POLITICS Demint’s legacy to GOP still a work in progress

ate just two years into his second term, to become president of the conservative Heritage Foundation. Some of DeMint’s admirers quickly portrayed this move as a brilliant way to expand his campaign to remake the Republican Party. But it’s more likely that moving from the Senate to the world of think tank fundraising (where he’ll probably excel) and policy (where his experience is thinner) will reduce his public profile, and close a chapter in the history of conservatism in the process.

This chapter — the DeMint chapter, the tea party chapter, call it what you will — was probably a necessary stage for the American right. It’s normal for defeated parties and movements to turn inward for a period of ideological retrenchment before new thinking takes hold. What’s more, the DeMint worldview wasn’t so much wrong as incomplete. It really was important for Republicans to get more serious about entitlements and to shake off their Bush-era blitheness about deficits. The principles of many tea partyers really were an improvement over the transparent cynicism of a Tom DeLay.

But if DeMint-style retrenchment was necessary for Republicans, it wasn’t near sufficient. The conservatism of 2011 and 2012 had a lot to say about the long-term liabilities of the American government but far too little to say about the most immediate anxieties of American citizens, from rising health care costs to stagnating wages to the socioeconomic malaise spreading across the country’s working class. Neither the Reagan legacy nor the current conservative catechism holds the solutions to these problems; they require Republicans to apply their principles more creatively, and think about policy anew.

So it’s fitting, perhaps, that the same week DeMint announced his departure from the Senate, one of the conservatives he fostered gave a speech that tried to do just that. This was Marco Rubio, who used an address at the Jack Kemp Foundation dinner to speak frankly about problems that too many Republicans have ignored these last four years — the “opportunity gap” opening between the well-educated and the rest, the barriers to upward mobility, the struggles of the poor. The speech didn’t offer the kinds of policy breakthroughs the party ultimately requires. Rubio mixed a few modest forays into fresh territory (mostly on education) with a long list of recycled proposals, and he stopped short of the leaps Republicans need to make on taxes, health care and other issues.

But his tone and themes represented a very different response to an electoral drubbing than the kind of retrenchment Republicans embraced four years ago. And as DeMint exits electoral politics stage right, his legacy ultimately depends on whether that difference turns out to be real or superficial — and whether the younger generation he helped catapult to prominence can prove itself more supple, creative and farsighted than its departing patron.