preview.tinyurl.com/3rkvtz -> www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/magazine/30Republicans-t.html?ref=magazine
By BENJAMIN WALLACE-WELLS Published: March 30, 2008 Correction Appended The Oklahoma Congressman Tom Cole is 58 years old, but he has never been famous before, and after this year, he will most likely never be famous again. Even this kind of fame, brief and slight, is uncomfortable on him. Cole is a party man, a lifelong Republican consultant, campaign worker and politician whose career, like that of a typical European Social Democrat, has recognized only a fluid and fungible line between political operative and elected official. people who meet him casually describe him as cordial or gentlemanly.
Republican Party, in its current uncertainty, might have chosen an ideologue to fill Cole's post or, as is its habit, a money man. Its choice of Cole, an operative, was the establishment insisting that its own learned habits were enough to save itself.
Letters: A Case of the Blues (April 13, 2008) Andrew Bettles for The New York Times Cole is a year into his term as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the group charged with managing the party's simultaneous campaigns for 435 seats in Congress, and this role has made him responsible for rebuilding the Republican Party from the ground up, and for mounting a defense of the political map. All campaign operatives are, to some extent, geographers, and the map of the United States, endlessly studied, is the object of their pieties and contains their own compulsions. Every operative has his own map, weighted by income, by ethnicity, by the practiced habits of ideology, but each believes his map is determinative and that elections do not contain surprises but more precise revelations of the map, of tendencies buried deep. CC's offices on Capitol Hill, in a building it shares with the RNC The building has small cubbyholes like telephone booths, from which representatives make fund-raising calls, and a sleek phone bank in the basement that is populated, election nights, by the party's interns and operatives. His own office walls are crammed with so many tribal curios -- Cole, who is part Chickasaw, is the only registered member of a Native American tribe in Congress -- that it can seem as if they are being offered for sale. In 2006, the Democrats won so many elections in what was traditionally Republican territory that Cole, as his party's chief Congressional recruiter, now finds himself in the unlikely position of flying into what used to be considered safe conservative districts and trying to goad Republican businessmen and state senators into running for Congress. He mentioned a black Republican prosecutor from Indiana named Curtis Hill, from a district that the party lost in 2006. Cole said he thought the seat was a more natural fit for his party than for the Democrats, and he wanted badly to convince Hill to run. Hill happened to be a founding-fathers buff, and so Cole flew him to Washington to meet with the White House political team and be briefed on how he could win, to look out at the monuments from his window seat and imagine himself as part of history.
Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, and out of touch with the values of the district. But he had five kids at home, and he also didn't quite buy Cole's description of Donnelly, whom Hill considered "a relatively conservative Democrat. I don't think he's done anything in his record that's irritated anyone." Cole said he had become convinced that Hill's political gifts were so great that he would be running for senator or governor soon.
Karl Rove began to talk with growing conviction about a permanent majority for the Republican Party. It would have been difficult then to imagine a more stunning reversal. The Democrats now control both houses of Congress and suddenly enjoy an advantage in campaign funds that, given the GOP's intimacy with big business and the recent supremacy of Republican fund-raising, would have been unimaginable just three years ago. Cole maintains that the 2006 election was an event of equal scale and significance to the Republican victory in 1994 -- "in many ways, it's a flip." Republican operatives now worry that the social conservatism that helped seal Rove's majorities might create for them a deficit that lasts a generation, that the party's position on social issues like gay marriage may permanently alienate younger, more moderate voters. Going into the 2008 elections, Cole faces a daunting list of challenges. To date, 29 of his party's representatives in Congress have retired, an unusually large number, leaving open politically marginal seats that incumbents might have held but which will be more difficult for challengers to defend -- Deborah Pryce's seat in Columbus, Ohio;
Rick Renzi, a Republican congressman from Arizona, was indicted last month on federal corruption charges, putting what was another safe Republican seat in play. These vacancies mean that in a year when, by historical standards, his party would be expected to win back seats, Cole will have to defend many more seats than he will be able to attack (only six Democratic incumbents have announced they are leaving office). His committee has approximately $5 million on hand, roughly one-eighth the amount of cash on hand as its Democratic counterpart, which at latest count had $38 million. Worse still, the National Republican Congressional Committee recently discovered, during an internal audit, accounting fraud so extensive that it had to call in the FBI, which is now investigating embezzlement by the committee's former treasurer.
immigration and government spending, that as Cole's staff took over, the committee's fund-raising pleas were being ignored and, on at least one occasion, returned in an envelope stuffed with feces. After 2006, most observers thought that those results suggested a onetime event, a so-called wave election, and predicted that come 2008, Republicans would reclaim some of those seats, the usual correction after a wave like this passes. But now, seven months before the 2008 election, that does not seem likely. The influential, independent Cook Political Report recently concluded that 12 of the 14 districts most vulnerable to change parties in this election will belong to Republicans, suggesting that Cole's party is likely to end up in an even deeper hole. The situation has provoked an uncommon modesty in the Republican establishment.
John Ensign, Cole's counterpart in the Senate, has made a point of acknowledging, publicly, that he doesn't expect to win back seats this year. The Republican consultant Rich Bond told me, "Tom was dealt an almost unwinnable hand." Yet Cole has been almost strangely sunny about his prospects. "This isn't an ideologically conservative country, and maybe some of us overreached in thinking that it was, and have been corrected for that," he told me in January. "But I believe that it is still a center-right country, and I think this election will show that." Like the other Republican operatives of his generation, Cole spent his career building the map that eventually elected George Bush, with the South, the Plains and mountain West and the rural parts of the Midwest committing firmly to their party. For the past decade, the politics of the country has been defined by this map -- a conservative heartland and two bracketlike liberal coasts. As Cole has begun to study the landscape of the 2008 elections, his hopes -- and those of the Republican Party -- rest on the insistence that this map remains essentially unchanged. "They have 61 Democrats in seats that voted for Bush in 2004, and we only have 8 Republicans in seats that voted for Kerry," Cole told me. But these are Republican districts, and in a presidential year a lot of them are going to return to the way they usually vote." He recalled a list of vulnerable Democrats his staff had put together and noted that many of them represented reliably conservative parts of the country. "In most districts they're going to be asking voters to split their tickets, and that's a tough ask," Cole said.
Next Page Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes about national affairs for Rolling Stone. His last article for the magazine was a profile of David Axelr...
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