As recklessly conservative as the Washington GOP is, they do seem to want to rebuild a moderate wing. NRSC chairman, John Cornyn, has recruited moderates to run for office in Illinois, Delaware, Connecticut, Florida, California, and, perhaps, in New Hampshire. But the base of the party is rebelling. It’s actually a House special election in New York’s Upstate twenty-third district that is causing the most division at the moment. Bush speechwriter, David Frum, tries to explain (although he doesn’t seem to understand New York election law):
By all rights, the special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional District should be a Republican cakewalk. Stretching across the hunting and fishing towns along the Great Lakes and Canadian border, the district contains Fort Drum, base of the 10th Mountain division, and re-elected its Republican congressman in the disaster years of 2006 and 2008 by margins of 60-plus percent.
Yet polls show the Republican candidate in serious trouble. State Republican Party leaders prevented an open primary race and instead engineered the nomination of one of their own, moderate, pro-choice Assemblywoman Deirdre Scozzafava.
Angry conservatives in the 23rd rebelled, rallying to the third-party candidacy of local accountant Doug Hoffman. Hoffman and Scozzafava are splitting the Republican vote between them, allowing Democrat Bill Owen to emerge as the front-runner.
It’s my understanding that New York avoids paying for a primary in special elections by empowering the county party chairpeople to select the candidates. The New York GOP leaders didn’t select Scozzafava to avoid an open primary. There are no primaries in New York in these circumstances. But, regardless, the party leaders did pick a candidate who is pro-choice, friendly with labor, and that has a decent environmental record. Her positions are sufficiently moderate that Markos Moulitsas is rooting for her to win over the Blue Dog democrat in the race. Perhaps he is just making mischief but, tongue-in-cheek or not, the Republicans seem to have taken the bait. When Newt Gingrich, of all people, endorsed Scozzafava, he came under fierce criticism from the right. Now everyone from Dick Armey to Michele Bachmann are lining up to support the Conservative Party candidate in the race. The question is why?
I mean, this is not a Senate seat. It’s one House seat out of four hundred and thirty-five. The equivalent on the Democratic side would be if the blogosphere and liberal publications, liberal lawmakers, and MSNBC had all lined up to beat Travis Childers in the Mississippi special election of 2008. After all, Childers is no progressive and he disagrees with us on most social issues. But we know that we’re lucky to elect any Democrat at all in northern Mississippi. Electing Childers didn’t do any harm, and it made it one seat harder for the Republicans to retake the House.
When progressives go after wayward Democrats it’s usually because they are voting much more conservatively than their state or district (see Joe Lieberman). And even that is not ordinarily sufficient. A lot of Democrats fly below the radar and avoid the wrath of progressives because, while they may vote poorly, they don’t go on teevee and radio and badmouth the liberal wing of the party or the leadership.
While there are strategic reasons for running primaries (see Joe Sestak) to keep wobbly Democrats in line, the idea is not to elect a Republican in their stead. But the GOP base is actually making that mistake, and making it repeatedly. The Club for Growth has knocked several lawmakers out in primaries, only to see the Democrats take over the seats. There is definitely a ‘cut off your nose to spite your face’ tendency to the right’s strategy.
David Frum summarizes the problem. If the Republicans lose the New York special election and the New Jersey governor’s race, what lessons will they take from it?
But the risk is that the party will draw a very different conclusion. From the New York experience, Republicans will be tempted to draw the lesson: Always nominate the more conservative candidate. From New Jersey: We need to drive pro-environmental fiscal moderates out of our party and into the Democratic Party where they belong!
And if the Republicans pick up an Arkansas Senate seat and a dozen blue-dog Democratic House seats in 2010, you can see this “tea party” mentality taking strong hold of the GOP in the run-up to 2012.
But a political formula that encourages Republicans to write off the suburbs, the Northeast, and California is not a formula for a national majority. It’s a formula for a more coherent, better mobilized, but perpetually minority party.
I don’t know about the adjective ‘coherent’ in this context. ‘Consistent’ might be more accurate. There is very little that is coherent about the tea party mentality. In fact, if the base succeeds in purifying the GOP and purging itself of moderates, the rest of the country is going to vote for the Democrats from sheer terror of the alternative. There are a lot of shitty Democrats, many of whom I’d like to see replaced. But I don’t want this version of the GOP getting even a whiff of power any time soon, and I think more and more people are reaching the same conclusion.