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Tom Jackson is in a 12-step program for recovering sports writers; as part of his rehabilitation, he writes a column centered on the people, politics, passions and peculiarities of Pasco County. Email

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Pasco County News | Breaking News

GOP’s out-of-power conundrum: message or messenger?

Posted May 5, 2009 by Tom Jackson

Updated May 5, 2009 at 11:43 PM

You can scarcely swing a dead pundit these days without whacking someone who knows how to cure what ails the Republican Party. From those on the hard left, still giddy from the November election, the message is: Get over your judgmental self; capitulate and come join the fun.

From those in the ever-compromising middle, it’s more of the “Reagan’s dead; can’t we all just get along” mush that created many of the problems (John McCain, reckless spending, power-laden corruption) that cost them Congress and the White House in successive election cycles.

And standing fast on the bristling right are core conservatives who, for all their misgivings about stem cell research, would clone Ronald Wilson Reagan in a heartbeat. As far as they are concerned, the country didn’t abandon conservatism; Republicans abandoned conservatism, and the country abandoned – rightly – them.

Well. There is nothing like an embarrassing dalliance with an ill-fitting new dance partner to help one remember the wisdom of dancing with the one what brung you. Following their inelegant pratfall into the political wilderness, influential Republicans seem increasingly inclined to heed the message of the unwavering base, those who stand foursquare on bedrock conservative principles, and who claim the ground on which the nation was founded.

Their message: We just need to do a better job getting our message out.

Remember when Democrats said that in 2000? And in 2002? And in 2004? And how, as George W. Bush embarked – as it turned out, ever so briefly and without conviction – on the good ship Ownership Society, right-center America laughed? Their message got out just fine, we chortled, and America said, “No, thanks.”

We’re hearing the same lament from what remains of the decimated Republican ranks – we’re so reasonable; we must have garbled the message – and now it’s the Democrats’ turn to giggle. Well. It may be true about last laughs being best laughs, but in American politics, nobody laughs last. The pendulum swings; everything is transient.

Even as the much-ridiculed (from both wings) national Republicans listening and self-immolation tour grinds on, the grassroots are laying out a lawn on which to receive their nominal party leaders. And they’re not fooling around. Whether the quartet of McCain, Jeb Bush, Eric Cantor and Mitt Romney are feted or treated as lawn dart targets will depend largely on whether they heed these passionate and newly motivated citizen activists, whose grassroots groups are spreading as though drenched in human Miracle-Gro.

One such bunch, the Republican Young Professionals of Pasco County, convened for the first time Tuesday night among much back-slapping and handshaking, virtually filling the meeting room at Steve Slowey’s Beef O’Brady’s in Land O’ Lakes. Among the charter members, 21-year-old Elle Rudisill, an international business and marketing major at USF who aspires to law school at the University of Virginia, puts the task ahead succinctly: “We need to make it cool to be a Republican. … If young people knew what we stand for, it would help.”

For the moment, she says, GOP college students on mainstream (i.e. liberal) campuses are shadow people, driven underground by daily doses of what passes for received wisdom on “The Daily Show.” Says Rudisill, “When I wear my Republican T-shirt to school, you wouldn’t believe the number of people who come up to me and say, ‘You’re a Republican?’ ” Here she leans closer, to whisper urgently and conspiratorially. “ ‘So am I!’ ”

In Friday’s column, available on tbo.com and in the Pasco Tribune, we will further address the message-or-the-messenger conundrum as perceived by Rudisill and others in attendance Tuesday, including a former Army public affairs officer and Iraq veteran, self-proclaimed conservative and George W. Bush voter who credits Barack Obama for “doing something” about the gawdawful mess he inherited.

In the young Republicans’ big tent, there are many, many rooms.