May 10 2009
Purity Poison Causes GOP Shift Towards Centrists
I am no longer a ‘conservative’ because the term has been poisoned and run through the muck by the far right. ‘True conservatives’ scream at diverse opinions with anger, unable to fathom why anyone would think differently (even in modest terms). To them Stalin, Soros and John McCain/George Bush are basically cut from the same clothe. It has become embarrassing to associate one’s self to the mindless raging of the likes of Michael Savage, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity and Monica Crowley (to name a few).
Reihan Salam said it well in the Washington Post recently:
Politics is about persuasion, and Republicans have gotten extremely bad at it — they can’t even persuade their own senators to stay on their side.
The real problem, however, is the party’s frame of mind. Conservatives still believe that they are a “silent majority.” So they don’t see the need to win over those who disagree with them: They’re convinced that all they need to do is to shout the same message — low taxes, low taxes, low taxes — at ever-higher volume.Â
Tone and volume matter in politics. Condescending zealotry and dismissive labels (e.g, RINOs, squishes, spineless, etc) do not create support or respect. They create backlash and well deserved cold shoulders. Louder doesn’t work. More anger (called ‘compassion’ by the incorrigible hot heads) only turns more people off. Anger reduces thoughtfulness and coherence. It is a poor substitute for actually thinking and planning – which is why it rarely leads to success.
But conservatives don’t need higher volume. Conservatism at its best is a tough and demanding creed. To sell it, you can’t call people who’ve lost their jobs and their homes “losers.” You need to sell the virtues of a growing and flourishing economy and the free-market policies that will make it happen. Because conservatives aren’t a majority, hard-edged accusations of socialism wind up alienating millions of potential allies — voters who are a little uncomfortable with Obama’s spending, particularly if it threatens to saddle their children with debt, but who recognize that the government needs to act to stave off an economic collapse. And so conservatives need to understand their political opponents.
Yes, they need George Bush’s compassion. His quiet respect for the office and the way he lived his values instead of shouting them in people’s faces. Check out this interesting dichotomy between Bush and Obama:
George Bush is and was a humble man. Obama thinks the world counts on him and him alone to lead us. Bush went to church and prayed often. Obama puts out press releases about his supposed piety. The left sold a great bill of goods to the American people claiming that Bush, et al. were arrogant while insisting that Obama was a “man of the people.â€
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The 65th Anniversary of D-Day is fast approaching. Barack Obama will attend the events on June 6th as George Bush did in 2004 for the sixtieth memorial service. Here is the rub, as of now Obama’s State Department has asked (read demanded) the French government not allow tour guide services to operate that day.
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Compare that with 2004. Security was tight as President Bush and other world leaders were in attendance, but the event was still open to all. A friend relayed the story of waiting in line to use a port-a-potty (a French port-a-potty no doubt, yuck, believe me.) She looks to her left and who he is in the next line waiting patiently? President Bush. Sure he had Secret Service nearby, but he waited like everyone else.
Contrast that with Team Obama not even allowing regular people near Colleville-Sur-Mer that day.  A shame indeed. Especially as the last of our WW II vets are expiring.
The far right was angry that President Bush did not act more like Paul Begala and James Carville and the nutroots. So they decided they would take conservatism down the path of ruin by mimicking the worse of the left. They continue to excuse their destructive behavior by pointing to the leftward fever swamps for validation.
But what the nation wants is something opposite to the juvenile, hormone driven reactionaries on the left. To this day the GOP is still the only party of the libertarian perspective (and it will never be a ‘pure libertarian’ party). It is the one, remaining political view that says it is better to be responsible for yourself than empower a bumbling, fumbling bureaucracy to be responsible for you.
Some place near the right of center there is a hot spot for opposing, stopping and hopefully undoing the damage the liberals are inflicting in this nation right now. The GOP knows it, because their best opportunities right now are to recruit centrists and go after the most liberal members of the DC Democrat elite:
For many Republicans, including Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, the reaction to Sen. Arlen Specter’s party switch was unequivocal: good riddance.
Yet even as his jilted former party slams the door behind him, the GOP is quietly pursuing a 2010 strategy that relies heavily on candidates nearly identical to Specter. The party’s road to winning back a Senate majority, it seems, is paved with moderates whose records are sure to make conservatives blanch.
For the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s recruitment list for 2010 reads like a roster of some of the party’s best-known RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) and squishes — the derisive terms applied to centrists by movement conservatives.
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In Delaware, where there is widespread consensus that just one Republican — Rep. Michael Castle, the co-founder of the moderate Republican Main Street Partnership — can win Joe Biden’s former seat, the push is on to get him to announce for the Senate.Â
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In the Midwest, there’s Illinois Rep. Mark Kirk, another leading centrist viewed as the GOP’s best hope of capturing a blue-state Senate seat — the one Obama vacated after he was elected president.
The point is, I think I could discuss embryonic stem cells from a scientific and biological perspective with these people and show them why the core chemistry of evolution (i.e., DNA) would also prove in a court of law that an embryo is a unique human being. A human created once in forever, never to be blessed with existence again for all of time. A treasure to be respected and honored, not sliced, diced and mutated.
