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Arlen Specter didn't jump ship. He was forced to walk the plank.
On Tax Day, in a move timed to coincide with the nationwide tea-bag protests, outgoing Club for Growth president Pat Toomey announced that he would mount a primary challenge to Specter, a Senate veteran from Pennsylvania best known for securing Clarence Thomas' confirmation to the Supreme Court. His goal wasn't to take Specter's seat for himself; according to top GOP observers, the far-right Toomey had no real chance of winning in a state that saw 200,000 Republicans register as Democrats in the last election. The true objective was to knock Specter — an old-school centrist whom Toomey's rabidly small-government Club had named its "Comrade of the Month" for his vote backing the president's stimulus plan — out of the Republican Party.
The plan worked — though not as expected. On April 29th, Specter sidestepped Toomey's challenge by defecting to the Democratic Party, a move that could give the president a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Explaining the breakup, Specter denounced the end of the "Reagan Big Tent" that had ushered him into office in 1980. Given the GOP's far-right radicalization, he said, he could no longer cater to the embittered dregs of the party he had served for decades: "I was unwilling to subject my 29-year record in the Senate to the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate." In other words, he told Republicans, it's not me — it's you.
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As Specter's forced march down the gangplank makes clear, the GOP is in the midst of a reactionary spasm — one that threatens to marginalize the party for a generation to come. Rather than acknowledging the party's failed policies and reaching out to new constituencies, the GOP's dominant faction is retrenching around the anti-government, free-market, fundamentalist strain of Republicanism last championed by Barry Goldwater — who steered the party to one of its most crushing defeats in 1964. The purists are led by a group of GOP veterans who tried to bring down Bill Clinton in 1994 — including Contract With America architect Newt Gingrich, former House majority leader Dick Armey and anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist. The veterans are allied with House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, a Gingrich protégé who has emerged as the youthful face of the Party of No, as well as with stimulus-rejecting Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina and right-wing radio heavy Rush Limbaugh, who enforces the new GOP orthodoxy from the most feared bully pulpit in America. Together, they seek not to expand the party but to purge it.
Indeed, the Republican jihad has reached such a fever pitch that, to these ideologues, excommunicating one of the party's most powerful senators and handing the president a potentially unstoppable majority actually marks a positive development for the GOP. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Sanford cheered Specter's departure, calling him "deadly for the Republican brand." Firing up his listeners, Limbaugh hailed the defection for "weeding out people who aren't really Republicans," adding that he only regretted Specter didn't take John McCain with him.
Moderates in the party were appalled by the loss of Specter — but seem powerless to stop the ideological cleansing. Sen. Olympia Snowe — the Senate's last moderate Republican, along with Susan Collins of Maine — rebuked the purists for betraying the Republican coalition. "I believe in the traditional tenets of the Republican Party: strong national defense, fiscal responsibility, individual opportunity," Snowe said. "I haven't abandoned those principles. The Republican Party has abandoned those principles." Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina went even further. "We are not losing blue states and shrinking as a party because we are not conservative enough," he said. "If we pursue a party that has no place for someone who agrees with me 70 percent of the time, that is based on an ideological purity test rather than a coalition test, then we are going to keep losing."
The purge comes as the Republicans find themselves in their deepest electoral hole since the 1960s. With the election of Barack Obama, the party suffered its worst presidential defeat in 44 years. Since 2006, the GOP has lost 51 seats in the House and another 15 in the Senate — and there's no sign that the Republicans have hit bottom yet.
Obama's victory was not simply a repudiation of failed conservative governance — it was a reflection of a fundamental electoral shift that threatens the GOP's long-term viability. White working-class voters are disappearing fast — their share of the electorate has plunged by 15 percentage points since Reagan left office. One in four voters are now racial minorities, and Hispanics, the fastest-growing bloc of new voters, broke for Obama two to one. Even more striking, nearly 70 percent of young voters from the millennial generation cast their ballots for Obama — and their ranks are swelling by 4.5 million every year.
"Our coalition is shrinking," McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt warned in a speech to Log Cabin Republicans in April, "and losing ground with segments of the population that are growing." In addition to the GOP's "alarming" inability to capture young voters, Schmidt said, the rise of Hispanic voters "could soon cost Republicans the entire Southwest. It's very hard to see how we put together 270 electoral votes without the Southwest."
