In 1986, a young anti-tax activist had an idea. What if instead of just encouraging legislators not to raise taxes, you made them promise never to do so? And made them actually sign their names to such an agreement? After all, if they accepted, they would be bound by the promise (at least politically), and if they refused, they could be accused of harboring secret pro-tax fantasies, something no good Republican would want.
And so, that young activist -- Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform -- unveiled The Pledge, a campaign asking legislators to sign a document promising that they would "ONE, oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses; and TWO, oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates." Yes, you read that last part right -- they even had to swear not to eliminate loopholes.
Twenty-five years later, The Pledge is going strong. The current House of Representatives contains 242 Republicans; 235 of them have signed Norquist's pledge, as have all but seven Republicans in the Senate. It's a testament to Norquist's persistence that his pet issue is now holy writ in his party. In fact, at the moment, there may be no single belief more central to what it means to be a Republican than the conviction that taxes must not be raised. For any reason. Ever.
There is no escaping the absolutist stance on taxes, but it is not the only position to which Republicans need to pledge allegiance -- not by a long shot. In today's Republican Party, candidates have to submit to a heresy screening as invasive as anything the Transportation Security Administration might devise. If you want to run for president, you'd better prepare to be poked and prodded for any sign of ideological squishiness.
Some of the things you have to believe are old standbys demanded by various Republican constituency groups: The right to own weaponry should be essentially unlimited, Roe v. Wade ought to be overturned, same-sex marriage should be banned (although Republicans can now support civil unions, a move to the left unimaginable just a few years ago). Others are relatively new. For instance, up until about 2008, it was not only acceptable but almost expected for Republicans to take the threat of climate change seriously, in their rhetoric if nothing else, and support a market-based solution like a cap-and-trade system. But in just the last couple of years, the standard Republican position on climate change moved from "We ought to do something about it, eventually, maybe," to "It doesn't exist, and even if it does, we shouldn't do anything about it."
This leaves the candidates in a quandary, because almost all of them supported cap-and-trade in the past, before it was rebranded a socialist plot. Tim Pawlenty recently apologized for his own heresy on the issue, though it wasn't heresy at the time, pleading that "everybody in the race, at least the big names in the race, embraced climate change or cap-and-trade at one point or another, every one of us."
Climate change is an unusual case of party orthodoxy undergoing rapid change, but more common is the shift of emphasis. For instance, smaller government was something Republicans have long advocated but not actually bothered to undertake when in power. Today, though, every GOP candidate has to pronounce himself as thirsty for the blood of government as the most rabid Tea Partier. The ever increasing whiteness of the Republican Party also means that to convince the base you're "one of us," you have to denounce not only illegal immigration but also any reform that includes a path to citizenship -- thereby alienating the rapidly growing Hispanic electorate. Now that the latest phase of a decades-long war on unions is in full swing, you'll have to denounce collective bargaining, which won't make you many friends among the cops and firefighters whose endorsement carries such symbolic weight. And, of course, you'll have to demand full repeal of the Affordable Care Act, a position popular with Republicans but unpopular with everyone else.
In other words, while opposing tax increases is never unpopular, most of the other pledges the candidates are forced to take in the primaries make the general election much harder to win.
When the primaries are over, nominees for president are supposed to move to the center, now that the base is locked down and they have a new goal of competing for the votes of independents. But the further you've gone to the extreme to please the base, the more difficult it is to reach the middle. That will be the real problem the nominee will face. In the last two years, the Republican base has gotten more and more concerned with ideological purity. The party's right wing learned it could purge ideologically suspect legislators in primaries and make all its officeholders live in fear of alienating the base. So taking a pledge on taxes isn't enough -- by the time he or she limps to the convention in Tampa, the nominee will have taken so many pledges to pass through the Tea Party security check that the political center will be miles away.
That doesn't mean a Republican defeat is inevitable. If you can wrap your campaign in a compelling narrative, policy issues recede in importance. This is what Barack Obama did in 2008 (just as every successful presidential candidate before him did). He was hope, change, and youth, a new beginning after a period of failure, folly, and mismanagement. After all the ups and downs of the last two years, it's hard to look back on that campaign without some measure of bitterness. But consider that by this time four years ago, Obama had already written the rough draft of that story. What is the story the Republican candidates are writing? At this point, there's no indication they've even begun -- which could leave the GOP with a candidate bound by a series of commitments written by the party's fringe but without much reason anyone else ought to vote for him.