I cannot have the same discussion with the purists on the right. They want to ban contraceptives – talk about getting into people’s private lives! They don’t believe in evolution because some dimwits on the left claim evolution proves God does not exist. Many of us think DNA, being the building blocks of every species and individual, is the handwriting of God in its unadulterated form. Can’t tell that to the far right, they are too busy yelling ‘spineless moderate’ to pay attention.
The far right’s anger is too toxic to make progress. It is much easier to turn the centrists to common reason than the zealots. And this is why the GOP, if it is to be reborn, will be born of people who can find common ground, not those who preach from the self declared high ground. The sooner this happens, the sooner the liberal destruction can be halted and repaired.
The GOP was suppose to be the party of national security, lower taxes ( strong economy), smaller federal goverment.
We became the minority when the right became the left under Pres. Bush’s term in office, our so called leaders in DC spent money like there was no tommorrow nevering learning the lesson of the 60s or 80s when revenues were coming in, reign in the spending.
The 90s our leaders did promise a contract with America, unfortuantly the leaders in 2000 went down the wrong road straying from the core principles of the GOP, spending ,coruption and the desire for absolute power.
I do not blame Pres. Bush for the demise of the GOP, as Pres. Reagan he let congress shoot themselfs in the foot and the American people saw congress for what they were as they have done with this crop of idiots.
The blowharts in DC and the extremists on the right are now looking for a excuse for their failures when all they have to do is look in the mirrior.
Well, I think there is another angle at work here, too, that isn’t all the work of the “purists”. The media grabs the words of the hard line right and reports it as if it is the mainstream though of the Republicans. They seek out and report that as “typical”. And the purists begin to believe they ARE typical because they are so reported to be.
Notice how often you will see the Newt Gingrich’s and Sean Hannity’s of the world as representative of Republican thought while the reporting of more pregmatic voices such as Palin are ridiculed and voices such as Jan Brewer of Arizona are simply hammered in the press.
Look at the strategy this way:
The major news outlets are basically the propaganda wing of the Democratic National Committee. You can either heavily promote your own party, which would be extremely obvious, or you can pick the least moderate members of the opposition party and portray them as the mainstream “base” of the party.
Neither party can win without winning the moderate center. People in the center are generally turned off by either extreme, left or right. So what you do is portray the most extreme elements of the opposition party as mainstream for that party while showing moderate, reasonable Democrats as the norm.
Jan Brewer, governor of Arizona is in a bad position. A state, unlike the federal government, can not simply print more money. They must have the cash to pay for the programs the legislature creates. She has said there has to be a tax increase in order to pay for these programs and is getting all kinds of flack for it. The people wanted these programs but don’t want to pay for them. They don’t want tax increases yet they don’t want the programs eliminated either. What is she supposed to do?
In this case the people of Arizona want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want the programs that the legislature enacted but they don’t want to pay for them, or they want “someone else” to pay for them. That can’t happen at the state level.
Here is the kind of cutting off of the nose to spite the face moronic drivel I am hearing from the purists these days:
“conservatives should withhold financial support from all GOP national committees and establishment politicians”
Riiiiiight. And what they will be left with is even more far left candidates in office and a Democrat super majority for the rest of their lives. I am beginning to believe that the people preaching that kind of behavior are actually Democrat shills designed to split the Republicans and keep them out of politics for the foreseeable future.
Ok, so “conservatives” don’t contribute to the Republicans. The Democrats gain even more ground. The “conservatives” are smug that they have “taught the Republicans a lesson” and the country moved even farther to the left.
Here is a little advice to the “conservatives” … form your own damned party and stop the sabotaging of the other parties. The “conservatives” seem only about negativity. They criticize, sabotage, are willing to tell anyone what they are against. When their candidates are trounced, they blame it on other people or other things, it is never their fault. In the meantime, the country elects Democrats by larger and larger margins. You would think they would wise up at some point.
Form your own party and if you (the “conservatives”) are right, then all the Republicans and Democrats will flock yo you. If you are wrong, the damage you cause can be contained in your little tent and the rest of us can get on with governing a country. Nobody is going to give in to the political extortion. Threatening people is liable to cause them to invite you to leave and mind the door on your way out.
ama:
Bush is not left, not even close. Believe it or not, average Americans do not want to give up a social safety net. They do not want to have to make choices between caring for their elderly parents and their children. However, the kind of spending we are seeing today with Barack Obama is so much greater than anything we have seen before, that there literally is no comparison.
In 2006 when the Democrats took over Congress our deficit was $160 billion, we run that in a month now.
crosspatch:
I agree. The other day I got into with a self styled conservative who told that Bush had no “right” to step in and stop a complete collapse of the financial. So I asked him, if there had been a collapse..Who would have been blamed.
He did not answer.
Another one of these same kind of purists said that social security and medicare are socialism and have to go..he also said that old people who could not work and ran out of savings should not be helped. That was their look out. It was socialism to step in.
