Republican candidate for New York District 23, Dede Scozzafava, recently pulled out
of the race. She had come under withering attacks from Conservative
Party candidate Doug Hoffman and his supporters, including Sarah Palin,
for not being "conservative enough" because of her pro-choice, pro-gay
marriage stance on social issues, ties to organized labor, and support
for the stimulus.
Scozzafava claims her record was misrepresented and that she simply could not raise enough money to counter the Hoffman campaign's considerable financial support from outside the state. She initially released her supporters to "transfer their support as they see fit" without explicitly endorsing Hoffman. While RNC Chairman Michael Steele is trying to spin this as a positive for Republicans, it appears to me - especially from her interview with Fox News - that Scozzafava thinks she was betrayed and unfairly maligned. That Scozzafava later endorsed her Democratic opponent, Bill Owens, over Hoffman seems to confirm this.
Now, I'll be the first to tell you that Scozzafava's positions, at first blush, don't seem all that different from a moderate Democrat's. I do have to ask, rhetorically, what's the problem with that? This leads to a larger question, though. What does it actually mean to be a Republican? Or a Democrat? Or a conservative? Or a liberal? Anyone who has read my blog for a while knows by now that I think the winner-take-all system we have that artificially imposes binary choices on us is absurd.
For example, I am very much pro-gay marriage and I think the Equal Protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment demands our country be held to a certain standard. Either the government must be willing to extend the same legal benefits to all partnerships of consenting adults (whether it calls them "marriages" or "civil unions") or it needs to get out of the business of marriage entirely. The Supreme Court has already held that "separate, but equal" doesn't meet muster.
I am also very much pro-Second Amendment. I am a gun owner myself. I believe they are tools. Like any tool, proper education and training in its use is the best safety insurance you can have. While reasonable restrictions on ownership and purchase are permissible, my rights as a law-abiding citizen should not be infringed. I don't mind that the government has a monopoly on nukes or that I'm not allowed to have heavy weaponry without special permits. I'm not going to live somewhere that tries to take away my Model 59 Smith and Wesson that I inherited from my dad, though.
When it comes to healthcare, I think our system is failing us. Costs are skyrocketing with no end in sight. Our employer-based system is an artifact of World War II-era wage controls. State and federal governments have colluded with corporations to erect widespread barriers to entry in the market and enact protectionist policies that block competition. That's why I have written about and supported proposals by the CATO Institute and Charles Krauthammer on market-based reforms to bend the cost curve down. The market is only truly free when consumers can make informed, free decisions.
Yet, the Scozzafava drop-out and the glee with which some self-described conservative bloggers harken this event as a sea change for a revitalization in their movement make me wonder what place there is in American politics for myself and others like me. My libertarian social views clearly disqualify me from that political sphere, as my lengthy e-mail debate with TexasSparkle last week made abundantly clear. My fiscally conservative views equally disqualify me from the far left wing of American politics, too.
Maybe it's long past time we discarded the two-party system, but I don't think that's really going to happen unless we change the way we vote. And I don't think that's going to happen any time soon because the Republican and Democratic Parties alike have the system stacked in their favor to exclude third parties as much as possible. If the far left and the far right continue to insist on ideological purity in their parties in their long-running feud with each other, where does that leave the rest of us?
Our country tends to work best when the excesses of either extreme are balanced against each other and the system is governed from the center. It took a Republican Congress and a Democratic President to enact welfare reform in the 1990s, as an example. Yet, it seems these days that the extremes of our political spectrum are more interested in insulting each other (and anyone else they perceive as a threat) than offering solutions. I don't want my President and his advisers skirmishing with Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and evading questions on whether MSNBC is just as biased (Note: They are.). That's time and effort foolishly wasted for nothing.
My father-in-law is a man I respect deeply, in no small part because he has the courage of his convictions. He is a life-long Republican and has been an active member of the Mens' Republican Club in his part of West Texas. Many of his visitors while he was in the ICU were fellow members. One of his best friends even joked that he would tell him that Obamacare was passed while he was asleep and that he got in "under the wire." We all laughed at that one.
My father-in-law told my wife once, though, that even he was disheartened with the direction his party was taking. The example he offered of why was this: Another long-time member who had worked tirelessly on their behalf was blocked from being a delegate to the state convention. Why? A core group of people decided he wasn't suitable because he didn't go to their church. He wasn't "conservative enough" because he didn't go to their church. And you can bet that they did everything in their power to discredit this candidate and ensure he didn't go.
