Robert Draper, a contributing writer for the magazine, wrote this week's cover article about the attempts by young conservatives to revamp the Republican Party. He last wrote for the magazine about how Democrats finally embraced super PACs.
Why did you choose to focus on this particular group of techies and young Republicans to tell the broader story of the party's future?
The story began for me, as many things do, in a bar over drinks. Shortly after the election, I got together over a period of several days with some younger Republicans whom I've known for some time, just to get their input about how Romney had managed to lose a winnable election. Uniformly, their assessment was that the loss bespoke a party mindset of which the Romney campaign was only emblematic. These younger conservatives began itemizing for me the many ways in which the party elders didn't get it — and that the G.O.P. was now at a disadvantage on five fronts: digital capability, how its brand was perceived by emerging demographic groups, the quality of its messengers, its entrepreneurship and its stable of strategic visionaries. Since these early sources of mine were all in the upper-middle climes of the party infrastructure, none of them wished to go on the record for my story. But it was partially with their guidance and encouragement that I located the individuals who ended up being the story's protagonists.
What surprised you when you first got in touch with these young conservatives?
I try to let a story's facts lead me to a premise rather than the other way around — which may be virtuous, but it also means a lot of floundering and credulousness before things start to make sense. What was unusual about this story was that 90 percent of the young conservatives I interviewed had the same thing to say — that the G.O.P. had fallen perilously out of touch with the 21st-century electorate — and weren't afraid to say it candidly. None of them had been old enough to vote for Reagan, and their honestly held fear was that the Reagan-era party that existed in their imaginations will never again return to its former greatness. As one of them told me with evident angst, "I'd really like to see us win again in my lifetime."
Is anyone in the Republican party arguing against the brave new digital world after the election? Could there be another figure like Stuart Stevens, Romney's campaign manager who doesn't tweet?
The problem, as Bret Jacobson and Ian Spencer of Red Edge, a digital-advocacy group for conservative causes, made clear to me, is that the party may now recognize the need for a digital component but will lack the imagination and the financial commitment to deploy it effectively. The G.O.P. is still dominated by veterans of the direct-mail and TV-ad trades. That's how they make their money, and for them there's little incentive to adapt to the digital world. One of my young sources theorized that Republicans continued to embrace a high-school model, in which the party chiefs are the big men on campus who ridicule the computer nerds. Whether or not that's the case, multiple sources made clear to me that the G.O.P.'s failure to match the Democrats on the digital front extends well beyond presidential campaigns and throughout the entire party superstructure — though a few Republican leaders, like the House majority leader Eric Cantor and the majority whip Kevin McCarthy, have been making efforts to reverse this attitude.
Kristen Soltis Anderson, a 28-year-old G.O.P. pollster, ran focus groups that sounded fascinating. What did they consist of?
Each of these groups lasted two hours and were quite animated. Kristen Soltis Anderson passed out sheets that described three or four "mission statements" for a political party and asked them what they thought. One of them espoused fiscal conservatism (read: traditional G.O.P.); another, adhering to constitutional principles (Tea Party); another, promoting shared values (social conservatism); and so on. The two least-popular mission statements by far were the Tea Party and social conservative ones. The focus group members found the former to be antiquated and the latter ominously subjective.
You write that Stuart Stevens's op-ed in the Washington Post made Anderson feel "unglued." That made me wonder if the pace of change in her party could ever be so slow that she switched parties.
Nope, no chance of that, any more than there was a chance that the abjectness of the Democrats during the 1980s compelled its finest young talents to switch parties. Anderson and the other young Republicans with whom I spent time remain true believers — though nearly all of them believe that the party is fighting a losing battle on gay marriage and should adopt a kinder, gentler approach to other incendiary social issues like abortion.
The United States is historically a two-party system. Is there any possibility that these young conservatives might split off and join with, say, libertarians?
No, the likelihood is greater that the Tea Party will become its own unit while the G.O.P. begins to fall in line with Anderson, et al. and espouse more socially tolerant views. She and the conservative journalist S. E. Cupp and others took pains, however, to emphasize that they don't line up with libertarians on matters relating to foreign policy or the federal government's role in domestic matters like education or disaster relief.
In many ways, your article reads more like a business story than a political one. Both Democrats and Republicans could be selling widgets rather than a candidate, is that right?
What David Plouffe and Jim Messina did in 2008 and 2012 and what Ken Mehlman did in 2004 was apply basic business imperatives to a political campaign: rely on continuously updated data, test and retest everything, develop a keen understanding of your customer base, empower your sales staff while holding them accountable, etc. Perhaps more remarkable is that arguably the most successful C.E.O. in the history of presidential campaigning, Mitt Romney, relied instead on what young Republicans told me was "the gut-check rather than data-driven model."
Wouldn't it be easier for Republicans to change the product, not the advertising?
The problem, as Kristen Soltis Anderson succinctly put it, is that the G.O.P. brand is perceived as "not of the 21st century." And in this new century, there are not only emerging issues but along with them emerging demographic groups with whom, say, Ronald Reagan didn't have to contend. S. E. Cupp, the conservative New York Daily News columnist, may well be right that Americans remain center-right on a host of issues (though polling on matters like abortion leave plenty of room for argument), and conversely I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that the way for Republicans to win is by pretending they're Democrats. It remains to be seen whether a Marco Rubio or a Chris Christie can project a more appealing party image while largely sticking to party positions that have turned off young and Latino voters. As Plouffe pointed out to me, Latinos embraced Obamacare more than any other voting group, and so to condemn universal health care coverage without offering a positive alternative plays into the party-of-no-emblem even if your last name is Rubio and you offer illegal immigrants a path to citizenship. Bill Clinton famously refashioned his party's "product" — first, through the moderate Democratic Leadership Council and later, as president, with welfare reform — and did so through personal mastery rather than wholesale reinvention. Perhaps through the Clinton paradigm Republicans will come to believe in a place called Hope.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
The 6th Floor Blog: Behind the Cover Story: Robert Draper on Why the G.O.P. Is So Slow to Adapt to the Digital World
Dengan url
http://koraninternetonline.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-6th-floor-blog-behind-cover-story_19.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
The 6th Floor Blog: Behind the Cover Story: Robert Draper on Why the G.O.P. Is So Slow to Adapt to the Digital World
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar