Opinion: GOP -- Beware Myths About Palin and McCain

(Dec. 8) -- As Republicans consider their presidential options for 2012, they ought to discard two dangerously misleading pieces of conventional wisdom: that Sarah Palin and her tea party supporters represent a triumphant, even dominant force in American politics, and that more centrist, veteran GOP officeholders exert little appeal to the electorate.

National results in the last two election cycles conclusively disprove both assumptions: Palin's power as king (or queen) maker in 2010 produced spotty, unreliable results. And Sen. John McCain ran a stronger race and drew more votes in 2008 than outspoken conservatives who shared the GOP ballot with him.

Concerning the purported magic of Palin's endorsement, The Washington Post tallied a total of 64 candidates who received her formal backing; 32 of them lost either in the primaries or the general election.

Moreover, Palin's victories included many lavishly funded, front-running incumbents who easily crushed their opponents – including McCain and Gov. Rick Perry in Texas. And many of her riskier, anti-establishment choices -- like Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle and Clint Didier -- failed in their bids and undermined GOP hopes of capturing the Senate.

Even in her home state, her chosen candidate, Joe Miller, lost decisively to a write-in campaign for the more moderate Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

What's more, of the six Senate seats the GOP took from Democrats -- in Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- five of the candidates were longtime officeholders identified with the Republican establishment, not tea party insurgents.

Finally, Palin's most celebrated victors -- Rand Paul in Kentucky and Marco Rubio in Florida -- won their contests in states where Republicans already held the Senate seats and so hardly demonstrated a broadening of the Republican base or an extension of the party's geographic reach.

No one can doubt Sarah Palin's status as bright, charismatic and deeply popular among hard-core conservatives. But she won her national prominence not through political victories or governing achievements of her own, but through McCain's surprise decision to anoint a first-term Alaska governor as his running mate.

McCain himself, meanwhile, turns up as Exhibit A for another oft-repeated political conclusion with no basis in recent history.

According to many outspoken right-wingers (particularly on talk radio), Republicans of McCain's "maverick" or "moderate" stripe doom the party whenever they're nominated.

But the fact is that in 2008 McCain did better than his fellow, more conservative, Republicans. For example, Republican House candidates that year -- most of them unequivocally conservative -- captured 42.5 percent of all ballots cast. McCain drew 45.7 percent.

In the Senate, Republicans lost Senate races in six conservative states -- Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia -- that McCain carried.

There's also no evidence that disappointed conservatives deserted McCain and stayed home in disgust. Overall turnout set records (at more than 131 million), while conservatives represented the identical percentage of the electorate (34 percent) as they did in the Bush victory of 2004. In other words, in sheer numbers, more conservatives voted in 2008 than ever before.

Finally, McCain's appeal remained strong in 2010, when he crushed a right-wing challenger in the primary and won a landslide re-election in November.

No one would suggest that Sarah Palin, who electrifies much of the GOP base wherever she goes, should give up her prominent political role.

But Republicans who hope to build on recent successes need to reject the idea that "constitutional conservatives" with tea party support will win every time (or even most of the time), and that veteran officeholders with more moderate records will lose every important contest.

As the 19th century humorist Josh Billings sagely observed: "It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that just ain't so."