How far are the ideological purists on both sides of the aisle willing to go? And at what cost? Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty seems to be concerned about that. He has said that in "places like Minnesota, the Northeast, the West Coast, the Mountain States, the Upper Midwest, the Great Lakes, we don't have a margin of error where we can afford to shrink the party. We want to be growing the party if we're going to win elections and also have the opportunity to govern and make a difference for the country. So this is about expanding market share, not contracting it."
At heart, I consider myself a "little L" libertarian who believes in the old admonition that the best government is the one that is least used. Perhaps that's why I'm more interested in what direction the Republicans take than I am the Democrats. I expect the Democrats to advocate more government. I've never seen myself as a Democrat and I doubt I ever will. I could get behind a Republican party, though, that truly embraces limited government and recognizes that also means staying out of our bedrooms, staying out of our doctors' offices, and keeping your church out of my house if I don't want it there. I'm not interested in a Republican Party that is nothing more than the Democrats, just on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Barry Goldwater once said that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." While I tend to agree with that sentiment and often wonder where the hell the voice of the Goldwater Republicans went, I think that also requires a recognition that such liberty must be extended to all our fellow Americans, not just the ones that we agree with. If you don't like gay marriage, don't have one. If you don't like guns, don't buy one. Your distaste doesn't entitle you to deny other Americans their rights through force of law.
Show me a party that recognizes such and champions it as its core principle. Then, I might consider joining. Otherwise, you can count me out.
Scozzafava claims her record was misrepresented and that she simply could not raise enough money to counter the Hoffman campaign's considerable financial support from outside the state. She initially released her supporters to "transfer their support as they see fit" without explicitly endorsing Hoffman. While RNC Chairman Michael Steele is trying to spin this as a positive for Republicans, it appears to me - especially from her interview with Fox News - that Scozzafava thinks she was betrayed and unfairly maligned. That Scozzafava later endorsed her Democratic opponent, Bill Owens, over Hoffman seems to confirm this.
Now, I'll be the first to tell you that Scozzafava's positions, at first blush, don't seem all that different from a moderate Democrat's. I do have to ask, rhetorically, what's the problem with that? This leads to a larger question, though. What does it actually mean to be a Republican? Or a Democrat? Or a conservative? Or a liberal? Anyone who has read my blog for a while knows by now that I think the winner-take-all system we have that artificially imposes binary choices on us is absurd.
For example, I am very much pro-gay marriage and I think the Equal Protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment demands our country be held to a certain standard. Either the government must be willing to extend the same legal benefits to all partnerships of consenting adults (whether it calls them "marriages" or "civil unions") or it needs to get out of the business of marriage entirely. The Supreme Court has already held that "separate, but equal" doesn't meet muster.
I am also very much pro-Second Amendment. I am a gun owner myself. I believe they are tools. Like any tool, proper education and training in its use is the best safety insurance you can have. While reasonable restrictions on ownership and purchase are permissible, my rights as a law-abiding citizen should not be infringed. I don't mind that the government has a monopoly on nukes or that I'm not allowed to have heavy weaponry without special permits. I'm not going to live somewhere that tries to take away my Model 59 Smith and Wesson that I inherited from my dad, though.
When it comes to healthcare, I think our system is failing us. Costs are skyrocketing with no end in sight. Our employer-based system is an artifact of World War II-era wage controls. State and federal governments have colluded with corporations to erect widespread barriers to entry in the market and enact protectionist policies that block competition. That's why I have written about and supported proposals by the CATO Institute and Charles Krauthammer on market-based reforms to bend the cost curve down. The market is only truly free when consumers can make informed, free decisions.
Yet, the Scozzafava drop-out and the glee with which some self-described conservative bloggers harken this event as a sea change for a revitalization in their movement make me wonder what place there is in American politics for myself and others like me. My libertarian social views clearly disqualify me from that political sphere, as my lengthy e-mail debate with TexasSparkle last week made abundantly clear. My fiscally conservative views equally disqualify me from the far left wing of American politics, too.
Maybe it's long past time we discarded the two-party system, but I don't think that's really going to happen unless we change the way we vote. And I don't think that's going to happen any time soon because the Republican and Democratic Parties alike have the system stacked in their favor to exclude third parties as much as possible. If the far left and the far right continue to insist on ideological purity in their parties in their long-running feud with each other, where does that leave the rest of us?
