Will Cornyn's 'Big Tent' Strategy Collapse?

When he took over this year as the chief candidate recruiter and campaign fundraiser for the Senate GOP, John Cornyn didn't tip his hand about his strategy for taking away as many seats as possible from the Democrats.

But his choice was the same one the Republican Party has faced since losing Congress and the White House in the last two elections: push to strengthen the party's ideological purity in hope of shoring up its base or relax its conservative orthodoxy in a bid to expand that base.

Now, a year before the midterm election -- and with the fight for the "soul" of the GOP roiling the party's national leaders -- the Texas senator has come down firmly on the "big tent" side of the debate.

Although he rose to prominence during his first term as a darling of the right and an unwavering ally of George W. Bush, Cornyn has gambled much on finding and promoting centrists able to win Senate seats in swing states and even some Democratic redoubts. And he's decided to do so even though those candidates in at least four states -- California, Florida, Kentucky and Connecticut -- must first compete in and win expensive and potentially divisive primaries, mainly against more socially and fiscally conservative candidates.

If he succeeds, and the party's current caucus of just 40 senators grows significantly in 2010, Cornyn's standing in the party hierarchy will be cemented and his long-term national ambitions surely furthered. But to get to that point, he is having to weather an intense wave of criticism from conservative leaders -- including a few fellow senators.

"He's trying to find candidates who can win. I'm trying to find people who can help me change the Senate," said Jim DeMint of South Carolina, a leader of the conservative bloc. "To think we can grow the party by picking people who are more liberal and don't share our core values doesn't make any sense."

The countervailing view is that electing more Republican senators, no matter the finer points of their ideology, will inevitably help slow the liberal agenda of the Democratic congressional majority and President Obama.

"Willie Sutton robbed banks because that's where the money is," said Fred N. Davis III, a political consultant based in Los Angeles, who last year advised both presidential nominee John McCain and the senatorial re-election campaign of Cornyn. "His job is not to redefine the Republican Party or its brand, but to get more Republicans elected to the Senate."

Some prominent conservatives are warning of a revolt, beyond the rhetoric, to deny the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), which Cornyn heads, the contributions needed to wage viable campaigns. Erick Erickson, who runs RedState.com, an organization that describes itself as "the largest online community of conservative activists and the most widely read right-of-center blog on Capitol Hill," has urged his readers to give "not one red cent" to the NRSC.

The president of the small-government Club for Growth, Chris Chocola, says a number of conservative donors are already waging a quiet rebellion by ending donations to the party's own campaign committees and giving their money instead to candidates and conservative groups. "Some people don't want to give to establishment Republicans organizations like the NRSC. They are looking for other ways to help and support conservative candidates," said Chocola, a former Indiana congressman.

"People will take measures into their own hands," added Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition. "They are not taking their marching orders from the party."

And Phyllis Schlafly, the legendary founder of the socially conservative Eagle Forum, warned that efforts such as Cornyn's that meddle in primaries to tamp out candidates on the far right risk alienating people who could provide both money and volunteer efforts in close general election campaigns.

So far, though, conservatives are distinguishing their derision of Cornyn's tactics from criticism of his performance. He is particularly admired among those on the right for his work on causes from his seat on the Judiciary Committee.

For his part, the senator says he's comfortable with his strategy and unbowed by threats of financial retribution -- which are so far supported mainly by the fact that, after raising more than the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) in both July and August, the NRSC fell behind in receipts last month.

Still, Cornyn notes, his committee's collection of $29.7 million so far this year, including from 129,000 first-time donors, is 25 percent more than in the comparable period at the start of the 2008 campaign, and at the moment the DSCC has raised only 12 percent more than that. In the last campaign the DSCC raised 72 percent more than its GOP counterpart.

The Schumer Playbook Cornyn's centrist recruiting drive grew out of concern that his caucus was the smallest it had been since 1978 -- in large measure because the moderate wing has been almost eliminated.

The blueprint came from an unlikely source: Charles E. Schumer of New York, who took over as head of his party's campaign arm in 2005, when there were 44 Senate Democrats, the smallest number since Herbert Hoover was president. The big gains since were largely because Schumer recruited candidates who were undeniably to the party's right and could turn that centrism to their advantage in swing states and GOP strongholds. Among the winners were Pennsylvania's Bob Casey, Montana's Jon Tester, Missouri's Claire McCaskill and Virginia's Jim Webb in 2006 and, last year, Alaska's Mark Begich and Virginia's Mark Warner.

