Lessons From ’92 Offer Hope to GOP
And then, as now, Republicans felt they had been laid low. Gov. Barbour, at the time a former White House political director, entered the scene to launch a four-part recovery plan for his party. Each piece would seem to make as much sense for Republicans today as it did then.
Step one was to rebuild state parties. When a party is in control of the White House, its strength lies at the national level. But when it’s in the minority, Gov. Barbour says, the route back to strength is for national leaders to help build strong state party organizations.
After the 1992 GOP debacle, the fruits of that effort came almost instantly. Within two years, the number of Republican governors had risen to 31 from 17.
Step two was to rebuild the party’s small-donor base. Another consequence of controlling the White House is that a party finds it easier to raise big money from big donors, and it tends to let its small-donor network atrophy. That’s what Gov. Barbour found in 1992. The party had raised records amount of money, but from a shrinking base. Its roster of donors had shrunk from almost a million in the mid-1980s to about 400,000. By focusing on regaining small donors, he built it back to 1.2 million by 1996.
Step three was to push the party to the cutting edge of political-communications technology. After 1992, that meant getting more plugged into talk radio and satellite transmission of television content. So Gov. Barbour built a first-class TV studio at Republican national headquarters, launched a Republican television network and used satellite uplinks to beam interviews with Republican lawmakers to stations back in their home districts by the dozen.
Today, of course, the challenge for Republicans lies in a different kind of technology: They’re behind Democrats in using the Internet to communicate directly with voters and donors.
Finally, and crucially, step four in the Barbour plan was to convince voters Republicans had fresh ideas — specifically, ideas that translated conservative philosophies into policies that addressed contemporary problems.
Gov. Barbour started that process by sending a questionnaire soliciting policy views to every Republican donor and officeholder in the land. He then launched his own in-house think tank to put meat on those bones of ideas.
“You want to get as many people as possible to participate in the policy-making process,” Gov. Barbour says. “And by that I mean literally in the hundreds of thousands.” By the time House Republicans wanted to compose the now-famous “Contract with America” as a policy platform on which to run in 1994, the content was fully cooked.
The parallels between 1992 and 2008 aren’t exact, of course; the economy at the beginning of the Clinton era was coming out of a mild recession, while it now seems to be in a deep one.
But the broader lessons of the Barbour era seem relevant — and cause for a bit of holiday cheer for a party that found mostly coal in its stocking this year.
WSJ
12/28/8
Magnolia Tribune
