I can’t say I blame the handful of Republican moderates left in the party for feeling frustrated. It must be disheartening to see, for example, Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, who wields enormous influence in GOP circles, admit that his mission is to make moderate Republicans an endangered species.
“The problem with the moderates in Congress is they basically water down the Republican message and what you get is something that infuriates the Republican base,” Mr. Moore said.
Ideally, I’d like to see the remaining centrists leave the party en masse and teach the GOP a lesson about straying to far into the fringes, though I know that’s probably not going to happen. The few moderates left are, however, speaking out and imploring their party to reverse its far-right course. I don’t think it’ll work, but it’s nice to see anyway.
Edward Brooke, a two-term African-American Republican senator from Massachusetts (1967 to 1979), said today he hopes for a Republican Party with “a more open mind and a more generous heart.” He also took Bush to task for his ideological approach to governing.
[M]any of [Bush’s] advisers and supporters show signs of arrogance, self-righteousness and intolerance, and of losing touch with the basic values of the vast majority of Americans. This extremism shows itself in any number of ways: excesses committed by the Justice Department under the Patriot Act, unilateralism in international affairs, crude political tactics in the Senate that have produced legislative gridlock and made a mockery of that chamber’s great tradition of bipartisanship.
Unfortunately, Brooke’s influence in the Republican Party is about as big as mine. Brooke, however, is not the only one who wants his party to come back to the middle.
A newly formed organization of former GOP officeholders will use a full-page ad in The New York Times today to urge their party to “Come Back to the Mainstream.” They want to shift the party and President Bush to the left on the environment, stem-cell research, foreign policy and judicial appointments.
“There are a whole host of areas where I personally think the administration has gotten too harsh, too partisan, too unwilling to reach across the aisle to get good answers to tough problems,” said former Washington Gov. Dan Evans, one of 17 former GOP officials who signed the ad.
The group sponsoring the ad has a pretty good message.
“Instead of partisan ideology — which increasingly has led moderates to leave the party — what’s needed is a speedy return to the pragmatic, problem-solving mainstream,” the group called Mainstream 2004 said in newspaper advertisements to be published Monday.
The “Come Back To The Mainstream” ads say what many moderate Republicans are thinking, said A. Linwood Holton, who was Virginia governor from 1970-74.
The problem lies with the “extremist element that controls the Republican party,” Holton said, “which has polarized this country.”
“I see the ads as an effort to try to get the Republican party to widen its appeal” to moderates around the country, Holton said. “Bush talks that way, but I don’t see him or the rest of the party doing that.”
To their credit, some of these guys mean what they’re saying. Holton, a Republican in Virginia no less, said he doesn’t even plan to vote for Bush this year — “Not unless they change substantially between now and November,” he said.
Now if Holton has a few million friends who agree with him, we’ll be in great shape.