{"id":13694,"date":"2008-11-19T11:48:37","date_gmt":"2008-11-19T17:48:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/?p=13694"},"modified":"2008-11-19T11:48:37","modified_gmt":"2008-11-19T17:48:37","slug":"no-room-for-rinos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/?p=13694","title":{"rendered":"“No Room for RINOs”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brendan Miniter<\/a>:<\/p>\n

South Carolina’s Mark Sanford is one of three GOP governors now being widely mentioned as potential saviors of the Republican Party between now and 2012. All are conspicuous for calling on their own party to live up to its principles. Most notably, none have advocated the GOP move to the left.<\/p>\n

Mr. Sanford is a two-term governor known for vetoing spending bills, pushing market-oriented policy reforms (such as moving his state’s Medicaid system to a private account-based model) and criticizing the lapses of the national GOP. “Some on the left will say our electoral losses are a repudiation of our principles of lower taxes, smaller government and individual liberty,” he wrote on CNN.com after this month’s elections. “But Tuesday was not in fact a rejection of those principles — it was a rejection of Republicans’ failure to live up to those principles.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the same op-ed he took a swing at Alaska Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, identifying him as someone who “personifies what went wrong in the election. . . He was a proud champion of pork barrel spending and bridges to nowhere and stayed so long that he developed a blind eye to ethical lapses that would be readily seen by scout leaders and soccer moms alike.”<\/p>\n

Two other leading lights for a troubled GOP are Govs. Sarah Palin of Alaska and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. Before she became John McCain’s running mate, Mrs. Palin was best known for challenging her own state GOP to cure its spendthrift, corrupt ways. She unseated a sitting mayor in her first bid for office and became a giant killer by knocking off the high-handed, free-spending Gov. Frank Murkowski in a Republican primary.<\/p>\n

Mr. Jindal is a boy wonder of the party. At 25, he was appointed to fix Louisiana’s failing Medicaid program, and succeeded. At 32, he lost a hard-fought campaign for governor but later landed a Congressional seat from which he criticized bureaucratic bungling in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Last year, after Katrina had destroyed Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s reputation, he won his second bid for the office by promising sweeping reform of Louisiana’s corrupt and inefficient government culture.<\/p>\n

That Republicans are coalescing around these three governors is also revealing for who is not included. Several years ago Christie Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey and EPA administrator, wrote a book called “It’s My Party Too.” She used that treatise to argue for the party to abandon its conservative roots. Even after two serious GOP drubbings at the polls, she has found no takers. Likewise, Lincoln Chaffee, the former Rhode Island Senator once labeled a “Republican in Name Only,” was still complaining last week to the Washington Post that “right-wing talk show hosts and the Ann Coulters and that ilk” never understood that the GOP needs people like him.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Maybe that’s because Republicans have looked closely at the election results. The country hasn’t so much moved left as it has abandoned a GOP that abandoned its own principles. In Ohio, Barack Obama actually won about 40,000 fewer votes than John Kerry did four years ago. Mr. Obama took Ohio only because John McCain pulled 350,000 fewer votes than George W. Bush did in 2004. Republicans and Republican-leaning voters stayed home.<\/strong><\/p>\n

That’s not an endorsement of the ideas of the left. It’s a lack enthusiasm for a party that failed to deliver the smaller government it promised in Washington. At least the GOP, in settling on future leaders like Governors Jindal, Sanford and Palin, seems to understand that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Indeed.<\/p>\n

But care must be taken not to confuse conservative principles of governing<\/i> with issues of morality<\/em> often tied to conservatism — at least the way it has been branded by a left-leaning media and opportunistic Democrats.<\/p>\n

Whitman and people like Kathleen Parker <\/a>(and other country club Republicans whose allegiance seems to be tied more to appearances than to principles) seem always to trip over the idea that conservatism as a principle of governing and social conservatism as a way of living one’s life can — and as I’ve argued, should be, separated. Writes<\/a> Parker:<\/p>\n

[…] the GOP has surrendered its high ground to its lowest brows. In the process, the party has alienated its non-base constituents, including other people of faith (those who prefer a more private approach to worship), as well as secularists and conservative-leaning Democrats who otherwise might be tempted to cross the aisle.<\/p>\n

