Snowe: The GOP Did Leave Specter Behind
As I noted below, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) thinks the Republican party will be fine as long as it embraces "mainstream" Americans like Pat Toomey, who stick to their laurels and don't push conservative voters on to a trail of tears to the South. Perhaps Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) will turn to that advice for when, as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, he addresses the question, which he raised yesterday, of how to turn the GOP into a national party once more. Or perhaps he'll pay more attention to Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), who wrote penned for the New York Times a counterpoint of sorts to Jim DeMint's bizarre interpretation of Arlen Specter's move into the Democratic party.
"Republicans [have] turned a blind eye to the iceberg under the surface," she wrote, "failing to undertake the re-evaluation of our inclusiveness as a party that could have forestalled many of the losses we have suffered."
It is true that being a Republican moderate sometimes feels like being a cast member of "Survivor" -- you are presented with multiple challenges, and you often get the distinct feeling that you're no longer welcome in the tribe. But it is truly a dangerous signal that a Republican senator of nearly three decades no longer felt able to remain in the party.Senator Specter indicated that his decision was based on the political situation in Pennsylvania, where he faced a tough primary battle. In my view, the political environment that has made it inhospitable for a moderate Republican in Pennsylvania is a microcosm of a deeper, more pervasive problem that places our party in jeopardy nationwide....
There is no plausible scenario under which Republicans can grow into a majority while shrinking our ideological confines and continuing to retract into a regional party. Ideological purity is not the ticket back to the promised land of governing majorities -- indeed, it was when we began to emphasize social issues to the detriment of some of our basic tenets as a party that we encountered an electoral backlash.
That's the second time in about 24 hours she went to the Times to sound off on the problems facing the GOP and its moderates. Yesterday, she told the Times' Carl Hulse that "[o]n the national level of the Republican Party, we haven't certainly heard warm, encouraging words about how they view moderates, either you are with us or against us," adding that Republican leaders don't understand that "political diversity makes a party stronger and ultimately we are heading to having the smallest political tent in history for any political party the way things are unfolding."
Trouble in paradise?
| TOPICS: Arlen Specter, Jim DeMint, John Cornyn, Olympia Snowe, Republicans, Senate
Josh
Matt
Eric
So is this a wake-up call to the GOP and will be heralded as such, or is this Snowe's threat to the GOP that she's considering becoming a Blue Dog Dem?
April 29, 2009 11:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
Republican establishment response. "We see a lot of things that look like words in her editorial but we can't make any sense of out them. It's like she's speaking in tongues, except that some of us can understand people who are speaking in tongues. The poor woman is just babbling nonsense. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that she's insane."
April 29, 2009 12:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
When will we hear from Michelle Bachmann on this?
April 29, 2009 2:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Join usssssssssss.
April 29, 2009 12:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Perfect!
April 29, 2009 2:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not so sure conservative ideas have been rejected. Conservative performance has been rejected, and liberal ideas get a chance as a consequence. That's all we get though, a chance: not acceptance of liberal ideas. Acceptance of liberal ideas will come only if the liberal record warrants it. Let's not get so busy enjoying the conservative self-immolation that we screw up.
Oh, OK, after being insulted repeatedly by these a-holes, we can enjoy it a bit.
April 29, 2009 12:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Is Snowe trying to assert some sort of 'common sense' into this debate? She's got a very safe seat here in Maine and as such can actually speak some truth to power. I dont' think she'll bolt the Republican party like Arlen and when push comes to shove, she'll stay within party lines. That said, boith she and Collins are in a unique position to safely criticize the rightward spiral of the mainstream Repubs without fear of repercussion.
Now, I'd like to see her say something about Rush Limbaugh...and then NOT apologize.
April 29, 2009 12:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is not that stupid old idea that things swing left- things swing right. Time and circumstance always move left, to more freedom and fairness. We were a country founded on slavery. Now we all agree to live free. We were a country founded by a patriarchy. Now we all agree that women are the equal of men. We are a country founded on property owners ruling everyone else and now we agree that "renters" are equal citizens as well. We are a country that banned inter-racial marriage and now we have an inter-racial president.
