National GOP: Take note of Nevada

By J. Patrick Coolican

Sunday, May 31, 2009 | 2 a.m.

After the November election, state Sen. Warren Hardy took some heat for something he told my colleague: “Nevada has gone in the last two to four years from center-right to center-left and it’s not going back.”

“We’re a blue state and we’re going to continue to be a blue state.

“If Republicans are going to survive, we need to figure out a way to recruit and run candidates who are going to attract Democratic voters,” Hardy said.

In Washington, this is known as a “Kinsley gaffe,” named after the writer Michael Kinsley, who once noted that a gaffe in Washington happens when a politician tells the truth.

Hardy was essentially correct — Nevada has 100,000 more Democrats than Republicans, and unaffiliated voters broke for President Barack Obama and Democrats in November.

The Republican right, however, was aghast at Hardy’s comment and is now in the process of eviscerating him and his Senate colleagues for supporting a $781 million tax hike.

But Hardy and his Senate Republican colleagues’ decision this session to support higher taxes in exchange for changes in public employee pay and benefits looks like sound politics.

There’s no good polling data to support this view yet, but hear out the hypothesis:

For decades Americans associated the Republican brand — at its best — with “reasonable.” Even the word the ideologues use to describe themselves — “conservative” — has a different meaning for most Americans, who generally are not ideological. It means prudence and the preservation of important institutions and traditions.

For these Americans in the Great Middle, the Republican Party, beginning with President Dwight Eisenhower, meant reasonable fiscal and foreign policies.

Why then has the Republican brand taken such a beating?

Because to most Americans — and polling bears this out — the war in Iraq, unfettered Wall Street capitalism, and cultural fights over gays and abortion seem neither prudent nor reasonable. They seem extreme and foolhardy.

Back to Nevada.

Consider the budget of Gov. Jim Gibbons. He would have cut state employee and teacher pay 6 percent, while cutting higher education 36 percent. To the mass of suburban voters in places like Henderson who decide elections and who gave Obama a crushing victory in Nevada, this likely does not seem prudent or reasonable.

(In a Review-Journal poll, respondents said by 57 percent to 27 percent they favored increasing taxes to maintain teacher salaries instead of cutting salaries 4 percent.)

Moreover, these suburban folks have kids in college, or kids they presume will go to college. They want the option of sending their children to schools in Nevada, and a 36 percent cut in higher education must have seemed absurd to parents of college kids or kids who will eventually get there.

So the Senate Republican caucus agreed to the tax increase. But they didn’t come away empty-handed. They kept it under $800 million and made sure it will sunset. They also demanded long-term changes that will rein in local government employee pay, as well as public employee health and retirement benefits — all significant long-term costs.

In the process, they successfully cast themselves as reasonable stewards of public resources.

Their effort had another salutary effect: They created distance between themselves and Gibbons, who is deeply unpopular and will create problems for all Republicans if he is on the ticket in 2010.

Though the bad economy is not directly his fault, Gibbons has been governor during the state’s worst recession of the modern era. His policies are unpopular, and Nevadans are not thrilled with his lifestyle.

In short, the public does not view Gibbons as prudent or reasonable.

Contrary to Republicans in Washington, who are obsessed with ideological purification and casting out the demons of heterodoxy via the thunderings of Rush Limbaugh, Senate Republicans in Nevada made a bid for centrist voters — Republican, Democrat and nonpartisan alike.

Smart play, fellas.