While the rest of the country was still up in arms over the George Zimmerman verdict, I watched a webinar from the Brookings Institution on The Future of the Republican Party: Is the GOP DOA? It wasn’t the most scintillating debate, but it did give some insight into how influential Republicans think—and what they don’t think about.
Zimmerman’s ordeal demonstrated once again the centrality of race and ethnicity in American political passions. But three of the four discussants—Elaine Kamarck, William A. Galston, and Alex Castellanos—played down the topic.
You might think that the violent, mindless rage directed by Democrats at Zimmerman as the face of white racism (despite his being Hispanic) might get Republicans thinking about how to exploit the inherent cracks in the Obama Coalition. But the idea seems never to have occurred to the participants.
The Brookings confab was mostly of interest because it offered a look the one speaker who did discuss race: at Sean Trende, the RealClearPolitics election data cruncher. Trende has a chance to evolve into the Nate Silver of the Right. He is a lucid speaker and a handsome fellow in a James Spader-sort of way, so he should get numerous opportunities to inject some reality checks into Republican thinking.
Trende’s recent four-part series on The Case of the Missing White Voters, Revisited basically introduced the Main Stream Media—at long last!—to the existence of the white voter. Trende is properly skeptical of the conventional wisdom, offered by such disinterested well-wishers of the GOP as Barack Obama, Charles Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi, that the House GOP must grant amnesty to illegal aliens now or never win another Presidential election.
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