has attempted a Ph.D. in economics, depending on how you count, no fewer than three times in his life, and all of them have ended in failure. Part of the reason is that your intrepid author isn't bright enough to pass the tests--but that's only part of the reason. The rest is a crippling and ubiquitous frustration with the fundamental, nay preposterous self-inconsistency of the modern conservative economic paradigm. It advocates greater market concentrations so as to exploit economies of scale, but ignores the anti-competitive side-effects of the decreased competition. It embraces free trade on the premise of lower product prices, but ignores the nagging detail that the only firms large enough to justify the move to cheaper labor markets are also large enough to withhold the cost-savings from their customers. It calls agriculture a perfectly competitive industry despite the fact that all those countless farmers get together once every October to sell their production to a monopsony buyer, with all the market distortions that appertain thereto.

There is absolutely no reason why a re-branded Republican party couldn't embrace all aspects of a less-encumbered, properly functioning market economy--notably including some basic checks on the extent of anti-competitive corporate power. They could advocate for freer trade, while at the same time supporting wage insurance and increased investment in workforce training. They could espouse less government regulation over the subject of opening and operating a business, without also embracing anti-perfect-information policies with respect to product- and workforce safety. They could be cavalier about the environment without coming across as cavalier about the downstream, downwind safety of our kids. I'd probably still vote the other way, but a party that said "free enterprise only works when there's less government intervention and smaller firms with greater competition" would at least be a lot harder to dismiss on the basis of open and shameless hypocrisy, the way this Republican party and its corps of professional economists is, now.

5) They must drop their one-sided policies with respect to immigration and the Middle East. This one is a toughy, since the White House is so tough to win without holding Florida and Arizona, but neither the Latino community nor the well-informed political junkies of the internet are going to suffer cheerfully a political party that panders to anti-Hispanic rhetoric in the desert southwest, or to an "anti-terrorist" plank that green-lights unilateral military adventurism by Israel. The situations on the borders between the United States and Mexico and between Israel and the West Bank are both bad and getting worse--not in spite of, but because of the Republican party's tacit acceptance of a race-dividing status quo with respect to the former and a barely contained anti-Muslim furor with respect to the latter.

When the path to citizenship is difficult, bordering on impossible, the only people who try are the most desperate (and, to that extent, the least easily recognized as potential benefactors of hard work and ingenuity). An easier path to citizenship in this country encourages not just free enterprise but increased innovation, attracting the very people most likely to be frustrated by their home country's thwarting of their Horatio-Algier spirits. It's a little-known but important fact that if Albert Einstein was alive and living in Germany today and wanted to come to the United States, he'd have to go through the infamous April Fool's lottery like everyone else--and probably wouldn't get in. (It'd be okay, though, because he could go build the atomic bomb for a more welcoming country somewhere else, instead.) Until the path to citizenship in this country returns to its free-enterprise-encouraging ease, and corporations are forced to hire U.S. citizens and pay them a living wage, no party that claims to love free enterprise can rest on a bed of anything other than hypocrisy when it advocates such ridiculous and race-dividing measures as the construction of a fence along the border.

Meanwhile in the Middle East, the previous Administration's quietude on Israeli excesses has created a powderkeg of disempowered resentment on the part of the Palestinians, largely in response to the Israelis' construction of a border fence of their own--a nightmarish concrete monolith that already stretches to over 200 miles, dividing families, destroying towns, suppressing Palestinian economic activity and effectively ruining all prospects for peace for the duration of its own existence. No political party that claims to be in favor of suppressing terrorism can turn a blind eye to this outrage without risking dismissal in the political news comment pages as a vehicle for shameless doublespeak. To re-brand itself in a way that would appeal to a plurality of better-informed and more racially diverse voters, the Republicans would have to drop the anti-immigration hate mongering, and call for a renewed commitment to forcing all sides to the peace table in the Middle East.

None of this will happen right away, of course, and most of it will never happen. Fortunes will turn and much of this re-branding will be either overtaken by new events or rendered unnecessary by some offsetting implosion on the other side. The purpose of this column was never to suggest that these are the only ways out of the low-20's doldrums for the Republican Party--but rather, to lay out the principal changes through which the "new" Republican Party would be harder for this author not to vote for. It might not make for an extra thirty-percent of the public in its corner, but making it harder for hardened Democrats like myself to dismiss it out of hand could well be the first, big step toward the next realignment of political fortunes, however far into the future that realignment may be. Lest we forget, the Democrats were in a situation not unlike this one in the early days of the Reagan Administration--and it took just this sort of reexamination of principles to get it where it is today.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida

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