Senate GOP Wounded, Talks of Rebranding

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While Senate Republicans say they must recast themselves as fiscally minded Reagan Republicans and not the “big-government conservatives” the public has increasingly seen them as in recent years, there appears to be little consensus in the Conference on what that mythical Republican looks like.

GOP leaders began Wednesday the process of picking up the pieces, with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Republican Conference Chairman Lamar Alexander (Tenn.) and other leaders talking during the day, aides said. Following those talks, McConnell issued a statement congratulating President-elect Obama on his victory and vowing to work with Democrats in a bipartisan fashion.

“The Republican leadership stands ready to hear his ideas for implementing his campaign promises of cutting taxes, increasing energy security, reducing spending and easing the burden of an immense and growing national debt. On these, and other bipartisan issues, he will find cooperation in the Senate,” McConnell said.

For conservative firebrand and Republican Steering Committee Chairman Jim DeMint (S.C.), the rebranding means a return to old-line conservative values and approaches, and if leadership is unwilling to come along, new leaders might.

“We have got to clean up, reform and rebuild the Republican Party before we can ask Americans to trust us again. This must begin with either a change of command at the highest levels or our current leaders must embrace a bold new direction,” DeMint declared following Tuesday’s electoral defeats for the GOP.

In an interview, he continued his critique of his party’s leadership, warning that “we’ve allowed a few big spenders to rule and ruin our party” and called the GOP’s soul-searching a “crisis of confidence and a crisis of courage.”

But he stopped short of calling for new leaders, saying that “our leadership needs to change direction” and hew to a more conventional conservative ideology.

For Judiciary ranking member Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), changing the party’s image means shedding some of the harder right-leaning inclinations and to adopt a more centrist-based approach.

“I think that the message comes across very loudly and very clearly that we can’t play just to a limited segment of our party. That elections are controlled by independents to a very significant extent and by swing Democrats who are willing to cross party lines and that means having ideas and policies which appeal to them, and this is a country which has traditionally been governed from the center. That’s why the Republican Party has to move to the center,” said Specter, a moderate.

And then there are those who, like Alexander, see the way forward as something of a hybrid approach that draws on the GOP’s traditional principles of fiscal and personal responsibility using a new set of, as Alexander terms it, “solutions” tailored for the 21st century.

“We simply have been a failure at taking those principles and turning them into solutions more than half the people can support,” Alexander said, adding that Republicans can no longer ride “along on solutions fashioned in the late ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.”

Republicans said McConnell would likely have to tread lightly with the handful of centrists in the GOP Conference.

“Working with moderates is always a better option than trying to force them to do what you want,” said Senate GOP strategist Ron Bonjean, who previously worked for former Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.). “However, the Republican leadership knows it will need to pick its battles in winning them over. It should be expected that moderates will not always be with them.”