Missing: Seller’s Remorse

It's not uncommon for companies, from time to time, to reposition a product. Occasionally, a company might even change direction, completely reorienting its focus and line of brands. Such a marked shift might indicate that the market for a given product has aged, that the long-term prospects for that segment look unfavorable, or perhaps that a more profitable market has been identified. Usually, these attempted transformations are conscious and very deliberate.

All of this background brings us, of course, to a consideration of the Republican Party's badly damaged brand. Over the past decade, or perhaps generation, the GOP has repositioned its product. However, the results of the last two elections -- the loss of more than a dozen U.S. Senate seats and more than 50 House seats, seven governorships, and several hundred state legislative seats -- suggest that the repositioning was ill-conceived.

Twenty years ago, the foundation of the Republican Party firmly supported several pillars. The GOP was steadfastly anti-communist and stood for a strong national defense. It was for keeping budgets balanced, the size of government under control, and taxes low. It staunchly favored law and order, and took more-conservative positions than the Democrats on social and cultural issues. Although the Republican Party represented all of these things, none was so singly important as to crowd out the others. When in power, the Republicans weren't extremely effective in pursuing all of their goals, but these were their principles.

Time altered that agenda somewhat. The Iron Curtain fell, and the threat of communism diminished. Democrats learned that siding with the American Civil Liberties Union on issue after issue paid few political dividends, and they repositioned themselves to be less susceptible to charges of coddling criminals.

Over time, Republicans became a party of only two pillars. The GOP didn't simply adopt a more conservative agenda on social and cultural issues. Rather, it took fiercely conservative stands on them and strongly emphasized religious values. Second, it became the party that demands tax cuts, come hell or high water, with little regard for the size of deficits. The Holy Grail became cutting taxes, which became the end goal, not just part of a broader fiscal policy. The impact of cutting taxes no longer mattered.

The consequences of this new direction have been stark for the Republican Party. Vehement GOP opposition to many forms of embryonic-stem-cell research and the party's handling of the Terri Schiavo case appeared so extreme to so many moderates that it was no longer Democrats who seemed radical. It was Republicans.

During the past eight years of a Republican presidency, with the GOP controlling at least one chamber of Congress for three-quarters of that time, the federal debt doubled to $10 trillion and the deficit, which basically had been wiped out under President Clinton, soared.

Meanwhile, the number of voters identifying themselves as centrists and conservatives did not drop. But the Republican Party became viewed as extreme. Token Republican efforts to reach out to the African-American community were seen as just that. And many in the GOP seemed to go out of their way to demagogue on immigration and alienate Latino voters, the fastest-growing part of the electorate. And finally, although President Reagan essentially pulled an entire generation of young voters into the GOP, George W. Bush and rest of the party's current leadership have chased the present generation of young Americans into the open arms of President-elect Obama and his Democratic Party.

One might think that with all of the extra time on their hands Republicans would spend some of it thinking about what their inadvertent or misguided repositioning has reaped. Certainly, there are brilliant Republican strategists who are painfully aware of what has happened -- and predicted it. But from most Republican leaders we are hearing shopworn shibboleths like, "We lost because we weren't conservative enough." If that mind-set prevails, the only way for Republicans to regain real power will be to wait until Democrats completely implode and to hope that Republicans can win at that point simply because they aren't Democrats.