A look at the national map reveals that the GOP risks becoming hemmed in to the northern Rocky Mountains. According to a recent Gallup analysis based on more than 350,000 poll results, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents enjoy a majority of five points or more in 35 states. Only five states tilt to the GOP: Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and Nebraska. This is an epic shift from 2002, when a majority of states leaned Republican. "You can't be noncompetitive in vast regions of the country and have any hope of governance," says Tom Davis, who led the GOP to victory in 2002 as head of the National Republican Congressional Committee.
According to recent CNN polls, Republicans are less popular than the governments of leftist Venezuela and communist China. Even legalizing marijuana has a bigger electoral constituency than the modern GOP. "The Republican Party has not coalesced around anyone, and it has not coalesced around any ideas," says Frank Luntz, a top Republican pollster and strategist. "And you've got the best communicator ever in modern politics as the leader of the Democratic Party. It is the perfect storm against the GOP."
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Against the seismic shifts in the electoral map, the GOP's move to purge its few remaining moderates strikes even the architects of the Reagan Revolution as insane. "The party's in dismal shape mainly because it doesn't know how much trouble it's in," says Bruce Bartlett, a top Reagan deputy who crafted the president's sweeping 1981 tax cuts. "They delude themselves that 'We'll come back in 2010, just like we did in 1994.' But the underlying fundamentals are vastly worse: Moderates have completely left the party. All you're left with is the hard core. And there's nobody in a position of authority in the party willing to say that some of the beliefs of the core are just crazy."
Indeed, the current Republican purge threatens to take the party even further to the right than George W. Bush did in 2000. The genius of Karl Rove was his ability to offset the dwindling ranks of Reagan Democrats with a brand of "compassionate conservatism" that drew soccer moms, seniors and Hispanics into the Republican tent. In the process, Rove broke with "small-government" tenets of hard-line conservatives. He delivered on tax cuts for the rich — but he also carved into historically Democratic turf by expanding public education and Medicare, paying for both with deficit spending.
It is against this legacy of GOP largesse that the Contract With America veterans — along with ideological allies like the Club for Growth — are now waging jihad. As Gingrich sees it, Republicans lost last year not because Bush's disastrous policies were too conservative, but because they weren't conservative enough. Freed from what he considers a "failed Republican leadership," Gingrich says, true conservatives can now fight what he has taken to calling the "Bush-Obama big-spending program."
"The choice for voters becomes either the hard left or the Reagan worldview," Gingrich tells Rolling Stone. "I think the Reagan worldview will win by a surprising margin."
While Gingrich and the GOP's party purgers cloak themselves in the mantle of Reagan, their project actually holds more in common with the legacy of Goldwater. "This romance with purity has a history to it," says Rick Perlstein, author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. "What's happening today to the Republican movement is a return to form."
In 1964, Goldwater won the GOP presidential nomination by rallying a hardcore base of small-government activists still furious over the New Deal. Despite suffering the worst defeat in modern Republican history — Goldwater garnered a mere 38 percent of the vote — hard-liners became convinced that the failed campaign purified the party, laying the groundwork for the Reagan Revolution. "It's a romance with defeat," says Perlstein. "It's not a position that a party that aims to govern a great nation can take. They'd rather be rigid than right."
But listen to those leading the current purge, and they will assure you that victory is just around the corner. Their frame of reference is not 1964, but the Gingrich revolution three decades later. "Obama has irritated and poked all of the moving parts of what caused 1994," says Norquist, president of far-right Americans for Tax Reform. Pointing to the success of the recent tea parties, Norquist insists that the GOP is on the verge of retaking Congress. "I'm optimistic we could take back the House," he says. "I'm planning on winning, and everything's in line to do that."
The key, Norquist says, is the formation of what he calls a "leave us alone" coalition — one that mirrors Goldwater's band of disaffected libertarians who oppose almost all government on principle. Norquist ticks off the coalition's component parts and their demands. "Taxpayers: Leave my money alone. Businessmen: Leave my business alone. Gun owners: Leave my guns alone. Parents: Leave my kids alone. Religious right: Leave my faith and my kids alone."
Gingrich is counting on this coalition to turn on Obama, whom he believes is engaged in a "maniacal effort to alienate virtually everybody in America." In a nod toward the rumors that he will run for president in 2012, Gingrich adds, "My only point is: If the Democrats want to alienate them, I'll be glad to gather them up."
