The New York Times’ John Tierney’s most recent column touched on an issue that’s gaining more and more traction of late.
Republicans in Washington did not abandon their principles lightly. When they embraced “compassionate conservatism,” when they started spending like Democrats, most of them didn’t claim to suddenly love big government.
No, they were just being practical. The party’s strategists explained that the small-government mantra didn’t cut it with voters anymore. Forget eliminating the Department of Education — double its budget and expand its power. Stop complaining about middle-class entitlements — create a new one for prescription drugs. Instead of obsessing about government waste, bring home the bacon.
But as long as we’re being practical, what do Republicans have to show for their largess? Passing the drug benefit and the No Child Left Behind Act gave them a slight boost in the polls on those issues, but not for long. When voters this year were asked in a New York Times/CBS News Poll which party they trusted to handle education and prescription drugs, the Republicans scored even worse than they did before those bills had been passed.
Meanwhile, they’ve developed a new problem: holding the party together.
Tierney, of course, is not a disinterested observer. An unabashed libertarian, Tierney laments the GOP’s direction because they haven’t done enough to make him (and people who share his ideology) happy — they’ve spent too much and made the government too big.
The consequence, as Tierney sees it, is that the delicate coalition of moralists and libertarians that helped lead Republicans dominate as the majority party in DC now finds its coalition unraveling. No GOP faction is getting what it wants — and each faction holds their intra-party rivals responsible.
Tierney’s headline was, “Can This Party Be Saved?” To a certain extent, it sounds like a silly question: the party that allegedly needs “saving” currently controls every branch of the government, and up until fairly recently, was openly speculating about a “permanent” majority.”
But all of a sudden, it’s a question that doesn’t seem quite as absurd anymore.
The column coincides with a similar piece in Insight magazine, an off-shoot of Sun Myung Moon’s far-right Washington Times, which suggests in its latest issue that the rift in the GOP is big and getting bigger.
President Bush has been trying to maintain a united Republican Party amid flagging conservative support and a split with the GOP’s liberal wing.
The two wings are so far apart that party strategists no longer envision a united front for the November congressional elections. The strategists said many of the [liberal Republicans], already alienated from the White House, have been campaigning as opponents of the president in an effort to win re-election as part of an expected Democratic Party sweep of Congress.
Some of this (such as the notion that there’s a reasonably sized group of “liberal Republicans”) seems overwrought. What’s more, much of the speculation seems like pre-election rationalizing from a party that appears poised for a rough campaign cycle.
But is there something to the broader argument? If the Republican ascendancy has peaked, are we hearing the early grumblings of a party that may soon be overwhelmed by infighting?
And if so, who’ll end up winning the intra-party struggle?