This should be a Hallelujah year for the Republican Party. It has history on its side — the almost unbroken record of mid-term Congressional losses by the party in the White House — and a sour economy to boot. The authoritative National Journal reports a rising tide of belief that the GOP will not merely gain seats in the House this fall but take control of the place and also capture five, maybe six, more Senate seats. The champagne should already be on ice.
And yet all is not serene in the Grand Old Party.
Serious questions are being raised by prominent Republicans about where in heaven’s name the party is headed. Mostly, this involves just how far it will lurch to the right under pressure from Tea Party types, the rising power of the party’s southern wing, and the fear-mongering by right-wing radio and cable television zealots.
As South Carolina’s GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham put it last week, even Ronald Reagan would have a hard time getting elected in today’s Republican Party.
Graham’s complaint is not a new one. The first such warning was sounded a year ago in an interview Ohio Republican Sen. George Voinovich gave the Columbus Dispatch. Lamenting the drift of the GOP into the fever swamps of right-wing paranoia, Voinovich said "it’s the southerners. We’ve got too many Jim DeMints and Tom Coburns," singling out fellow senators from South Carolina and Oklahoma.
Voinovich might well be the moderate model for electability and durability in a large, important swing state — county and state legislator, mayor of Cleveland, lieutenant governor and two-term governor of Ohio and two-term U.S. Senator. Like more than a few other moderate Republicans, however, he’s retiring after this year.
There’s more. Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah, denied nomination for another term by a Tea Party-dominated convention, complained that he found "plenty of slogans on the Republican side but not very many ideas." Rep. Bob Inglis, a South Carolina Republican and another primary election Tea Party victim, singled out Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck for spreading "demagoguery."
"I think what we’re doing," Inglis told the Associated Press, "is dividing the country into partisan camps that look a lot like Shi’a and Sunni," referring to Iraq’s sectarian violence. "It’s very difficult to come together to find solutions."
In Nevada, Sharron Angle, the GOP Senate nominee, has among other things suggested that if the Democrat-run Congress doesn’t change its ways, Americans many "look toward Second Amendment remedies." She has, as Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson put it, "identified the United States Congress with tyranny and contemplated the recourse to political violence. This is disqualifying for public office."
Gerson’s no hand-wringing liberal. He’s a former Heritage Foundation fellow and speech writer in the last Bush White House. His critique of the extremist drift in the GOP is both telling and comprehensive. For example, he even takes on the party’s libertarian camp followers and their less-government, holier-then-thou hypocrisy.
"In America," Gerson writes, "the ideology of libertarianism is itself a scandal. It involves not only a retreat from Obamaism but a retreat from the most basic social commitments to the weak, the elderly and the disadvantaged, along with a withdrawal from American global commitments."
Say this for Gerson: he really knows how to hurt guys.
His most severe criticism is reserved for what he calls "responsible Republicans" who remain silent in the face of such radicalism.
A Republican victory in November that put extremists in power, Gerson writes, "could create durable, destructive perceptions of the Republican Party that would take decades to change. A party that is intimidated and silent in the face of its extremes is eventually defined by them."
Gerson’s fear that the GOP’s about to blow a great opportunity may itself be a bit extreme. But as Fats Waller, a sometimes philosopher, put it about things like this, "one never knows, do one?"