Here’s the deal, ‘pubbies: Howard Dean was right.<\/p>\n

It isn’t that culture doesn’t matter. It does. But preaching to the choir produces no converts. And shifting demographics suggest that the Republican Party — and conservatism with it — eventually will die out unless religion is returned to the privacy of one’s heart where it belongs.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Parker makes a legitimate point here — particularly when one looks at the electoral landscape pragmatically. One of the major influences on elections is the role of the media, and the fearmongering by media types and Democrats (often one in the same) that conservatives will treat government like a centralized church — turning a democratic republic into a theocracy — resonates with large swathes of voters. (Many of the people I know who voted for Obama cited fear of the coming theocracy should Sarah Palin ever gain control of the White House; evidently, the fact that Alaska has not devolved into a version of the medieval Church proved less persuasive than the fear mongering of the media, Democrats, and elitist Republicans like Parker — who could have seized on that clear evidence that there is no cause and effect necessary between personal religious beliefs and governing philosophy, but instead decided it would be more fun to win points in the liberal salons with her withering denunciations of Governor Palin and the theocons).<\/p>\n

And sadly, she still hasn’t learned from that mistake:<\/p>\n

Religious conservatives become defensive at any suggestion that they’ve had something to do with the GOP’s erosion. And, though the recent Democratic sweep can be attributed in large part to a referendum on Bush and the failing economy, three long-term trends identified by Emory University’s Alan Abramowitz have been devastating to the Republican Party: increasing racial diversity, declining marriage rates and changes in religious beliefs.<\/p>\n

Suffice it to say, the Republican Party is largely comprised of white, married Christians. Anyone watching the two conventions last summer can’t have missed the stark differences: One party was brimming with energy, youth and diversity; the other felt like an annual Depends sales meeting.<\/p>\n

With the exception of Miss Alaska, of course.<\/p>\n

Even Sarah Palin has blamed Bush policies for the GOP loss. She’s not entirely wrong, but she’s also part of the problem.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This, on one level, is true: so long as the media is permitted to depict Palin — whose governing style was legally conservative, federalist, and libertarian in many ways — as some sort of ignorant theocon unable to separate her personal religious beliefs from her understanding of what is Constitutional, then sure, Palin will be “part of the problem”. <\/p>\n

But what Parker seems to miss is that Palin is “part of the problem” largely because Parker gives cover to the Democrats and the liberal media to paint her — and those like her — as crazed religious fanatics, rather than as ordinary people of faith who happen to believe in the tenets of their religion<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Parker finds religion itself silly and distasteful, it seems to me — particularly when one has the gall to actually believe<\/i> in it as something more than a resume point for a run at national office. <\/p>\n

So rather than highlighting those instances where Sarah Palin’s belief in God — and her own personal sense of morality — was overridden, in terms of public policy, by fidelity to the law, and a truly conservative style of governing, Parker went instead for the easy target, scoring points with the “right” kinds of people by attacking something that proves increasingly easy to attack: faith.<\/p>\n

The Denver Post’s libertarian columnist David Harsanyi and others outlined Gov Palin’s governing philosophy and found it far more palatable than, say, the governing policy of the “Maverick” John McCain. (Recall, Palin vetoed a Republican effort to deny same sex couples certain privileges on the grounds that she thought the measure likely unconstitutional.)<\/p>\n

Yet, were you to ask the average voter about Palin, those not diehard conservatives or political junkies would know virtually nothing of her governing philosophy — but plenty about her speaking in tongues, or her burning books, or her stance on abortion, or her slaughtering of helpless wolves, or her pregnant daughter, or her career as a beauty pageant contestant.<\/p>\n

And people like Parker, putative conservatives, are largely to blame for allowing that caricature to take shape and breathe.<\/p>\n

I have frequently noted that I believe that social conservatives are a problem for the conservative coalition — but only inasmuch as they try to push a religious agenda on the country through mechanisms favored by progressives.<\/p>\n

Otherwise, they can actually prove helpful, should conservatives or classical liberals \/ libertarians ever commit to selling ideals rather than looking to find voting blocs to which they might effectively pander. Because the way one goes about trying for change<\/i> is an important selling point for classical liberalism; and the conservative coalition holds the high ground when it appeals to the Constitution, the rule of law, and a fidelity to the process set out by the founders.<\/p>\n

And it’s time people like Parker begin to highlight such differences between progressives — who like to operate through court fiat — and classical liberals \/ legal conservatives \/ libertarians, who are committed to working within the system for “change” that is more than merely a buzzword.<\/p>\n

(h\/t BJTex)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brendan Miniter: South Carolina’s Mark Sanford is one of three GOP governors now being widely mentioned as potential saviors of the Republican Party between now and 2012. All are conspicuous for calling on their own party to live up to its principles. Most notably, none have advocated the GOP move to the left. Mr. Sanford is a two-term governor known for vetoing spending bills, pushing market-oriented policy reforms (such as<\/p>\n

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