Can the Brits Show the GOP How It's Done?

LONDON -- Dick Cheney needs a title. "Former Vice President" limps as a Sunday morning chyron. It tells us nothing. CBS might as well paste Prince's indecipherable Love Symbol into the lower third of the screen the next time Cheney sits across from Bob Schieffer.

Indeed, if Republicans want to win again, they'll need to do more than farm out their popular personalities to the cable chat-fests. Without new issue-by-issue leadership in the party apparatus, voters will continue to have no idea about who actually speaks for the GOP. The recent food fight among Rush Limbaugh, Colin Powell and poor, hapless Michael Steele is but one example.

Clearly, Republicans need to get organized, top-down. Cheney is arguably the party's strongest voice on defense issues. So Steele, the national chairman, should dub him just that -- the GOP's national security spokesman. Or, as they say in the United Kingdom, shadow Secretary of Defense.

David Brooks and Fred Barnes have cast longing glances across to this side of the Atlantic of late, proffering Britain's Conservative Party as a possible model for Republican renewal. The Tories, after 12 years in the wilderness, are likely to win the next parliamentary election. What should catch the GOP's eye is not the Tories' current modus operandi of gooey do-gooder centrism, but the British philosophy of opposition – the so-called "shadow Cabinet."

Under this system, a slate of party leaders, each with expertise in a particular subject, is tapped to maintain a running critique of their counterpart government ministers. Here's how it could work for the GOP: Every time a member of President Obama's Cabinet proposed a policy, the shadow minister's job would be to answer back with tough questions and an alternative plan. If Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner rambled on about the budget, the "official GOP response" could come from, say, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gives a speech, Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan could be the go-to guy. Energy Secretary Steven Chu proposes an anti-drilling initiative? Have Gov. Sarah Palin go on "Morning Joe" as shadow Energy Secretary.

Of course, every GOP leader would probably want to play a role. Maintaining message discipline in the shadows would be an adjustment. To solve this, Republicans could hold a national platform convention early next year where potential shadow ministers debate one another for a place on the GOP front bench, with party faithful voting online. If a politician ran for a post and lost, he or she would be welcome to become a behind-the-scenes adviser to the shadow secretary.

One who likes the concept is Jeb Bush, who spoke in detail about it in a Wall Street Journal interview. While acknowledging the difference between British parliamentary government and the U.S. presidential system, he said the GOP should benefit from the British example and "organize our opposition based on policy... It's a huge opportunity to advocate reforms and advocate our beliefs and do so with some humility and recognition that the other guys won."

Mr. Bush noted that a shadow government is an especially apt approach at a time when the Obama administration and Democratic Congress are spinning off a large number of policy initiatives that, in Mr. Bush's view, a "center right" American electorate never really voted for.

Last month, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia recruited a hodgepodge of party leaders, including Mr. Bush, to join his upstart National Council for a New America, a group National Journal called a "makeshift shadow government." Please. This group's debut, held at an Arlington pizzeria, was not about barbed opposition, but "listening," whatever that means.

"What's to hear?" asked columnist Daniel Henninger in The Wall Street Journal. "People want what they always want: a job that will let them build a life and family. What they want from Republicans is leadership toward that goal." Unfortunately for Cantor and Bush, it's going to take more than $4 slices for the GOP to build a comeback. Besides, President Obama has already one-upped them with his numerous burger jaunts. Instead of ruminating about making their own Five Guys trip, the GOP should be asking, "Where's the beef?"

So would a Republican shadow Cabinet actually work? In typical British fashion, many of those I spoke to in and around Westminster welcomed the GOP to make a careful study of their model, but said they would not be amused if Republicans tried too earnestly to copy it. "It would be like putting a quarterback on a soccer team," scoffed Richard Heffernan, a British politics expert at The Open University.

Nonetheless, from senior members of Conservative leader David Cameron's team to wise old Thatcherites and British academics, all were happy to weigh in on the GOP's latent urge to emulate. Winston Churchill once said: "Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference." One lesson is that an effective shadow Cabinet is as much a matter of style and attitude as a formula for regaining power.