I have to say that I wonder if some of these people really are conservatives or Republicans. I think some of them are actually plants. No one can be that dense.
What would solve a lot of this is a simple change in the way the states calculate electoral votes. If they went from “winner take all” to a system where winner of the state got two votes and House district cast one vote to the winner of the district, American politics would moderate considerably.
As it stands now, the candidate who takes the cities in a state carries the entire state. In the way I described above, a city can only take a number of votes proportional to its population. A candidate could lose considerable electoral votes by going too far left or too far right.
Electoral vote would more closely match popular vote and rural districts (whether they be Democrat or Republican) would have their say.
For example, Kerry won Pennsylvania in 2004 by a vote of 2,938,095 to 2,793,847 … pretty close … 51% to 47%. Kerry’s electoral votes were 21 to 0 because Pennsylvania is a “winner take all” state. Divided the way I describe above, Kerry would have still won the state but he would have got 12 electoral votes to Bush’s 9. That gives the voters in the rural districts of Pennsylvania their say in the election instead of being disenfranchised by the urban areas.
What it does in a strategic sense is that it gets rid of “flyover” states because since the race is more about congressional districts, a candidate can campaign in an entire region that spans state lines that will bring in electoral votes. Maybe areas of Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee that all together might bring in more electoral votes. It makes the rural districts important again rather than candidates only campaigning in the major metros.
With the current system you could have a situation where, for example, a candidate loses by one vote in 49 states, but wins by a landslide in one state. It makes campaigns by district important.
But most importantly, it allows third party candidates who carry a district to get an electoral vote. What that means is that BOTH parties can find themselves losing electoral votes to someone not of either of the major parties. It is currently nearly impossible for a third party candidate to get an electoral vote because they would have to carry an entire state. This way, if a third party candidate campaigns on some issue of the times, it forces the other two candidates to listen. They can’t afford to ignore that issue candidate. The net influence would be more discussion, more diversity of thought, and more moderation of extreme positions because candidates would not be able to take all the votes of a state for granted anymore.
A Green Party candidate might carry a few districts in California or Oregon and cost that Democrat some electoral votes. Or a Libertarian candidate might threaten a few electoral votes from a Republican candidate. The result *should* be to prevent either party from going to far out to extremes because they could start to hemorrhage electoral votes before losing an entire state. It is sort of a “leaky” election process that acts as a check valve to extremism.
Winner take all is an extreme measure that leads to extremism. Winner takes according to take is a better mechanism that better reflects the will of the people.
It would require no changes in the number of electors, and no changes in federal law. The states have the power to do this at any time. Sadly, Colorado recently defeated just this very mechanism in their legislature.
Now that I think about it, there is probably one person who could run on the Republican ticket and win in 2012:
General David Petraeus
AJ: The problem with evolution is that the Church of Darwin has ruined the word. When I talk evolution, I always talk of biological evolution versus cosmological evolution.
The one is testable, researchable, and susceptible to advances. The other is religion born of atheist’s who wanted to prove that God was unnecessary. The first person to warn strongly that the religion of evolution would ruin the science of evolution was Darwin himself. If only Darwin was alive today he could testify on how the Church of Al Gore has ruined the science of climatology.
The other person who warned me about the constricting nature of the religion of evolution with its neo-darwinism, neo-neo-darwinism and today neo to the fifth power darwinism was Gene Roddenberry. Ironic I write this with the Star Trek movie doing.
Your reference to DNA was ironic as well. As with Neanderthal, the DNA has proved no relationship with modern Humans, even though they co-existed. DNA has been a huge blow to Linear Progression. The reluctance to abandon linear progression has ruined evolution from a cosmological perspective but not from a biological one. Who cares if progression is sometimes exponential, sometimes regressive, sometimes non existent. Or if progression is sometimes almost impossible to detect.
All that cries out for is more research. But just as the Church of Al Gore has held back legitimate research into climatology, so has the Church of Darwin held back legitimate research into biology. Just as Darwin himself warned in the early 1880s.
For every “conservative purist” post AJ makes there is another of the opposite view (don’t moderate) somewhere else. I have mixed thoughts on both sides of the debate….and, have simply reasoned that it will all shake itself out eventually. However, one thing is for certain…
if you can’t win elections you simply don’t have a politcal vote.
So, maybe “moderates” should become “conservatives” in the primary races to win elections. LOL
On a serious note, Fred Barnes may be on to something:
“….This scenario has occurred time and again. Why
do you think Democrats won the House and Senate in 2006 and bolstered their majorities in 2008? It wasn’t because they were more thoughtful, offered compelling alternatives, or had improved their brand. They won because they opposed unpopular policies of President Bush and exploited Republican scandals in Congress. They were highly partisan and not very nice about it.
If Republicans scan their history, they’ll discover unbridled opposition to bad Democratic policies pays off. Those two factors, unattractive policies plus strong opposition, were responsible for the Republican landslides in 1938, 1946, 1966, 1980, and 1994.”