Our country tends to work best when the excesses of either extreme are balanced against each other and the system is governed from the center. It took a Republican Congress and a Democratic President to enact welfare reform in the 1990s, as an example. Yet, it seems these days that the extremes of our political spectrum are more interested in insulting each other (and anyone else they perceive as a threat) than offering solutions. I don't want my President and his advisers skirmishing with Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and evading questions on whether MSNBC is just as biased (Note: They are.). That's time and effort foolishly wasted for nothing.
My father-in-law is a man I respect deeply, in no small part because he has the courage of his convictions. He is a life-long Republican and has been an active member of the Mens' Republican Club in his part of West Texas. Many of his visitors while he was in the ICU were fellow members. One of his best friends even joked that he would tell him that Obamacare was passed while he was asleep and that he got in "under the wire." We all laughed at that one.
My father-in-law told my wife once, though, that even he was disheartened with the direction his party was taking. The example he offered of why was this: Another long-time member who had worked tirelessly on their behalf was blocked from being a delegate to the state convention. Why? A core group of people decided he wasn't suitable because he didn't go to their church. He wasn't "conservative enough" because he didn't go to their church. And you can bet that they did everything in their power to discredit this candidate and ensure he didn't go.
How far are the ideological purists on both sides of the aisle willing to go? And at what cost? Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty seems to be concerned about that. He has said that in "places like Minnesota, the Northeast, the West Coast, the Mountain States, the Upper Midwest, the Great Lakes, we don't have a margin of error where we can afford to shrink the party. We want to be growing the party if we're going to win elections and also have the opportunity to govern and make a difference for the country. So this is about expanding market share, not contracting it."
At heart, I consider myself a "little L" libertarian who believes in the old admonition that the best government is the one that is least used. Perhaps that's why I'm more interested in what direction the Republicans take than I am the Democrats. I expect the Democrats to advocate more government. I've never seen myself as a Democrat and I doubt I ever will. I could get behind a Republican party, though, that truly embraces limited government and recognizes that also means staying out of our bedrooms, staying out of our doctors' offices, and keeping your church out of my house if I don't want it there. I'm not interested in a Republican Party that is nothing more than the Democrats, just on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Barry Goldwater once said that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." While I tend to agree with that sentiment and often wonder where the hell the voice of the Goldwater Republicans went, I think that also requires a recognition that such liberty must be extended to all our fellow Americans, not just the ones that we agree with. If you don't like gay marriage, don't have one. If you don't like guns, don't buy one. Your distaste doesn't entitle you to deny other Americans their rights through force of law.
Show me a party that recognizes such and champions it as its core principle. Then, I might consider joining. Otherwise, you can count me out.
If the GOP continues to make moderates and independents feel alienated and unwelcome, I think they're in for a big surprise.
Newt Gingrich likes to refer to himself, with all due humility, I'm sure, as a "conservative intellectual". On that note, I was taught it was polite to allow others to bestow recognition, rather than claim it for oneself, but I digress.
Newt the conservative intellectual is sometimes right, hard as that may be to believe. And in his recent identification of the right wing purists in his own party, he is dead on correct. He put the number at 20%, and I assume he was speaking of 20% of the entire electorate, which seems about right to me. And he noted, properly (as in.....duh) that 20% does not win elections for wingers. In Texas, for example, it takes at least 38% - the amount Rick Perry got last time around, meaning that a heck of a lot of moderate Republicans abandoned him.
The GOP should take note of this, but of course with people like Sarah Palin and Cathie Adams and Texas Sparkle as leaders, they'll miss the point.
JK, I know you like to toe a moderate and balanced line but in all honesty, the right wing "purists" far outnumber any of the left, if they even exist in legitimate numbers like the right. The right wingers are the ones who ex-communicate their own in a rabid internecine witch hunt that has already occurred with Scozzafava, Arlen Specter, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and even John McCain.
On the other hand, Democrats haven't done anything to Joe Lieberman for siding with McCain and turning against the Democrats in a number of issues (Iraq, Healthcare reform, etc.). Not only was he not ex-communicated from the Democratic party, he even kept his Senate Committee chairman's title ( don't remember which committee he was head of).
