Election 2006: Some in GOP still don't get it

Our view: In Arizona and nationwide, voters rejected rigid ideologues in favor of those who promised moderation, dialogue.

The picture that emerged from last month's elections, at both the state and the federal level, showed a majority of voters weary of hard-line, intransigent ideologues on the far right.

We know that, because voters turned both houses of Congress over to the Democrats and for the first time in many years gave Democrats 27 of the 60 seats seats in the Arizona House of Representatives.

They also re-elected Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano, giving her a 27 percentage point victory over her ultra-conservative challenger, Republican Len Munsil.

And so there is some irony, to put it kindly, in the comments from some Republicans who believe the party suffered because its candidates were not conservative enough. That line of thinking suggests that what voters really wanted were tougher, more rigid conservatives. If that were true, then candidates like Republican Randy Graf, an aggressive conservative who was running for Congress in District 8, should have trounced his Democratic opponent, Gabrielle Giffords. But the opposite happened. Voters told Graf to take a hike and sent Giffords to Washington.

It is remarkable, then, to hear Republicans like Bill Montgomery, who did so poorly in his race against Attorney General Terry Goddard, declare: "The Republican Party took a hit because we strayed from the principles that make our party so strong and that serve to unify our membership, which consists predominantly of fiscal and social conservatives."

This is the same as saying Republican conservatives should stick to the principles that made them unpopular and that voters, for the most part, rejected.

Montgomery was quoted by reporter Daniel Scarpinato in a Star story last Wednesday. We are more inclined to agree with Steve Huffman, a Republican moderate who ran a primary against Graf and lost.

"I think the most important conversation we have to have right now is: 'Are we where the voters are?' " Huffman said.

It's an important, practical question that suggests that candidates should be responsive to voters' concerns. It makes perfect sense, and if other Republicans were to accept reality they would see that there was nothing mysterious about the election results. Voters rejected the fringes and moved toward the political center. The Republicans in District 8 who rejected Huffman didn't get it.

Many of them would undoubtedly agree with Montgomery, a political novice, who told Scarpinato, "I've always had a problem with the term 'moderate.' If you always take the middle ground, I don't see how that's a virtue. That's not leadership."

On the contrary, we would say that it is both a sign of leadership and a necessary asset to realize the wisdom in compromising on 10 or 20 percent of the issues in order to achieve success on 80 percent of the others.

Compromise is not a dirty word, nor is it fatal to try to understand another viewpoint in the hope of negotiating an issue that gives both sides some of what they're seeking. A case can be made that compromise is a sign of wisdom and maturity.

The point that hard-liners like Montgomery miss is that public service does not require rigid adherence to a personal ideological agenda. It requires an ability to remain flexible enough to respond to the people who elected you as their representative, not their emperor.

Failure to accept the fundamental message of the last election will eventually dilute Republican power at the state level as sure as it has at the national level. Voters want a change, not a restatement of the same old manifesto.

Reality?

Conservative values candidates lost everywhere, their average ACU rating in the mid 80's.

Neither party's base voted differently than in the previous election.

The center swung to the left and defeated a slew of social conservative candidates.

To claim that they voted for liberals because they wanted more Conservative candidates is absurd, yet many here are making just that claim.

Yet, you are here trying to convince me that what happened came about as a result of those people not being conservative enough.

I don't think that you have a good grip on reality.

The road back to power for the GOP goes through a big tent, not a not an ever-narrowing ideological porthole.

Granted, you may not be taking that trip, but that's fine too.

Luis, I've decided to be your personal myth debunker. You should feel honored, not many folks have their own myth debunker. To repeat, the country is center right on social issues, the country is center left on economic issues. The center left economic folks won the day along with the stink of corruption and a dislike for doing what it takes to win in Iraq. It's a democratic republic so I can live with that. Evidently you can't.

