The LAT had a feature about a week ago highlighting the precarious position anti-war Republicans find themselves in. As disastrous as Bush’s Iraq policy is, and as unpopular as the war has become, “Republican lawmakers who have broken with over the war are under fire from party loyalists.”
Ron Brownstein explains today that there’s an “ideological inquisition” underway in the GOP, and the unintended result will likely be a smaller Republican Party.
The two House Republicans most critical of the Iraq war (Walter Jones of North Carolina and Wayne Gilchrest of Maryland) have drawn serious primary challengers from the right. So had Nebraska’s Chuck Hagel, the Senate Republican most critical of the war, before he announced his retirement last month…. In all these ways, Republican leaders are signaling they prize solidarity over outreach, and familiar thinking over independent ideas. […]
On problems ranging from health care to energy, [Republican presidential candidates] have retreated to a reflexive denigration of government and praise of unfettered markets aimed squarely at hard-core conservatives. Tellingly, the GOP hopefuls have broken with Bush primarily on the policies — comprehensive immigration reform and the Medicare drug benefit — that he consciously formulated to expand the party base. “It is a tired party and an uncertain party, and it is trying to reach back to … the tried and true,” frets Peter Wehner, the former Bush White House director of strategic initiatives who is now at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center.
The “tried and true,” apparently, means appealing to voters by moving to the hard right, especially on spending, which helps explain why we’re seeing such inexplicable opposition to policies such as S-CHIP.
It’s a pleasant surprise; usually the Republicans are savvier than this.
These guys seriously believe that Bush’s presidency is a failure and their party lost both chambers of Congress because they weren’t ideologically rigid enough. It seems to have escaped their attention that Americans hate the war in Iraq, are disgusted with Republican incompetence and corruption, and feel alienated by a party strategy that focused attention solely on the far-right base.
No wonder, as Brownstein noted, some national polls “now give Democrats their widest advantage in party identification since before Ronald Reagan’s presidency.”
Kevin Drum’s analysis of this was spot-on.
Every two years the losing party has this exact same conversation: (a) move to the center to appeal more to swing voters, or (b) move left (right) in order to stay true to the party’s liberal (conservative) heritage? My sense is that (b) is almost always the choice after the first loss or two, after which (a) finally wins out.
This year, though, we’re in a historically odd position. The Republican Party is still in stage (b), but to a smaller extent, the Democrats are back there too. The Democratic Party spent so long in stage (a) during the 90s, moving aggressively to the center after years in the wilderness, and the GOP moved so far to the right under Gingrich and Bush, that Democrats have the luxury of being able to move modestly to the left and yet still be moving relatively closer to the center than the Republican Party. On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s like the GOP is moving right from 8 to 9 while the Democratic party is moving left from 6 to 6.5. The lunacy of the conservative base is providing a huge amount of cover for liberals to make some modest progress this year.
Said lunacy, of course, is best demonstrated by the fact that Brownstein — correctly — identifies Rudy Giuliani as the most moderate overall major candidate in the Republican field.
And given how far gone Giuliani is, that’s really saying something.