Fred Karger, candidate for the Republican nomination for president, is a man without a party. Karger is a political consultant from California whose clients have included large corporations and industrial groups, as well as a string of GOP presidential hopefuls, of whom he particularly focuses on Ronald Reagan. He is also a gay rights activist and the first openly gay candidate to seek the nomination of a major American political party.
He’s not going to get it, and he knows that. Karger generally comes in at around 1% or less in every state where his name appears in polls. His candidacy, as he puts it, is a campaign to move the debate in the GOP primary away from social issues, which he feels pushes his party too far to the right and away from the bulk of American voters, and back toward jobs and economy.
Even as a protest candidate, Karger has not been very successful. With no money, no momentum, and no hope of even placing in a single state, he can neither buy nor earn much attention in the mainstream media. The televised debates are his only real chance to get his point across, but his low national polling numbers have kept him from being invited (along with former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer and, with one exception, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson). It’s tempting to ask what else Karger expected; he does not have an established political brand, the capacity to make noise by raising a lot of money, or even a pet policy (such as Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan) that could attract attention.
This does not and should not detract from the fact that Karger is essentially right. The GOP has, since the 1960s, been an alliance of the financial establishment, social conservatives, and national security hawks, with the simple and effective branding of ‘small government, low taxes, and a strong national defence’. This was more than clever messaging – they were the three things on which each constituency of the GOP (finance, social, national security) could agree. This was the offer that brought the Fred Kargers of the world to the Republican party in the 1970s and 1980s (and generated the phenomenon of Reagan Democrats).
All of the present GOP candidates sing some variation of this song, although the difference in hymn-sheets is increasingly clear, particularly in the Republican party’s inability to agree or develop a coherent position on national security (undermined as they have been by the previous administration’s embarrassing failure of leadership on the issue). The GOP offer stands strongest on the low taxes issue, perhaps the party’s most fundamental value; if ever turbulent political seas should sink the Republican ship, taxation will certainly be the last plank to which they cling before slipping forever into the briny deep. As a result, the debates have generally been more about the candidates accusing each other of not staying faithful to the agreed line than about discussing genuine differences in policy.
This is not to say there are not substantive disputes within the GOP on its core issues; last year’s ugly schism within the Republican party between the financial establishment and the doctrinaire Tea Party over the debt ceiling may be over, but it is not forgotten, and libertarian champion Ron Paul takes a line on national security – withdrawal not just from Afghanistan but from every international position, including Korea and Germany – that is borderline heretical. But that’s not what has Fred Karger worried.
Underpinning this entire arrangement – financial, social, and security conservatives for smaller government, lower taxes, and strong defence – has been an understanding that the GOP’s candidate must placate the social conservatives by at least appearing to agree to their agenda, the two redline issues of which are reproductive rights and gay rights (immigration has made a strong push to join them recently). That the most recent manifestation of this is that the Iowa primary was almost won by Rick Santorum, a largely talentless right-wing hack whose views on homosexuality, reproductive choice, and perhaps race are ludicrously retrograde and out of touch, can and should provide Karger with matter for very grave reflection.
What Karger is asking – leaving social values out of the debate – is not prima facie absurd, politically. American attitudes toward reproductive rights are remarkably similar to where they were thirty years ago – a minority saying abortions should always be legal, a minority saying they should never be legal, and a real majority saying they should be legal some of the time. There is very little political mileage in having a righter-than-thou contest on this.
Meanwhile, attitudes on gay rights (marriage and military service, in particular) have progressed significantly even in the last three years; Republican candidates who would reinstate Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (requiring gay men and women in the armed forces to hide their sexual identity) or who advocate a national law defining marriage as heterosexual are, for the first time, representing a clearly minority position. There was a time when gay rights issues were a cudgel with which the GOP could beat Democrats (witness the 2004 election in Ohio, for example), but the advantage there seems to be slipping away even as candidates devote more time, energy, and money to obsessing over them.
The Republican candidate, in all likelihood Mitt Romney, will certainly tack back to the centre after the primary and start talking about what he’s always wanted to talk about, which is jobs. He will, however, leave behind roll after roll of film and feet of column inches in which he says things about social issues that are out of sync with the American public. Progressive campaigners can use this to portray him as a reactionary social conservative bent on curbing the individual liberty of women and suppressing the expression of 10 per cent of the population’s very identity – and why not? He will certainly have said those things when, Karger would argue, he might have been talking about jobs and the economy all along.
Karger is right. He is also letting himself off the hook. After thirty years of candidates having to tick the ‘anti-gay-rights’ and ‘anti-choice’ boxes, it should not be a surprise that some candidates struggle to build a recognisable identity beyond their ability to win this particular race to the bottom. Karger loves to trumpet his reverence for Ronald Reagan (in this he is not alone); Reagan appears not to have been personally very exercised about homosexuality, but he publicly described it as an ‘alternative lifestyle…that society cannot condone’. Social conservatism is not new to the GOP; it is only increasingly grating as fewer Americans share those redline beliefs or care very strongly about them.
The truth is that, without its social conservative constituency and their ideology, the Republican party cannot build a large enough coalition to consistently compete with Democrats. There may be a small evolution in 2016 if Jon Huntsman gets the nomination; he is unapologetically in favour of civil unions, a nuanced position previously untenable in a Republican candidate. Huntsman is, however, rigidly anti-choice, which should reassure a portion of his base. Beyond that, the rightward-swing in the primary/centre-swing in the general will be the order of the day for the GOP for years to come. This is the party of Karger’s hero, Reagan. If Karger feels he doesn’t belong, it is not because he suddenly doesn’t; it is because he never really did.
Frank Spring tweets @FrankSpring