But Cornyn realized that a parallel strategy for the GOP would not be universally welcomed when he hinted at his approach in a February speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference. There, he received a decidedly tepid response. "To be a national party we have to put blue and purple states into play," he said then. "It's very important that we broaden our party and we increase our appeal among groups that share our values, conservative values, but they don't necessarily identify themselves as Republicans or maybe even identify themselves as conservatives."

In April, when Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania switched to the Democratic Party, antipathy to the idea of courting GOP centrists grew vocal among conservative elders, who said the defection was proof that reaching out to people of his ilk would prove fruitless. Anger spread in May, when Cornyn gave the formal NRSC endorsement for the open Senate seat in Florida to Gov. Charlie Crist. (Crist outraged conservatives by appearing with Obama to press for enactment of the administration's economic stimulus package, which the right viewed as excessively expensive. And he's also vying for the GOP nomination against former state House Speaker Marco Rubio, a rising star among conservatives.)

By summer, annoyance had seeped to the grass roots. Cornyn drew jeers and a few cries of "traitor" when he appeared at a July Fourth rally in Austin for the "tea party" movement of low-tax, small-government conservatives.

For his part, Schumer says it's no surprise that his own centrists-welcome campaign strategy is spurring contention within the Senate GOP. "They have fewer people in the middle, so he'll get even more flak than I did," he said of Cornyn.

How He Does It Cornyn is described as having a smooth, low-key approach in persuading some of his recruits to give up their relatively comfortable situations to run for the Senate.

"He's a master of the soft sell," said Mark Steven Kirk of suburban Chicago, who is giving up growing seniority on the House Appropriations Committee to run for the open seat in Illinois. To seal the deal, Cornyn met privately with Kirk over four months, and worked with allies behind the scenes to cajole Andy McKenna Jr., the conservative chairman of the state GOP, not to join the ranks of primary challengers.

To woo his other big recruit from the House, Delaware's Michael N. Castle, Cornyn asked a flock of emissaries, including the much more conservative Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, to make the case that Castle could have a bigger impact as a senator than by staying in the House. When Castle signaled that he'd had enough such calls, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee decided to write him a letter.

Another Cornyn tactic paid off in July when Jim Bunning announced that he would retire: He was shown polling by Cornyn that made clear a third term would be tough to get. Cornyn ceded the job of anointing a GOP candidate to his close friend and boss, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who settled on an ally back home, Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson. But Grayson's moderation -- he conceded that he cast his first presidential vote for Bill Clinton in 1992 -- is forcing him to fight for the nomination against a well-funded conservative, Rand Paul.

In Connecticut, Cornyn scored an early recruiting coup in former Rep. Rob Simmons, who initially seemed like the best possible opponent for Christopher J. Dodd. But as the five-term Democrat's fortunes have faltered, a wave of Republican candidates has flooded the race -- including centrist Linda McMahon, former chief executive officer of Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment Inc. "She said she was prepared to spend $50 million; that caught my attention," Cornyn recalled of their most recent meeting, after which he became neutral in that primary.

The NRSC chief is still hoping that former Gov. George E. Pataki of New York will oppose appointed Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand's bid for a full term. "One of the names on my dance card," Cornyn said, noting that the two of them talked two weeks ago.

Pataki, Kirk and Castle are fiscal policy hawks who have broken ranks with conservatives on other domestic issues. Such an ideological balancing act will keep most conservative opposition at bay, says Dick Armey, the former House majority leader who's now the head of the conservative advocacy group Freedom Works.

Overall, Armey compared the NRSC's strategy with the initial choice of the Democratic establishment to back Hillary Rodham Clinton for president last year. "It turned out the mood of the Democratic Party was they needed someone to the left of Hillary. Now the mood of a lot of Republicans is they want someone who can provide a sharp contrast to Obama."

For his part, Cornyn is neither declaring his expectations for 2010 nor signaling whether he wants to run the party campaign arm through more than one election. "Winning back the majority will take more than one cycle" is all he'll say on both counts.