Caldwell's argument was that Southern cultural values diverge from Midwestern ones (one of the themes expounded on at length in The Nine Nations of North America 30 years ago), and that the differences could be used by liberals to drive wedges between Midwesterners and the GOP, unless the GOP firmly turned its back on the South.
His article (June, 1998 -- not 1997 as I previously posted) was accompanied by a series of caricature drawings of e.g. an elephant driving a pickup truck, beer in hand, gun in back-window rack, NRA cap on head, dogs in truck bed.
His summarization, the money quote:
The Republicans are too conservative: their deference to their southern base is persuading much of the country that their vision is a sour and crabbed one. But they're too liberal, too, as their all-out retreat from shrinking the government indicates. At the same time, the Republicans have passed none of the reforms that ingratiated the party with the "radical middle". The Republicans' biggest problem is not their ideology but their lack of one. Stigmatized as rightists, behaving like leftists, and ultimately standing for nothing, they're in the worst of all possible worlds. [Emphasis in original]
The quote that shows Caldwell's aversion to the South is this one:
At the same time, the abortion issue illustrates that the problems of a southernized Republican Party are not simply a matter of how far right the Party is. Opinion on abortion has swung sharply toward the Republican position.....It's not the issue of abortion that's driving people away, they argue, so much as it is the broader cultural claims of those who put it forward.....
....Southern-style Christians are a powerful bloc in a way that none of the Democratic blocs is.... This is a big enough bloc to take over not just a party but a country.
The bet that Republicans are [were -- LG] making is that the South will add congressional seats and electoral votes faster than the rest of the country grows alienated from the party's southern message. Most members of the party are content.....but they're also hoping that the South can be transformed enough to keep voters elsewhere from fleeing the party in droves. [Emphasis supplied.]
"Voters elsewhere" may be, I suspect, a euphemism for "we neocons at Weekly Standard's offices, and everyone else who can't stand Southerners and their hokey, socially regressive cr*p."
How do you get away with conflating Caldwell's warning that becoming too explicitly a Southern party would hurt the GOP with some nefarious plot to hurt the party?
Leading question. I stopped beating my wife at exactly 11:46 last night, I checked the wall clock to be sure. And what do you mean, "get away with"?
What "nefarious plot"? "Hurt the party" how? By nominating its weakest candidate since Wendell Willkie?
Look, all the implicit "cures" for the ills spelt out in Caldwell's articles have been taken by the Bush Administration, starting with the 2000 GOP convention, when Bush held the Christian Coalition people at arm's length while doing quiet but very explicit outreach (including a Mary Matalin-conveyed promise to support gay "marriage") to the Log Cabins. Dubya continued this walkaway when he announced his open-borders policy after he sewed up the nomination, and welcomed all South America to the GOP.
Dubya, Rove, and now McCain have done everything they can to marginalize Southern conservative Republicans, and that effort has been based not in electoral politics but in distaste, as shown in a recent PBS documentary about George H.W. Bush and his political career, in which Southerners were repeatedly excoriated on camera and even called "bastards" by Poppy Bush's people. This after two Bushes have been sent to the White House three times since 1988. That's ingratitude for you, real, visceral, loathing-induced ingratitude at the core of the upper, gold-plated reaches of the GOP.
You have another theory that covers what the GOP has been doing since Caldwell's article appeared?
Mine is that Caldwell cashed in on the beating the GOP took from the MSM and their hate campaign of 1995-6, playing off the MSM themes of "all the world hates you" and "you're nothing but a bunch of neo-Klukker lynch-mob gomers" to make an argument of his own, "The media are beating us to death with this South-hating stuff, it's working, the battleground-state public is turning on us, we gotta bail on the Southern conservatives and pretend we don't know these guys!"
Issues define who's in one's camp and who isn't. So the South was very firmly on the Republican side. But what do you do with that? How do you behave in Congress? Do you try to expand that base or do you limit your appeal to the areas you already control?
If you don't want to compromise, fine. But if you compromise on the principles you believe in, but sharpen regional antagonism that doesn't look like a winning strategy either.
I can only speak for myself. But glancing over Caldwell's article, it looks like you misjudge him. You can find phrases to justify a "We hate you Southerners" interpretation, but to take that for the whole message of the article looks like a mistake. What I'm trying to say, is you can learn from someone's argument even if you don't agree with it or you can demonize it, and you've made your choice.
Your argument also looks like an oversimplification.
... Caldwell cashed in on the beating the GOP took from the MSM and their hate campaign of 1995-6, playing off the MSM themes of "all the world hates you" and "you're nothing but a bunch of neo-Klukker lynch-mob gomers" to make an argument of his own, "The media are beating us to death with this South-hating stuff, it's working, the battleground-state public is turning on us, we gotta bail on the Southern conservatives and pretend we don't know these guys!"
A lot happens in over a dozen years. Someone less inclined to see everything in terms of victimization would pick up on that.
There was no rejection of the South in 1995 or 1996 or afterwards. What happens is what always happens: politicians stay in power until they start screwing up, and then they leave. Nobody said "Oh! We hate you Gingrich, or Armey or Livingston or Delay or Gramm or Lott! Go!" (assuming that's who you're talking about). Rather there was a natural attrition of politicians who made the kind of mistakes politicians always make.
Moreover, in the election after this article appeared, Republicans didn't go with McCain or Forbes, but with someone more acceptable to the South, G.W. Bush. If they were running away from the South, wouldn't they have nominated someone else?
Ah, but Bush isn't a true Southerner! Guess not, not like the Southerners in the race, Lamar Alexander and Libby Dole. My point is 10 years ago or now, the people you'd be most comfortable with and likely to regard as "true Southerners" aren't going to get very far in national politics. Even people who get elected to statewide office in Southern states don't fit the bill.