A place to start is Anthony Seldon, the famed British biographer and editor of a study of repeated Tory sojourns in the wilderness titled "Recovering Power: The Conservatives in Opposition Since 1867." Consider another period of ascendancy of leftist politics, namely in the years immediately following World War II. The Tories were then still led by Churchill, but the shadow Cabinet of the late 1940s amounted to little more than a lax coterie of Conservatives that enjoyed batting around policy over fortnightly lunches at the Savoy Hotel, said Mr. Seldon. Though Churchill returned to power in 1951, he had no formula for rolling back an increasingly bankrupt and inefficient state.

It wasn't until Margaret Thatcher was elected Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition 34 years ago that the modern approach that presumably inspires Mr. Bush and friends was born. Mrs. Thatcher extended her reach beyond a core group of Tory MPs. "Mrs. Thatcher did much of her work not in the shadow Cabinet but in free-market think tanks such as the Centre for Policy Studies, which she co-founded in 1974, and the Institute for Economic Affairs," said Mr. Seldon. By 1979, Mrs. Thatcher had a powerful message: "Change is coming – the slither and slide to the socialist state is going to be stopped."

The GOP was doing similar things in the late 1970s, when the late Jack Kemp was a powerful voice for change in Congress. Mr. Kemp's work helped to create an environment that ushered in the success of Ronald Reagan's message in the 1980 presidential campaign.

"Kemp brought more to the table than supply-side tax cuts," observed Kenneth Tomlinson in The Weekly Standard this year. "During the Carter administration, it was Kemp's congressional operation that constituted a virtual shadow Cabinet for the Defense Department, with Bill Schneider pushing defense concepts that were the seed corn of the Strategic Defense Initiative that helped force an end to the Evil Empire."

Republicans, take note. A GOP shadow Cabinet that contains only 2012 presidential wanna-bes would look as sad as last year's long line of primary candidates bickering at the Reagan Library. Instead, the party should reach out to diverse conservative voices beyond Congress -- in think tanks, boardrooms and especially state legislatures far away from Washington.

"A shadow Cabinet which simply contained party grandees maybe competing for the next presidential nomination and rehearsing the policy battles which would take place in the primaries four years later might actually emphasize disunity," cautioned William Waldegrave, who was a minister for Margaret Thatcher and John Major. "I would recommend something much looser: a loose alliance of leaders dedicated at this stage to re-winning the intellectual battle, which is what Mrs. Thatcher and her allies did."

There's definitely no need to make a shadow Cabinet some RNC gimmick. Michael Howard, Tory Party leader between 2003 and 2005, told me that the road back to power can be long. "Out of power, when the government is popular, you can lay the groundwork for credible and convincing policies," he said. "My advice would be to seriously think about the kind of policy agenda you will need to put forward and to generate some distinctive ideas."

A shadow cabinet "is effective for two reasons," added Ed Vaizey, David Cameron's longtime confidante and a shadow Culture Minister. "One, it gives the opposition the opportunity to build up expertise in an area, to meet with the relevant interest groups and respond rapidly to government initiatives. Second, it allows the media to know who to go to for comment."

Regardless of their strong poll numbers, the Tories are still modulating their message in the shadows. "Until David Cameron's election, the opposition was invisible. Now they are scoring points, but mainly because of the government's problems," said Jonathan Hopkin, a lecturer at the London School of Economics. "Yet government failure is not enough. (Opponents) also need a coherent line of policy."

For all its Anglo-American whimsy, the shadow Cabinet idea has power because it aims to give voters a better option. If Republicans are content with their message and are crossing their fingers that a bad economy will doom Democrats in next year's mid-terms, they may find voters weary of the left but hardly inspired by the right.

"American Republicans have unique issues to deal with now," said Michael Gove, a Tory MP and adviser to Mr. Cameron. "One thing that has always impressed me is their resilience. The nature of American government is that you can still see policy innovation and the next generation of policy leaders grappling for influence," citing Louisiana's Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal as an example.

Be it a new shadow Cabinet title for Mr. Jindal or Mr. Cheney, now is the time for the GOP to think big, if, perhaps, a bit British.