Time marches on and we are forming a "more perfect union" by constantly moving left, left, and left again.
Someday soon we will have universal health care, gay marriage, and better income equality.
Good for us.
April 29, 2009 12:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Socially, agreed. Economic systems? Not so much. If "left" and "right" are defined by the amount of government involvement in the management of the economy, then even if Obama replaced Summers with Krugman and they got everything they wanted from Congress, we'd still end with an economic system somewhere to the right of where it was under Nixon.
April 29, 2009 3:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Interesting. I would love to have Krugman instead of Summers. I do not think when you compromise common sense and facts that you get farther along because you have 'balanced' common sense with faith based trickle down. I think the issue of more or less government involvement is mute. Run-away banking is what you get when even moderates temper their best judgement to satisfy the rich. The bottom line (pun intended) in American politics and economics is how much advantage the rich and super rich are allowed to take of the middle and poor. As the Republican party has gotten it's way the results are (look it up!) that the pie has been shrinking for almost everyone except the super-rich for whom it has been a historical bonanza. The social and economic problems that society struggles with are made hugely more difficult is the super-rich are sucking up all the wealth creation America produces. Some of this wealth creation needs to be used for educating the next generation. Giving your billionaires tax cuts while letting your school systems crumble is economic suicide. I honestly think we as a country are waking up to this, and Obama is the perfect leader to get us away from the conservative dogma and on to solutions that work for everyone. We live in an ever more interconnected world and an ever more complex world, socially and economically. The correct answer to this evolution will always be reordering to greater fairness and will never be retrenchment to freedom for robber barons.
April 29, 2009 4:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Better than getting 60 votes (Call for Al Franken!)...this meme is priceless
April 29, 2009 12:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think folks are missing the boat on how Snowe is missing the boat. Focus on here close:
It is for this reason that we should heed the words of President Ronald Reagan, who urged, “We should emphasize the things that unite us and make these the only ‘litmus test’ of what constitutes a Republican: our belief in restraining government spending, pro-growth policies, tax reduction, sound national defense, and maximum individual liberty.” He continued, “As to the other issues that draw on the deep springs of morality and emotion, let us decide that we can disagree among ourselves as Republicans and tolerate the disagreement.”
I couldn’t agree more. We can’t continue to fold our philosophical tent into an umbrella under which only a select few are worthy to stand. Rather, we should view an expansion of diversity within the party as a triumph that will broaden our appeal. That is the political road map we must follow to victory.
That GOP Litmus Test of RR:
* restraining government spending
* pro-growth policies
* tax reduction
* sound national defense
* and maximum individual liberty
We all know that last one always was bullshit.
But the other four items *are* the *current* GOP Litmus Test. It's where Arlen bit the GOP farm - supporting the Stimulus. It's where Snowe has gone off the reservation, even as she had billions cut from the Stim.
The GOP are completely lost in the punch of that Litmus Test. It's their sole policy now: cut taxes, cut spending, pass laws to help "growth" (i.e. make the Rich even more Rich).
Snowe is so lost in the punch that she doesn't get that all these young Reagan Revolution nutters have taken the Litmus Test to an extreme.
I suspect Snowe thinks all the religous nonsense has become a Litmus Test. But that really hasn't been what's killed off Arlen. It's failing The Gipper's Test.
On one level it would be nice to see Snowe jump to give us more numbers. But one has to understand that she remains a true hardcore Reaganite fiscal conservative. And those folks, even ones in our own party like Nelson and Bayh, are going to be limiting our agenda. We don't really need to add Snowe to help do that from within. Far better to work towards taking her and Collins seats down the road as the GOP gets more marginal, and force her to move to the left in votes if she hopes to retain here seat.