Let's hear from Michael Barone:

"As for protectionism, well, yes, that was a position long emphasized by Sherrod Brown, who won big in the Ohio Senate race, and a position taken to one extent or another by most Democratic candidates. Almost all incumbent House Democrats voted against a free-trade measure as innocuous as the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Protectionism has become a partisan issue, with virtually all Democrats for and most Republicans against. So you can score a Democratic victory, like this year's, as a victory for protectionism. It will certainly have consequences. Trade promotion authority lapses on June 30 next year, and the chances that the Democratic Congress will renew it are close to zero. The Doha round of world trade talks is currently stalled and unlikely to be renewed in time for an agreement to be sent to Congress. In any case, the fact that the Agriculture committees will be chaired by Tom Harkin from corn-growing Iowa and Collin Peterson from the wheat-growing Minnesota Seventh District means that the 2007 farm bill will not meet the standards of any Doha agreement that could conceivably be reached. The lapsing of trade promotion authority will doom the regional and two-country trade agreements that special trade representatives Robert Zoellick, Rob Portman, and Susan Schwab have been negotiating. We won't be moving toward more protectionism, probably. But we're going to miss many chances to advance free trade.

It's interesting that a party so many of whose members pride themselves on their sophistication and mental superiority is taking a strong stand against the one thing that has always been taught in Economics 1, whether the instructors are Keynesians or Friedmanites–that free trade is better for everyone. Chalk that up to the AFL-CIO, whose massive turnout efforts achieved much success: Twenty-four percent of those surveyed in the exit poll said they were union members or that there was a union member in their households. That's a pretty big chunk of the electorate, considering that only 8 percent of private-sector workers and slightly under a majority of public-sector workers are union members."

A move to the left economically Luis. That is the lesson of 2006 aside from the fact that corrupt republicans are promptly punished for their misdeeds which is appropriate. Democrats not so promptly but that is another story.

I don't need a myth debunker, so you can stand down.

A political party is a coalition, inside that coalition there are many opinions.

As you examine those opinions within the mass that is the political party, you find that the bulk of the party is found near the center of the political opinion scope, the further you move from that center, the thinner the crowd.

Now, rather than being my personal myth debunker, perhaps you should have spent time figuring out that I am speaking from field experience.

Sometime back, I started taking a pounding in this forum when I suggested that the religious right would eventually hurt this coalition. The religious right, "social conservatives", have an agenda that while at the surface seems to be right in tune with the GOP, it flies at the face of what a traditional conservative would call conservatism by demanding more and more government interjection in the lives of citizens. Like it or not, that's how the vast majority of Americans perceived the Schiavo case to name one issue...perhaps not the majority of the people you come into contact with, but the rest of the nation did. I posted numbers that illustrated this, and in spite of the fact that you dismiss numbers that do not support your contentions (while amazingly posting numbers and opinions that you then expect others to simply believe at face value), those numbers were real.

I personally conceded the Florida Senate race to Nelson when Kathrine Harris held her "Reclaiming America for Christ" campaign rally in Broward County, home to the nation's fifth largest Jewish community.

The Independent voter in America IS center-right, but when a Party is perceived to move too far to one extreme, the voters swing away from it. The DNC knew this, and decided to campaign to the center and the indies went right to them.

Now, the GOP needs to swing back to the center to recapture the seats lost in this last election, and they will NOT do so by swinging further right as so many argue, and they CAN'T do it without the indies.

The religious right may disagree, but without the GOP in power, they don't stand a snowball's chance in hell to advance one iota of their agenda.

What am I going to be working on for the next few years within the Florida GOP?

I'll be working on building a big tent, and attracting people whose political ideas are in tune with mine, and with what I perceive to be the political opinions of the center of the voters. My question will be "what do you think the government should do about tort reform?", not "who do you sleep with?"

I'll be asking politicians "what do you think should be done about the growing threat of Islamic terrorism?", not "what do you believe in when it comes to evolution versus Creationism"?

I'll spend my energy advocating tax relief and not electrified fences.

Now, let ME be YOUR myth debunker...

" It's a democratic republic "

No it's not, and it's never been.

America is today, and has always been a Constitutional Republic; it is in fact the oldest Constitutional Republic in the world.

Maybe, instead of spending time worrying about what I can live with, you need to spend time figuring out where you live.

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