ELEANOR HALL: One senior Republican who remains to be convinced that a Sarah Palin run for the White House would improve the Republican brand is David Frum. He is a former special assistant to George W. Bush, who is now with the American Enterprise Institute.
He says his party is in trouble not just in terms of its depleted numbers in the Congress but in terms of talent, money and direction. David Frum spoke to me earlier today from Toronto.
ELEANOR HALL: David Frum, a week before the election you warned that John McCain would not only lose the election but he would take the party with him. How long will it be before the party recovers from this loss?
DAVID FRUM: It will be a long time. First of all I should say that the final outcome was actually a little less bad than I fear that week, so the balance won't be as bad for the Republicans.
At one point I feared it might go as low as 42, it looks like it will be 44. That said, the party's in a lot of trouble, and the trouble comes from kind of subtle ways, not just the obvious balance in the house and the Senate but also when you look for future talent, when you look down to the state level to say well who are the candidates for tomorrow.
Our talent is rather thin and fundraising is going to be very difficult for the Republicans with the Democrats holding all the instrumentalities of power. Now the hope I am encouraging is try to accelerate the learning process, we see parties that are out of power, can often refuse to learn the lessons of their defeat and stay out of power for a long long time.
ELEANOR HALL: Well the party is now doing the grisly post mortem. Who or what do you blame for the size of the loss?
DAVID FRUM: Economic defeat, outside the United States, many people look at Iraq and obviously that wasn't a positive and yet through the election cycle, John McCain consistently out polled Barack Obama as the candidate most trusted on Iraq.
So that alone cannot be the answer. But we've had even before the market crash, we've had six years in which the income of the typical American worker did not rise. That's a huge problem.
ELEANOR HALL: So did the Republicans ever stand a chance whoever the candidate and however the campaign was run?
DAVID FRUM: I think there were moments where the Republicans might, if they played everything well might have done better than they did.
The crucial moment or the point of no return was the David Lehman Brothers collapse and John McCain stepped forward to say that the fundamentals of the economy are sound.
We had failed to deliver economic benefits to ordinary people and on that day we confirmed that the reason we had done so was we were just completely out of touch with the economic situation or ordinary people.
ELEANOR HALL: And what about the selection of Sarah Palin as the Vice Presidential running mate?
DAVID FRUM: That hurt but it hurt in a different place. Over the past decade we have really witnessed an erosion of our support amongst the well educated so that's a big problem. Well Sarah Palin made it worse and it sort of confirmed a lot of the fears that you know the better educated people have. One that we're too religious a party, second that we just don't care about being good at your job, we don't care about competence, she seemed so obviously unqualified for the job.
ELEANOR HALL: What was your reaction when she was picked initially?
DAVID FRUM: My reaction was I was disturbed and certainly I think her early appearances didn't impress anybody. link
Palin and backs him up:
"I'm like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I'm like, don't let me miss the open door. Show me where the open door is. Even if it's cracked up a little bit, maybe I'll plough right on through that and maybe prematurely plough through it. But don't let me miss an open door. " Palin said in an interview on Fox News' On The Record.
