No one turns their back on their political party lightly. Ronald Reagan always said he did not leave the Democratic party but that it left him.
Arlen Specter has finally moved to the Democratic party. I remember meeting Arlen Specter at the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. He was a nice man. It is a sad day for what is left of us moderate to liberal Republicans that he has left us. Specter’s leaving the GOP makes me wonder where the rest of our dwindling moderates stand in an extremely conservative Republican party.
At the local level, I had a similar feeling when Mark Desaulnier left the Republican party. DeSaulnier, a Liberal Republican with a bright future, had never been embraced by the conservatives that ran the Contra Costa Republican Central committee. In 1998 DeSaulnier left the GOP. He had a big coming-out party hosted by Congressmen George Miller at the union hall on Detroit Ave in Concord. I called him after that event. DeSaulnier, always a class guy took my call. I told him that I understood why he changed parties and that no matter what he would always be my friend. He thanked me and we have remained close ever since.
Specter left the Republican Party because the party has left him just as many other people don’t feel they want to live and follow conservative othodoxy. In 2010, far right of the GOP was going to run a very conservative Club for Growth guy, Pat Toomey, in the 2010 GOP primary.
This is the typical tactic used by conservatives to push moderates out of elected office. I remember in 2000 when State Senator Richard Rainey faced a life and death fight against Tom Torlakson who challenged him for the 7th District Senate seat. The local conservatives ran some unkown conservative against him to weaken him and he eventually lost in the general election.
I remember in 1994 when Ron Unz challenged incumbent California Governor Pete Wilson in the primary and got 35% of the vote. I could go on, but the point is that for years conservative Republicans in primaries have worked to remove moderate Republicans or weaken them so they lose the election.
One notable exception is when ex-liberal Republican congressman Pete McClosky ran against Richard Pombo in the 2006 primary and got 35% against the seven term uber conservative incumbent. None of the Republican intelligentsia believed that Pombo would lose. But Pombo, the weakened right winger, in an act of political desperation even called in President George W. Bush to campaign for him before he was crushed at the polls in a majority Republican district by political neophyte Jerry McNerney.
As I have already written here, there is no room for moderate Republicans in the modern Republican Party. If you think there is room for moderates you are fooling yourself.
Moderate Republicans need to understand the far right is willing to have our support at election time, but when push comes to shove, they want to show us the door.
I am through playing this game. There is no such thing any more as a big tent in the Republican party. If there ever was one. The time has come to ignore the far right of the GOP and and let them wither on the vine and die as they listen to Rush Limbaugh and continue to lose elections.
Let the conservatives come to us and explain why they think the Bible should have an equal footing with science in school; that stem cell research should be banned and that sick people should suffer for it. And why ban sex education or birth control or that I need to look to Sarah Palin for my family values.
Why characterize the poor and homeless as nothing more than losers who don’t have the desire to work hard and should be cast aside to private charities with no help from the government. Or that the free market is the answer to our problems with education. And of course tax cuts are the ultimate solution to everything and that you believe in small government and balanced budgets.
Please!
Don’t forget the latest that we are governed by fascists and we need to join the governor of Texas Rick Perry and secede from the United States. Please come to me with a straight face and tell me that is what you want me to believe. And get ready as I laugh and show your freak show the door.
It makes me wonder what other notable local GOP moderates like Warren Rupf, Richard and Sue Rainey, John Coleman, Judy Lloyd, Rochelle Bird, John Duncan, Arthur Bruzzone and Kris Hunt, Matt Delcarlo, Howard Soule and others are thinking about their future in the flat earth society of the Republican Party?
Maybe it is time for Moderates to leave the party and let the conservatives have it. At a minimum, the time has come to send conservative Republicans a message that their movement is dead and until they realize that fact and change they will remain in the wilderness and moderates will no longer follow them into self destruction and political oblivion.
Good luck and Good bye!
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
A Liberal Republican…sounds like something out of the Whig Party. A Moderate Republican… I thought that Abraham Lincoln died?
In all seriousness, I have always felt that the lack of moderation in the Republican Party has helped to push the Liberal Wing of the Democratic Party to power. There are some substantial and reasonable positions that need an honest discourse for us to come to agreeable paths to problems that we face.
For example at what point does a safety net become an enabler? At what point does supporting poverty rather than supporting people out of poverty cause its own problems.
These are valid issues for different view points along a whole spectrum of things that needs a respectable and healthy political dialectic or push and shove. However, when one party comes with so much baggage and demonic casting of the debate with social issues from the Salem Witch Trials it deflects and defeats the purpose of discourse. (The Newt Gingrinch’s and Karl Rove’s have a lot to be held accountable for.)
A new revised Republican party (or a new Independent party) may be needed but is not going to happen. Instead, it appears that the debate will shift to the various wings within the Democratic Party where there is a growing number of moderates and a tolerance of different views almost to the point of chaos. As Will Rogers once said: I belong to no organized political party, I am a Democrat.