Paul Waldman responds to my and Jonathan Chait's posts on whether Republicans will respond to a more diverse country with less culture-war campaigning:
Unfortunately for political operatives who'd love to be able to devise a strategy and then just implement it, a party is a big, unwieldy beast with lots of people who can influence the course it charts. Let's say Mitt Romney is the 2012 nominee. He can say, "I'm going to concentrate on economic issues, and push the culture war and white grievance stuff to the side." But he can't make Sarah Palin stop talking about what she wants to talk about. Or Rush Limbaugh. Or any of a hundred other people with varying degrees of influence, many of whom are very invested in a particular political narrative and strategy, and won't be dissuaded from it by anyone. The nominee's voice will be the loudest, but a lot of other voices will still matter, and they may not be pursuing the same goals he is, or at least not in the same way.
This is what I was trying to get at in my post last week. It seems obvious that some elite GOP strategists would rather not talk about birtherism. I'm personally very amused by Karl Rove's approach of describing birtherism as a "trap," a ploy that uses reverse psychology to leverage conservatives' reactionary impulses into abandoning the entire concept. If the Republican base can be convinced that liberals want them to be birthers, well, they'll bring sanity back like Styrofoam cups in the Hill cafeterias. Unfortunately for all of us, it doesn't seem to be working, and Donald Trump's parody-perfect non-candidacy is encouraging conservatives to openly embrace Reform Birtherism.
Waldman's post gets at what I was trying to say in my first response to Chait last Friday when I wrote that Fox News, as one of the more influential entities within the conservative movement, has a more "direct interest in drawing ratings rather than winning elections." Even if Republican strategists want to abandon the culture war, they don't have that kind of control. Just after I responded to Chait's post, Fox News' morning show announced a weekly feature, "Mondays with Trump."
