WP, Meyerson: How the GOP Lost the North (aided by timid "moderates")

[DeepModem Mom]

How the GOP Lost the North
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, November 1, 2006; Page A21

....Most of the House seats that the Democrats are expected to take from Republicans are in the Northeast and industrial Midwest, heartland of the old Republican Party of Lincoln, McKinley and Eisenhower. Many of the Republicans holding these seats are a distinct minority in a party now dominated by Southerners who are more supportive of executive branch authoritarianism and yet also more government-phobic. And the Republican moderates, judging by their own comments, are boiling mad that the Democrats are going after them.

"There is no one who has voted more often with the Democrats than Linc Chafee," Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine, told the New York Times of her Rhode Island colleague, who is trailing Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse in the polls. "Yet that didn't stop them from going after him with everything they had."

And we all remember how moderate Republicans stopped the conservatives who control their party from going after moderate Democrats in previous elections, right? How they pleaded with Tom DeLay not to push through his mid-decade reapportionment of Texas, which led to the ousting of such veteran conservative Democrats as Rep. Charles Stenholm? How they deplored the campaign that Republican Saxby Chambliss waged against Georgia Democratic Sen. Max Cleland, who'd lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, for being soft on national security?

Indeed, it was precisely the Republicans' success at defeating the centrist and center-right Democrats in the South over the past two decades that has driven the GOP steadily rightward. And for all their protestations of moderation, the northern Republicans -- from Susan Collins to Lincoln Chafee to Rep. Chris Shays -- abetted that transformation. While some of them may have favored raising the minimum wage, all the Republican moderates in the House voted for rules that prohibited the Democrats from bringing a minimum-wage hike to the floor unless, as their Republican leaders dictated, it was linked to other provisions (such as a permanent repeal of the estate tax) that would doom it in the Senate. While they may have harbored doubts about the wisdom of the president's course in Iraq, their party conducted no oversight hearings....

***

Susan Collins may protest that she has a quarrel with the Democrats, but it's her own party that provoked this transformation. And in a larger sense, her quarrel is really with history.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/31/AR2006103101312.html?nav=most_emailed

[hatrack]

1. Two words for Sen. Collins . . .

Bite me.

[lazyriver]

3. You nailed it.

I hate the fact that my state keeps her in office. Olympia (tell 'em what they wanna hear)Snowe isn't any better.

[Dr.Phool]

2. I think she hears footsteps.

She's next on the list.

[Nite Owl]

4. They voted for Frist

as Majority leader though right? Well that says it all, they voted for the agenda of the right wing GOP. What don't they get, if Chafee had gone I even and caucused with the dems there would be no race there.

[Vogon_Glory]

5. GOP: A National Party No More. Coming Soon

When Republican moderates either lose their party's nominations at the hands of "RINO"-hunters like the so-called Club for Growth or at the general elections by voters who don't feel that they can trust them any more, we're likely to see a dearth of elected GOPsters in the Midwest.

What was it that Georgia party turncoat said? Something about the...Party being a national party no more.

It looks like that will become true for the Republicans.

Serves them right.

:evilgrin:

[karynnj]

6. I LOVE this - this is the alternative truth to the Democrats losing the South

The question is are our values, cultures and choices that different? Can we get the Non-coastal west to see that they are more like us than like the South.

Having written the last sentence, why do I feel that it and this article are divisive - just as the Democrats could be winning in the South in areas they were previously not cometitive?