How the parties deal with their fringe figures

The Gadflyer’s Paul Waldman has an item on TomPaine.com this week, raising an issue that’s bothered me for years.

Noting that last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference featured high-profile Republican leaders hobnobbing with some of the right’s most polarizing extremists, Waldman wonders why there’s no outcry when mainstream Republicans in powerful government positions rub elbows with radicals.

[Y]ou won’t hear anyone asking prominent Republicans to “distance themselves” from the wingnuts in their midst. Reporters and pundits won’t be fishing out controversial statements from CPAC conference speakers and asking elected Republicans to repudiate them. Conservative writers won’t be penning magazine pieces advising the RNC to hold the center by purging activists whose views are “outside the mainstream.”

But the story is far different on the left, where the circular firing squad is a regularly scheduled event. This is not to say that conservatives don’t sometimes go after their own, but the critical difference is this: The right purges its moderates, while the left purges its liberals.

Quite right. High-profile right-wing figures can say the most outrageous things imaginable, but they remain welcome in Republican circles. Grover Norquist believes the Estate Tax is morally equivalent to the Nazi Holocaust, calls WWII veterans “anti-American,� and believes “bipartisanship is another name for date rape,� but is nevertheless working alongside Karl Rove and Tom DeLay to drive the Republican agenda. Pat Robertson would like to see a nuclear bomb hit the State Department, but he still gets to hang out with the president. Meanwhile, fringe left-wing figures rear their heads, say something controversial, and mainstream Dems want nothing to do with them.

This is even true among lawmakers. There are some pretty liberal House members (Maxine Waters, Dennis Kucinich, and Barbara Lee come to mind), whom Dems keep relatively hidden away and out of the spotlight. On the other side of the aisle, Republicans find the most conservative, ideologically rigid lawmakers in their ranks — Tom DeLay, Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum — and promote them to leadership posts.

They have Grover Norquist; we have Michael Moore. They have Jerry Falwell; we have Ward Churchill. The difference is, our fringe is persona non grata; their fringe has Karl Rove on speed-dial.

With this in mind, Waldman offers some excellent advice to Dems, who probably spend a little too much time worrying about their non-existent ties to fringe figures.

There’s no better time than the present for Democrats to think seriously about who they are and how they’d like Americans to think about them. But if they go about recasting their image without also working to shape the image of conservatism at the same time, they’ll only be fighting half the battle. The fact that Republicans don’t worry about how radical their fringe is means that there’s plenty of ammunition just sitting there. Show Americans the orgy of hate-mongering and creeping fascism that is today’s radical right and they’ll recoil in disgust. Force Republicans to embrace or repudiate their radical supporters and they’ll be stuck between a rock and a hard place. Then we’ll be getting somewhere.

I couldn’t agree more. When Norquist condemned the WWII generation as “anti-American,” a few Dems called on the White House to repudiate the remarks. True to form, the Bush gang waited for the story to blow over, the media barely lifted an eyebrow, and Norquist’s hate-fest moved on to new targets.

Today’s right is, to borrow a phrase, a “coalition of the wild-eyed.” There’s no reason Dems shouldn’t remind the public about this as often as possible.