The Moderate Republican

"What are we Doing tonight Brain?" "The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Take over the GOP!"

Warner Brothers references aside, I read an interesting story in the New Republic about how former Deaniacs are trying to remake the Democratic party into a liberal party by working from the inside. Howard Dean turned the ashes of his failed presidential bid into an organization called Democracy for America which basically works in the same way that the Christian Coalition did for the GOP. Here is the money quote:

"On the surface, this might seem like nothing more than a short-term strategic calculation based on a realization that liberals somehow failed to grasp last time around: Their differences with the Republicans overwhelm their differences with centrist Democrats. But the shift is more fundamental than that: Liberals have put aside their ambivalence toward the party and decided to work for their causes from within. In fact, they're borrowing a strategy from one of their arch-ideological enemies: the Christian Right, which succeeded in changing the direction of the GOP by inserting its members into the party structure. During his speech at Take Back America, Dean explicitly invokes Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition, as he talks about the work of Democracy for America, the political action committee he created out of the remnants of Dean for America, and the need to run candidates in elections across the country, no matter how seemingly insignificant the office or how politically hostile the territory. "The way Republicans succeeded is that somebody ran for the school board, somebody ran for the city council, all the way up--and we didn't do that," Dean says. "We cannot be a national party until we take our campaign to Utah, Mississippi, and Texas." Already, Democracy for America has endorsed about 60 candidates for elected office around the country, from Eddgra Fallin, running for a place on the Huntsville, Alabama, school board, to William O'Neill, running for a seat on the Ohio state Supreme Court.

Every so often I get a message from somebody who says that moderates should just leave the Republican party and form a new party of their own that is more centrist. As tempting as that is (I've endorsed that idea from time to time) it really is not a winning strategy for a few reasons. First, third parties have a history of being marginal at best in America. Only a few times has a third party made big time and that was by displacing a major party (the Republican party vanquished the Whigs back in the 1850s.). Second, centrist parties don't seem to have a sucessful record even though one would think they would. The Reform Party had a shot, but party infighting and Pat Buchanan's take over weakened the party; and in Minnesota, the centrist Independence Party has not been able to capitalize on former Governor Jesse Ventura's term in office. I believe the best strategy is to change a major party from within. If Jonathan Cohn is correct, liberals in the Democratic Party are learning toput aside their ambivalence towards their party and change it from the inside. It's no secret that moderate Republicans also have some ambivalence about their party (I know I do). However, are we willing to set that aside and work from the inside to change the party for the better?

What I think moderates in the GOP must do is create organizations that help moderates run for office-any office-even dogcatcher. That's how the far right was able to takeover the GOP.

I believe that if we want to marginalize the power of the religious right, we are going to have to get our hands dirty and start organizing. Any idea that moderates can form their own party is a pipe dream. Same goes for moderates leaving and hoping the far right will wither and die. That won't happen either. The far right is savvy enough to give a moderate sounding message in elections and then govern from the far right. The only way to beat the far right is for moderate Republicans to get involved in politics again. We won't change the party overnight. The far right took decades to change the party into their image and we will need to be patient and keep our eyes on the goal. To paraphrase the late Senator Paul Wellstone, we need to organize, we need to organize, we need to organize and then we will win.