Salam: The GOP is Ready for a Comeback

In his column for The Daily Beast, Reihan Salam argues that predictions of the GOP's death are premature, and that the party is ready for an electoral and policy comeback:

Somehow, despite an endless parade of scandal and embarrassment and the not-distant memory of a presidency widely regarded as a miserable failure, the GOP is poised for a dramatic comeback. The midterm elections are still six months away, and it is entirely possible that Democrats will experience a dramatic political revival between now and then. But even if they do, there is good reason to believe that the Democratic Party has reached its high-water mark. Political scientist Alan Abramowitz has suggested that Republicans will gain roughly 20 seats in the House even in the event of a huge surge in President Obama's approval rating, simply because Democrats won many staunchly Republican seats in 2006 and 2008.

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Frum has taken the conservative intelligentsia to task for its blind adherence to movement orthodoxy, and he's called on the right to learn from the example of David Cameron's effort to modernize Britain's Conservative Party. But this is necessarily a slow-moving and organic process, one that arguably requires more gentle persuasion than outright confrontation. And indeed, it is possible that electoral success must come first. If large numbers of Republicans outside of the South and the Mountain West win seats in 2010, particularly suburban swing seats, there will be a built-in constituency for a more pragmatic brand of center-right politics. The Tea Party could pave the way for a more inclusive political movement that embraces the same fiscal conservatism while leaving aside more polarizing cultural messages, as seen in the Scott Brown campaign. This would parallel the evolution of the antiwar movement between 2003 to 2008, from a fringe movement that alienated moderates to a tendency that came to embrace a large majority of the public.

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