The Post is overflowing with commentary on sending signals today. If you are not baffled by Kevin Hassett advertising for the Valentine’s Day racket discussing the science of mating, there is always Broder to provide his own, er, unique brand of political analysis:

Still, if real-world confirmation of Brownstein’s thesis were needed, the Republican National Committee furnished it on Jan. 30 when it elected Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland, as the first African American to hold that post.

It was the clearest possible signal that the GOP realizes it must escape the shackles of its ideologically binding Southern strategy and compete in a more diverse, pragmatic and intellectually challenging environment.

Brownstein’s thesis is that the Democrats have established a reliable bloc of 18 states (plus D.C.) that have voted for their presidential candidate for at least the last five elections. This “blue wall” gives the Democrats a more or less automatic 248 electoral votes, which makes it much easier now for Democrats to win presidential elections. The thesis seems reasonable enough, but I fail to see how RNC chairman elections could confirm or reject it. According to Broder, Steele’s election is supposed to be evidence that Republicans have recognized how far their party has sunk, but the more I think about it the more it seems to me to be another in a long line of fumbling efforts to “re-brand” the GOP.

Republican party leaders have been trying to compete “in a more diverse, pragmatic and intellectually challenging environment” for many cycles. This gave us Dole-Kemp, “empowerment zones,” school choice mania, “compassionate conservatism,” No Child Left Behind, amnesty and “the ownership society.” In pretty much every case, the policies the GOP adopted as part of their lame but consistent efforts at “outreach” were deeply misguided, wildly unpopular or both. The GOP has been breaking out of whatever ideological shackles that once held it for over a decade, and in the end the results have been almost uniformly bad for them and the country. It was during this same period of shackle-breaking and “outreach” that the “blue wall” was built up. There is no question that some kind of adaptation to demographic changes is needed, but the GOP’s difficulty is that their answers are almost always the wrong ones.

For the most part, this is a function of pursuing minority voters least likely to be won over as a way of indirectly appealing to the sentiments of white moderates and independents rather than trying to craft policies that actually serve the interests of those moderates and independents. This is part of the GOP’s broader problem that it does not craft policies that serve the interests of most of the constituents it already has, but relies on signals, cues and lifestyle identity politics designed to mobilize people against the other party rather than to have any clear reason to support a Republican agenda. It is not surprising then that the GOP relies entirely on sending signals to moderates and independents through the adoption of bad policy proposals aimed theoretically at the benefit of entirely different groups, which creates a situation in which conservatives protest against these bad policies at the peril of sending contradictory signals that render the entire exercise pointless.

To the extent that housing policy of “the ownership society” brought about our current financial woes, the desire to be “compassionate” has helped plunge us into the worst recession in at least a generation. If Republican education reform ideas are now limited to school choice, it is little wonder that suburbanites now find little about the GOP that is attractive. Then again, considering the failure that has been NCLB, which punished the schools with the fewest resources by taking from what little they had to impose “accountability,” it might be better if Republicans steer clear of education all together. Indeed, at the national level this is exactly what they ought to do–make education once again entirely the concern of states and municipalities and give up on trying to craft some half-baked “market-oriented” federal education policy. Instead, as Steele has already indicated, the GOP is going to keep flogging school choice no matter how little the idea helps them.