I think your efforts at fairness have "unfairly" lent too much credence to the right wingers. Just my humble far left opinion Justin, and I ain't kicking you out of the He-Men Winger Hater's Club. ;-)
The only grass in the teabaggers' "grassroots" is what must be in the cigarettes they be smoking......
msnbc leans left at night but the daytime leans right to center, fox has geraldo for a token and facilitates the tea party "movement". with murdoch's trump like empire building and ailes as the rove-type architect, we now have three parties, dems, republicans and the TEA PARTY whatever the hell it is supposed to be. probably a platform for ailes to run for president, just like he recently "leaked". 3rd national party almost ready to be unveiled, the tea party has evolved into a bunch of zealots, hate-filled mindless zombies who before losing their last brain cell to the virus truly believed what their passions were rising for was grass roots based and righteous. beck and rush and palin are only the paid schills who use their growing influence to turn a buck while recruiting like vampires, you have to "invite them in" after they worm their way into making you feel they understand you, and you need what they offer. and like the old hair club for men ads, their not only a paid "spokesman" but also a "member". but say that in reverse: they are members who became the paid spokespeople. john mccain was their first big kill, and their agenda has been set to cannibalize the republican party as an even bigger trophy. along the way their ambition is to fuel the ideology for more profit and political capital. we've seen them gobble up the libertarian and true independent identities, in the ultimate case of identity fraud. now they engage in old fashioned, tried but true salem witch hunts, trials and executions, sniffing out and seeking to expose and destroy any republicans who dare cross their narrow mandates of true "conservatism". but they are not purely driven by their lust for greed, power and recognition. they are the balloon boys of politics, they are driven by the need for constant attention to drive their narcissistic mental imbalances. palin took to the national stage as just another "hockey mom" without anyone challenging her on the fact that hockey is a game strictly for the affluent, winking away the fact that one soccer or basketball can be kicked or tossed around a public park by dozens of kids at a time, for no money if kids are poor. while ice time runs around $600 & up per hour. my younger played jr. aero's elite travel from age 5 to age 12, it cost over $10,000 per yr for league and tournament "club" dues, in addition to state, national and international travel. equipment was outgrown yearly and costs hundreds a yr, the best could costs thousands. the "hockey mom wink" was the first inkling i had of her dangerous appeal to the wealthy, suburban mass who also happen to be in the walmart cult yet could so easily dismiss her wild shopping sprees and designer clothes. i have nothing against upper middle class, in fact enjoyed the status for years myself before the older child's illness spiraled me down into oblivion financially and emotionally. but i've lived two lives and have a unique peek behind the curtain. my family of pro right catholic conservatives are now beck and rush cult devotees, using words like RINO they'd never know in a million years before the mind control started. they talk about "govt takeovers" and "obamacare" as well, without the ability to explain what boehner care consist of, also laughing along at jokes fresh from that mornings fwd fwd fwd emails. tea party people have a script of canned talking points, no ability to discuss or debate issues on their feet. if i try (like brad friedman) to query them about what THEY stand for they regurgitate what beck or rush said the day before, like the fox news desk or republican lawmakers do when they huddle to give their "response" to democrats. i respect the diversity of the dem party, with so many established caucus groups and a place for ANYONE under a "big tent". palin and beck collapsed the tent and hold up the eye of a needle for republican camels to enter. i've said all along, dismissing them as teabaggers, underestimating or joking them away was a mistake on our part. but a new opportunity has opened up, to widen our tent for conservatives who welcome diversity and will stand against the "with us or agin us" madness. we must not go further left, we should stay centered and clean up corruption in our own house, like you would a spare room for a guest. and i for one hope the first of many guests will soon arrive!
John Cole has a quick writeup on an ancillary note.
I think, too, we're seeing the early stages of this theme going on with respect to Blue Dog Democrats, with their party bona fides questioned.
"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Not many people understood what Goldwater meant by that in 1964. He may have been referring to the Sarah Palins of his time, the John Birch Society. To be sure, the Birchers were every bit as nuts as the GOP leadership of today. The current right wing leadership believes Obama represents tyranny and oppression, when it is they themselves who are the fanatics and the absolutists.
And it is all about ideology - not governing. Now for example, the current spin is that the Conservative candidate in NY, the one the wingers endorsed over the GOP candidate, is looking out for the interests of the district by preserving Fort Drum. Catch that? The conservative, anti-government, anti-tax candidate will be the one to preserve a federal installation in the district. Makes no goddamn sense whatsoever, but here we have the wingers actually promoting the idea, without realizing it is contrary to their own argument.
You know, it is really disturbing when anybody in the Republican Party is immediately branded as "RINO" if they *dare* to speak out against the proscribed lines.
Very disturbing. I despise that term: "RINO".