We need more Republicans like Tom Cole of Oklahoma to offset the Tea Partiers

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Zeal That Threatens Both Parties
By John Harwood, September 20, 2013

The extraordinary zeal of the Tea Party has been a signature development during Barack Obama’s presidency — with dangers for both Republicans and Democrats.

Its white-hot opposition to Mr. Obama, seen first in lawmakers’ town hall meetings and then in the 2010 midterm election campaign, helped cost Democrats control of the House. It could yet help Republicans hold their majority in 2014.

The downside for Republican leaders occurs when that political energy propels the party to places that make it harder to win general elections and to govern. Just as Mitt Romney struggled to avoid getting dragged too far right in the 2012 presidential race, Speaker John A. Boehner struggled this week to steer his caucus away from what could be an economically and politically catastrophic government shutdown.

But some Republican politicians display an ability to absorb the heat and reflect it back in more politically promising directions. That’s why 2016 presidential hopefuls and House leaders could learn from recent town meetings conducted by Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma.

Mr. Cole, a House deputy whip and a former chief of staff for the Republican National Committee, represents a district that voted two-to-one Republican in the last three presidential elections. Since first winning his southwest Oklahoma seat in 2002, he has never drawn less than 60 percent of the vote.

What dominated his sessions with constituents was, as one man in Midwest City described it, “a sense of outrage about our government.” Mr. Cole embraced the ideological touchstones of his constituents: He said he was “violently opposed” to the new health care law, extolled his National Rifle Association membership and noted that “I’ve never voted for Planned Parenthood in my life.”

Yet Mr. Cole also challenged unhappy constituents on tactics, tone and spirit. If replicated effectively on Capitol Hill and the 2016 presidential campaign trail, those three guideposts could be a path toward expanding the party’s appeal:

* Realism. Some Congressional colleagues indulge the illusions of the party’s most fervent activists, producing legislative demands that Mr. Boehner simply cannot meet. Mr. Cole did not.

For constituents urging a government shutdown over the health care law, he warned that it would doubly backfire by hurting local residents like the workers at nearby Tinker Air Force Base, and by heaping blame on Republicans. A party controlling neither the White House nor the Senate, he said, lacks the power to reverse a White House incumbent’s foremost domestic achievement, no matter how often the House votes to do so.

“It’s awfully hard to repeal Obamacare when a guy named Obama is president of the United States,” he said. “We’re in a position to stop a lot of what he wants to do. We’re not in a position to undo.”

On the nation’s long-term budget woes, he encouraged constituents to refocus their concerns away from emotion-charged but comparatively tiny accounts like foreign aid and toward the vast entitlement programs benefiting them and their friends and neighbors.

At a meeting in Moore, one elderly man complained about the idea of reining in Social Security by applying the “chained Consumer Price Index” to benefit calculations. Instead, the man asked, “Why don’t you put that chain on the spending?”

That, of course, is exactly what the chained-C.P.I. proposal would do. “Those things are going to be on the table,” Mr. Cole told him, noting that popular programs like Social Security and Medicare make up 60 percent of the budget.

“It’s pretty easy to tell people what they want to hear,” Mr. Cole said in Midwest City, adding a barb for some of his colleagues: “There’s a certain amount of that going on in the Republican Party right now, at a very high level.”

* Respect. A recurrent theme on the Republican right is the illegitimacy of opponents. Some accuse Democrats of profiting from vote fraud. Others, like Mr. Romney in his famous “47 percent” remarks, insist that large numbers of Democrats have grown enfeebled by reliance on government programs.

Mr. Cole sounded different notes. Instead of deriding political adversaries, he acknowledged their strength and grit.

Mr. Obama, as one of only a handful of American presidents who have twice topped 50 percent of the vote, “won fair and square,” Mr. Cole said. He saluted the resilience of Democratic partisans whose ability to win the presidency appeared in doubt a generation ago — as it does for Republicans now.

“They didn’t quit,” Mr. Cole said. “They kept coming back election after election. Republicans have got to have that same kind of patience, that same kind of dedication, that same kind of respect for the process.”

And to like-minded constituents befuddled by conservatives’ national defeats recently, he invoked electoral math.

“California is 10 Oklahomas,” he said. “New York is about 5. Those people are as passionate about what they believe as people in this room.”

* Optimism. By associating changes coursing through American society with a sense of irreversible decline, some older white conservatives impede Republicans’ ability to connect with young and minority voters.

But Mr. Cole described the nation’s trajectory — and the attitude required to alter it — in a different way. “I’m not one of these people who thinks the country is going to hell in a handbasket,” he said. His own son, he added, finds the pre-civil-rights society he has read about hard to imagine.

“Americans are freer today than they were, and more of them are free,” Mr. Cole said. “The country does make a lot of progress. It does move in the right direction.

“We’ll get there. But the thing is not to quit, and not to lose faith in the country.”

Mr. Cole, in his sixth term in Congress, offered disgruntled Republicans a tough-love exhortation to invest the political sweat-equity required to gain power and enact their agenda.

Invoking his late father, a military veteran, Mr. Cole said: “He would have looked at this stuff — a pretty tough old master sergeant — and said: ‘You guys are wimps. Just get up and go to work.’

“Let’s go win some elections.”
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