Mr. Mesozoic

Political campaigns can be merciless.

A decade ago, Tommy Thompson was the bright face of the new Republican Party, nationally acclaimed as an innovator of Big Ideas like school choice, learnfare and W-2. But this summer, as he slunk out of Iowa after a humiliating loss in the straw poll, Thompson looked almost prehistoric, a dinosaur whose era was long gone.

Certainly, Thompson wasn’t ready for prime time and seemed to have one bad hair day after another in the presidential debates. He entered too late and stumbled too often. But he also seemed oddly out of step, a centrist Republican in an age of right-wing rigor. Thompson’s gushy optimism seemed cornball and quaint next to the steely, get-tough ethic of other GOP candidates.

That hard-edged style was heavily influenced by Karl Rove, hailed as “the architect” of the new party. Indeed, even as Thompson was being buried by conservative commentators, some were hailing master strategist Rove upon his resignation from President George W. Bush’s administration. Tommy now looked like a fuddy-duddy, an anachronism, an antique. So we might ask: Just what was it that made his style of Republicanism so passe?

During an unprecedented 14-year run as Wisconsin governor, Thompson’s approval rating never dipped below 60 percent. Bush has averaged about 35 percent for the last couple years, while Vice President Dick Cheney, the dour face of tough Republicanism, has accomplished the impossible, polling a favorability rating that’s below 20 percent.

Thompson was a traditionalist who, in the time-honored fashion, moved to the middle in the general election. Rove rejected centrism and embraced stark ideological contrasts. Rove simply conceded the heavily Democratic blue states. Thompson, by contrast, wanted to win every vote. He went after blue counties with a vengeance and won heavily Democratic Milwaukee County every time he ran.

Bush/Cheney lost the popular vote in 2000 and won 50.7 percent of the vote in 2004. For this, Rove was called a genius, while Bush declared his razor-thin 2004 victory a “mandate” for change. Thompson would have been mortified by such a measly margin. He won by at least 15 percent of the popular vote every time he ran for re-election.

Thompson, much like Ronald Reagan, was the perpetual optimist. He loved the state, loved governing and loved the voters. We were all in it together, he suggested, all headed for greatness under Tommy’s leadership. The Rove approach, by contrast, was to divide and conquer, relentlessly emphasizing fear and condemning those who disagreed as unpatriotic.

Thompson worked to build a mainstream party that embraced the widest possible range of voters. Rove rigorously reinforced the base until an ever-narrower group of voters fit this definition. One national poll recently found Republicans have gotten far more conservative and older. Seventy-one percent are now self-declared conservatives, compared to 55 percent in 1997. Forty-one percent are now over 55, compared to 28 percent a decade ago.

The Thompson administration worked to recruit young staffers and make Republicanism cool for twenty-somethings. Bush/Rove went in the opposite direction. Polls show the percent of 17-to-29-year-old Americans identifying as Republicans has dropped from 37 percent at the end of the Reagan era to 25 percent today.

Thompson rebuilt the Wisconsin GOP as the party of the Big Tent. Ideological purity was not required. Conservative legislators like Glenn Grothman (now state senator for the 20th District) chafed at Tommy’s centrism, but his approach led directly to a Republican takeover of both the Assembly and Senate (the latter has since turned Democrat).

The Bush/Rove approach rejected governing from the center and marginalized moderate Republicans like Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords (who left the party and became an independent) while weakening senators like Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chaffee (who was defeated by a Democrat in 2006). The ideologically purer party quickly got smaller: In 2006, Republicans lost control of both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

The GOP’s push for political correctness is exemplified by presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who changed his positions on abortion and gay rights once he entered the Republican primary. One reason Thompson seemed hollow and inauthentic in the GOP debates was because he, too, felt the pressure to sound arch-conservative. His flubbed comment that private businesses should be allowed to fire a gay employee stood in complete contrast to his attitude while serving as governor.

Indeed, the Gov. Thompson that many Wisconsinites came to love was so lacking in ideological fervor that he appointed Democrats to key positions in government. Sure, he engaged in partisan tussling, but most Democrats respected and envied the governor. That level of civility would be unimaginable in our nation’s capital, where toxic partisanship is all the rage.

Nothing, in short, could be more out-of-fashion than Tommy Thompson. Imagine, a political leader who actually thinks you should compromise and govern from the center. It’s indeed fortunate that today’s enlightened Republicans have rejected that approach – as any delighted Democratic strategist will be the first to tell you.