John
April 29, 2009 12:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
I read the Snowe NYT op-ed piece this morning and find little to disagree on about the larger point it makes re the GOP not changing with the times, being too rigid and inflexible, etc. However, I disagree with the point that appears to be implicit in its title and sprinkled throughout the entire piece---the meme that somehow the Republican party left Arlen Specter and he didn't leave them. That's pure BS---Specter is an opportunist of the first magnitude. Does anyone really think that he would have a D after his name today if he wasn't facing a blowout primary loss to Toomey? OK, I didn't think so. Cornyn and the Repubs were right on this one---it is an act of political self-preservation, pure and simple. This was no act of soul-searching higher political principle.
I would be happy to see Arlen get beat by a credible challenger in a Dem primary, but unless there is a grassroots uprising, the powerbrokers are set to clear the field for him. That's a pity---we shouldn't have to put up with less than progressive Dems in states like PA and CT. I'm willing to be pragmatic and bite the bullet on people like Ben Nelson or to a lesser extent Evan Bayh (and yes, as someone pointed out in another thread, they are total camera whores), if the alternative is a Republican like Mike Johanns. At least Nelson will vote correctly 50+% of the time, while Johanns will never break out of single digits. We shouldn't have to settle for that kind of less than stellar average out of states like PA and CT.
April 29, 2009 1:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
These things are not mutually exclusive -- Specter is an opportunist of the first magnitude and the GOP left him. There's no question he did this primarily because he wants to be re-elected (he said as much himself), but the reason he's in that position is because the GOP's march to conservative purity drove out huge numbers of moderate Republican voters who are his base of support. His switch is pure self-interest, but following the voters to a different party isn't necessarily a result of self-interest.
That said, I hope he gets a strong primary challenge. If so, at best he'll lose and we'll get a better Democrat, and at worst he'll understand that he has to pay attention to the Democratic base, not just the ego that is getting powerfully stroked right now.
April 29, 2009 2:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Why isn't the word CORPORATE mentioned every single time the word REPUBLICAN is mentioned?
The republicans are only tangentially racist. They are only tangentially concerned about economic conservatism. Social conservatism is a cloak. What they really are, the handmaidens of Corporate Power. The reason their tent cannot grow, is it is already full of fake, astroturf groups that try to make their members look like something more than the White Power Oligarchs.
They are not against unions because of racism or conservatism. They are against unions because COrporations are against unions. Why do you think DeMint is trying to bring up Unions and Forced Unions and Friendly South....that is the smallest part of the Specter story yet it is the only thing a ProCorporatist can think of to utter on the topic.
I am continually stymied by the fact that Republicanism, and most conservatism, never appears TIED TO THE HIP of Corporatism even in our liberal media circles. The two, Republicanism and Corporatism, should never be mentioned without the other. We should never be asking what motivates the Republicans or why they seem so stupid.....they are not humans in anything but the most simple form....they are Corporate Beings. They do not answer to human misery, human want, human concerns. They answer to their Inhuman Corporate Masters. Corporations are NOT people. They continually grow, consume, devour, destroy, cannibalize, and live nearly forever. Don't expect Republicans to make sense, or do the right thing, or behave in a way that comports with their human "constituents" or basic human common sense.
Recongnize that Republicans are fleshy tools of Inhuman COrporations, and then their policies and stances and behavior suddenly become all too understandable. And please, don't read this and nod your head and then go back to mentioning Corps or Repubs alone in the same sentence. They are symbiotic.
April 29, 2009 1:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
I absolutely 100% agree.
I am always puzzled how and why our legal system has granted corporations the same 'rights' as human citizens. Free speech does not equal unlimited money dumped into politics to get laws passed favoring your business but it interpreted that way by the law. Why are corporation treated like human citizens to the disadvantage of real human citizens.
And this notion of being "too big to fail" Really? That is something of a constitutional question isn't it?
April 29, 2009 4:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
The best thing I can say about the Repiblicans is what Charles Barkely once said, and to quote..." I was a republican once, until they all lost their minds."
April 29, 2009 2:24 PM | Reply | Permalink