Your guilty conscience may force you to vote Democratic, but deep down inside you secretly long for a cold-hearted Republican to lower taxes, brutalize criminals, and rule you like a king. That's why I did this: to protect you from yourselves. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a city to run. - Sideshow Bob, as Mayor of Springfield in the Simpsons
Political systems are built through symbols, and no symbol has been more pernicious than the idea of a moderate Republican. Since 1964, the Republican Party has gradually turned itself into a neo-Confederate group of extremists attached to a political network of partisan pagan church groups. This transformation has happened explicitly, with a bevy of tax breaks directed at white churches, or implicitly, such as when Reagan opened his 1980 campaign at the site where three civil rights workers were murdered. Moderate Republicans - like Lowell Weicker, who did stand up to Nixon - gradually died out, replaced by leashed poodles who substituted affability and pork for moderation. Chris Shays, Nancy Johnson, and Rob Simmons are such figures.
Moderate Republicans are a dangerous symbol because they are a mirage that tricks liberal and moderate voters into thinking that the natural governing center is an affable extremist. Put a 'moderate' face on extremist policies or a party, and all of a sudden you have a country built on, say, corporate trade agreements that are reviled by the public at large. Or you have the war on drugs, which is nonsensical but considered part of the natural governing tapestry, or 2 million prisoners costing America hundreds of billions of dollars a year, or any number of crazy policies that are considered moderate but are in fact simply elitist in orientation.
David Gergen is the epitome of the adult in charge, the governing force without which adults will not trust you. Air America had 'moderate Republicans' running the show, and large Democratic donor networks have been stymied by donors who think that moderate Republicans exist and want to hire them to run a liberal movement (hint, it doesn't work). People like Tom Kean Sr. are a good example of the problem - he's loved and revered by liberals in New Jersey, and was put on the 9/11 Commission as a respected character, and then he goes out an engages in a dishonest smear campaign to peg Bill Clinton as responsible for 9/11 through an ABC propaganda piece, all to help his son get elected in New Jersey.
Killing the idea of the moderate Republican is critical if we are to convince the country that progressives can govern. As we've seen, right now journalists, opinion-leaders, donors, and politicians do not think that the hawkish pro-corporate bipartisan consensus will be disturbed if Democrats take over. Already we have Thomas Riehle trying to say that it is the netroots that want a targeted strategy versus James Carville-types who want to widen the playing field. We have stories in the New York Times about New Democrats ascendant and the progressives being beaten back in a more moderate party, and Harold Ford splashed on the cover of Newsweek as the face of a new and more conserative party. The LieberDems are licking their chops at a perceived ability for Joe to rule the Senate if he is reelected (prepare for a bad Q-Poll tomorrow, kids, polling director Doug Schwartz ain't a fan of Lamont). Certain House Democrats are panting at the ability to reach out to the Republicans as one of their first acts in office, to show a new spirit of openness to their GOP Beltway boyfriends who have been abusing them.
Fortunately, even as power players preen about how close they are to moderate Republicans in their style and attitude, the electoral fortunes of the 'adults' is waning. The most potent symbol of the moderate Republican up for office is Tom Kean Jr. He's the poster boy for faux moderate, extremely affable and likeable, and culturally liberal in that he likes Starbucks coffee and doesn't belong to a mega-church. He's facing Bob Menendez, a candidate who has always had overblown rumors of corruption surrounding him, which is actually standard for New Jersey politicians. If any matchup were to deliver a Senate seat to a moderate Republican, it would be this one.
And yet, New Jersey is a Democratic state, with leaners likely to go for the Democrat, especially in a year like this one, and a traditional pollster undersampling of Democrats. Remember in 2004, when Bush was totally almost going to capture New Jersey, until he got blown out? I would peg Tennessee as the opposite, with all the optimism for Harold Ford somewhat misplaced (I'd love to be proved wrong, of course). And with Menendez surging in the polls after having run a standard campaign, it's looking like it's becoming increasingly impossible for any Republicans to get the critical cross-over votes they need to stay competitive in blue states.
That Kean is losing is a big deal, because it shows voters have moved away from at least one of their illusions. Tom Kean Sr is a beloved figure in New Jersey politics, a statesman who parlayed a genteel affability into a Governorship in the 1980s and a storied place on the 9/11 Commission. He was considered for a time Presidential timber, and he's now the model of bipartisan honor and integrity, one of the last good Republicans. He's a dream, an "independent, honorable public servant, the kind that citizens admire and long for", as New Jersey's master of the obvious pundit David Rebovich puts it.
Of course, there's another thread to Kean Sr. He won his governor's race in 1981 by an extremely narrow margin using hired racists thugs to suppress minority turnout, his fiscal policies destroyed New Jersey's budget picture, his family shakes down corporate contributors, and he dishonestly pushed the film 'The Path to 9/11', a historical travesty. His legendary sheen has both threads running in parallel, the race-tinged corruption playing footsie with the bipartisan ethical righteousness. In 1971, Kean made his first important political move, becoming speaker of the Assembly even though he was a Republican in the minority party. The myth is that Kean was so respected on both sides of the aisle that he was a consensus pick; the reality is that he cut a deal with a white corrupt Hudson County politician, David Friedland, who couldn't ascend to the speakership because of a loan-sharking scandal and then threw his support to Kean to keep the a black Democrat from becoming the Speaker.
And it was off to the races for Kean Sr, moving quickly to the Governor's mansion and then to a storied place as an elder wiseman for the nation. His son, who is mostly a lightweight in the State Senate and similarly affable, simply can't get above the mid-forties in the polls. His avoidance of Iraq and his refusal to disavow Bush has hurt him badly among cross-over voters. The nasty core of faux moderate Republicans - affability over substance - is dying out. Iraq is too bloody and obviously wrong for Democrats to be fooled anymore.
So the 'moderate Republican' adult aesthetic - greatly weakened - may still be in charge of DC on November 8th in the form of Beltway journalists, politicians, and lobbyists, but the people are gradually voting it out of power.
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