The phrase “Moderate Republican” just sounds silly. Republicans aren’t supposed to be moderate. If they were, they wouldn’t be Republicans at all. To Republicans, moderateness is not just an embarrassing admission of weakness, it’s a sign of petty treason. If any of your GOP friends start leaning towards the center, intervene immediately; they are a few short steps away from going soft on terrorism and becoming hardcore socialists.
But the truth is that moderate Republicans, however oxymoronic the term, do exist, and many are more embarrassed by the latter part of that moniker than the former. In the haze that is the political climate on the right, it is the cries of the Tea Partiers and the Mosque Conspiracists that ring out loudest. Lurking– or, perhaps more accurately, sulking– in the fog are a mass of moderate Republicans that have yet to find a voice loud enough or bold enough to be heard above the din of the far right.
Even before theTea Party, back in the innocent days of 2008 when Sarah Palin was still just a hockey mom who happened to be the Governor of Alaska, these moderate Republicans existed. Many of them– horror of horrors– voted for Obama when it became clear that the GOP couldn’t get its Grand Old house in order. The irony here, that Obama’s politics and tendencies belie his soothing bipartisan rhetoric, is not lost on the right center crowd. The ranks of the moderate Republicans are poised to swell as the very independents that unseated the GOP in the first place become disenchanted with the new business-as-usual politics of the Dems and prepare to jump ship. True to form, the Republican Party seems to be doing everything in its power to prevent this from happening.
Nate Silver, on his NYTimes.com blog, speculates that if the GOP keeps trotting out Tea Party candidates in New York, “moderate Republicans . . . might wonder whether there is any longer a place for them within the party. And if there isn’t a place for moderate Republicans in New York . . . one wonders if there is a place for them anywhere.” Failing to appeal to the center is one of the reasons McCain-Palin lost in ‘08. Failing to appeal to the center right poses an equally grave problem for Republican electoral hopes this November. For all the spirited critiques that Republicans have launched against the Dems in recent months—many of which have been valid, some of which have been ridiculous— Democratic strategists like David Plouffe seem optimistic that the far right will help the Democrats chances rather than hurt them.
The fact that the Tea Party has gained such notoriety– and indeed its own unique kind of political clout– is a testament to a few defining characteristics of the position of the GOP. The one that Tea Partiers will point to, and the one that is truly the driving force behind the movement, is dissatisfaction with the new administration and the Democrat packed congress. The second factor — one that probably isn’t the theme of a sign at a Tea Party rally — is fear within the GOP itself. After the devastating losses at the polls in 2008 and 2009, and really after eight devastating years before that, Republican leadership looked to cling to the only thing it had left: its “base.” In the rhetoric of Sarah Palin, this base consists of the real Americans.
Now, there is no doubt that Tea Partiers are real Americans. Expressing discontent with government is — as the name of the movement itself alludes to– nothing new. But the Republicans who are not holding picket signs are Americans too. Heck, so are the independents. So too, if you really want to get technical, are the Democrats. This is something that Republican leadership is going to have to realize if they want to capitalize on the Democratic blundering of the past year. Americans come in more than one type. And, like it or not, so do Republicans.
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