rssModerate Republicans Don’t Recognize Their Party
Wednesday, April 29, 2009 at 11:32 am
- 7 Comments
In the wake of Sen. Arlen Specter’s (D-Pa.) defection from the Republican Party, another prominent GOP moderate is expressing doubts that the party has a future on its current tack to the right. Writing in The New York Times today, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) argues that “the political environment that has made it inhospitable for a moderate Republican in Pennsylvania is a microcosm of a deeper, more pervasive problem that places our party in jeopardy nationwide.”
There is no plausible scenario under which Republicans can grow into a majority while shrinking our ideological confines and continuing to retract into a regional party. Ideological purity is not the ticket back to the promised land of governing majorities — indeed, it was when we began to emphasize social issues to the detriment of some of our basic tenets as a party that we encountered an electoral backlash.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because Specter himself voiced the same sentiments Tuesday, as did former GOP Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island — who was quick to point out in a phone interview that the same conservative Club for Growth that contributed to his defeat in 2006 is largely responsible for pushing Specter out of the party this year.
Echoing Snowe’s criticism of the GOP’s misguided focus on hot-button social issues, Chafee blasted the 2006 decision of party leaders to dwell on contentious items like bans on gay marriage and flag burning — things popular among the Rush Limbaugh base, but alienating to many moderate Americans.
The message from these moderates seems to be this: The decision by Republican leaders to unite around a theme of right-wing social conservatism should also be accompanied by the recognition that most of the country thinks differently — and the shift in congressional power is simply the natural consequence of this ideological incongruity.
Snowe ends her screed by invoking the words of Ronald Reagan:
We should emphasize the things that unite us and make these the only “litmus test” of what constitutes a Republican: our belief in restraining government spending, pro-growth policies, tax reduction, sound national defense, and maximum individual liberty … As to the other issues that draw on the deep springs of morality and emotion, let us decide that we can disagree among ourselves as Republicans and tolerate the disagreement.
“I couldn’t agree more,” Snowe writes. “We can’t continue to fold our philosophical tent into an umbrella under which only a select few are worthy to stand.”
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7 Comments
Comment posted April 29, 2009 @ 8:54 am
Can we please get it straight? These people are not moderates, they are liberal Republicans. They are nominally fiscal conservatives but they are still willing to spend and they are not socially conservative in the least. This does not make them moderates. If they were from the mid-west they would have to be Democrats because they would not be able to even infer that they were conservative.
Comment posted April 29, 2009 @ 10:20 am
Yes, keep insulting and attacking your moderates GOP, we want you to be a minority party for a long time. Keep listening to Rush, Rove, and Newt too. They obviously know whats best for the party!
Comment posted April 29, 2009 @ 2:33 pm
Conservative seems to mean whatever you want it to mean when you say it, then changes whenever you want it to. Conservatives owned all three branches of government thanks to the judicial coup of 2000 and the election fraud of 2004. What did they do? They handed out spoils, even though they were the most “conservative” majority ever elected to office. Did they deliver on your social engineering goals of creating a state religion where abortion was illegal, shotgun weddings the law of the land and Southern Baptist preachers ran the schools with no evolution taught and no lessons not in the Bible? Nope. Newt Gingrich as your flagbearer means a degenerate who married his high school math teacher and ditched her for his secretary, then lathered, rinsed and repeated, while persecuting the president with frivolous investigations is running your conservative Utopia. DeLay was an overt crook, and Bush and Cheney, longtime conservatives, took the opportunity to whizz on the Constitution and expand government programs to higher levels than even LBJ.
Bill you were suckered and your fellow “conservatives” will keep being suckered because you believe in Fairyland conservatism. Get meaner, get more conservative, get madder, throw teabags, but you can't stop the world from doing what it wants. America was built on justice, equality, and freedom, and the GOP did nothing to foster those values and everything to impede them. Why be on the wrong side of history?
Comment posted April 29, 2009 @ 3:54 pm
Can we please get it straight? These people are not moderates, they are liberal Republicans. They are nominally fiscal conservatives but they are still willing to spend and they are not socially conservative in the least. This does not make them moderates. If they were from the mid-west they would have to be Democrats because they would not be able to even infer that they were conservative.
Comment posted April 29, 2009 @ 5:20 pm
Yes, keep insulting and attacking your moderates GOP, we want you to be a minority party for a long time. Keep listening to Rush, Rove, and Newt too. They obviously know whats best for the party!
Comment posted April 29, 2009 @ 9:33 pm
Conservative seems to mean whatever you want it to mean when you say it, then changes whenever you want it to. Conservatives owned all three branches of government thanks to the judicial coup of 2000 and the election fraud of 2004. What did they do? They handed out spoils, even though they were the most “conservative” majority ever elected to office. Did they deliver on your social engineering goals of creating a state religion where abortion was illegal, shotgun weddings the law of the land and Southern Baptist preachers ran the schools with no evolution taught and no lessons not in the Bible? Nope. Newt Gingrich as your flagbearer means a degenerate who married his high school math teacher and ditched her for his secretary, then lathered, rinsed and repeated, while persecuting the president with frivolous investigations is running your conservative Utopia. DeLay was an overt crook, and Bush and Cheney, longtime conservatives, took the opportunity to whizz on the Constitution and expand government programs to higher levels than even LBJ.
Bill you were suckered and your fellow “conservatives” will keep being suckered because you believe in Fairyland conservatism. Get meaner, get more conservative, get madder, throw teabags, but you can't stop the world from doing what it wants. America was built on justice, equality, and freedom, and the GOP did nothing to foster those values and everything to impede them. Why be on the wrong side of history?
Pingback posted November 19, 2009 @ 7:20 pm
[...] with nothing.. Except for the independents. Oh, and the majority of the republican party. http://washingtonindependent.com/410…nize-their-gop [...]
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