More immediately, mobilizing a mob of leave-us-aloners has enabled Gingrich and other Contract With America veterans to reassert their power in the rudderless GOP. The driving forces behind the tea parties were American Solutions, a pressure group run by Gingrich, and FreedomWorks, an outfit directed by former House majority leader Dick Armey. Together, they provided logistics, talking points and "tool kits" to the protesters, even deploying organizers to take over lackluster parties. The effort turned out more than 300,000 furious right-wing protesters into the streets of 800 cities nationwide.
The protests, Armey says, should serve as a blunt warning to Republicans: "If I want to hold my office, I better make these people happy." But given the mix of crazies and dead-enders who showed up at the tea parties — secessionists, self-appointed border militia, Ron Paul "revolutionaries" and kooks who question Obama's citizenship — the protests succeeded only in showcasing the party's most politically ineffective fringe. "We're moving to a conservatism that's a form of cultural dissent," says David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who helped coin the phrase "Axis of Evil." "It's becoming a way for people to vent feelings of alienation and anger. It's not a way to organize people into a group that can become a majority, that can win an election and exercise political power in an effective way."
Even the issue supposedly at the heart of the tea parties — higher taxes for ordinary Americans — was itself a falsehood. In an interview with Armey, I ask how he could honestly crusade against Obama for raising taxes when the president has in fact lowered them massively. Armey's response was jaw-dropping.
Armey: Where was the massive tax cut?
RS: In the stimulus bill.
Armey: There was no tax cut in the Obama plan.
RS: I'm sorry?
Armey [To an aide]: Did I miss a tax cut in the Obama stimulus package?
Aide: There was a mild one. A very, very mild one.
Armey: Well, my guy tells me there were apparently some modest tax cuts in there. But my guess is that it was an income-redistributional tax cut.
RS: Correct me if I'm wrong, sir, but it was the largest tax cut in history — even bigger than Bush's.
Armey: I'd have to look at that. Maybe I've been unkind and unfair in having missed that.
"It's just partisan horseshit," says Bartlett, the former Reagan deputy. "There were no tea parties protesting the stuff that Bush did that increased the deficit. Nobody said a goddamn word then, because it was the Republicans who were doing it. When our side does it, it's OK. When the other side does exactly the same thing, it's socialism. The party needs a deep rethink of its basic political philosophy. But right now it's all pandering to the base and throwing red meat to crazy people. Whatever you think about the policies they're proposing, there's not the slightest possibility that it will ever put them back into power."
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On Capitol Hill, the man charged with enforcing the GOP hard line is House Minority Whip Eric Cantor. "He's a real small-government conservative," gushes Armey. Like his political mentors, Cantor is trying to capitalize on the backlash over the bank bailouts. Such faux populism is nothing new for Cantor. His most substantive achievement as a member of the House was preserving a loophole that taxes the massive profits of hedge-fund partners at only 15 percent, instead of the customary 35 percent — a boondoggle for billionaires that Cantor baldly tried to pass off as a victory for "bluejean-wearing Americans."
At the beginning of Obama's term, House Minority Leader John Boehner had tried to strike a collaborative tone with the new president. "Our job is not to be the Party of No," he said. "We need to be willing to put our solutions out there. And if we're not willing to put our better solution out there, then we ought to reconsider the position we're taking."
But in Cantor's worldview, the federal government isn't in the solutions business. "I don't think we came to Washington to fix everybody's problems," he has said. Consulting with Gingrich and Armey on a regular basis, Cantor has bypassed Boehner and returned the House to a far more hard-line approach. Whipping his caucus into line, he marshaled every Republican in the House to reject Obama's stimulus plan and budget. "Cantor is the whip for the Party of No," says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. "They're banking on the idea that Obama will fail. But if his term is crowned with success, they'll be in even deeper trouble than they were in 2008."
Judging from the early returns, the "just say no" strategy formulated by Cantor and Gingrich is failing miserably. Despite the bruising fight over the stimulus, 70 percent of Americans approve of Obama's handling of the economy, and 65 percent believe the GOP isn't doing enough to cooperate with him to get the American economy back on track. "If you take a look at the numbers," says Davis, the former NRCC chair, "Republicans aren't gaining anything."
That hasn't stopped the GOP's radicals from punishing anyone who dares to propose a more moderate direction. Consider the recent dust-up between Rush Limbaugh and Michael Steele, the new chairman of the Republican National Committee. Nothing seemed to indicate that real change was coming to the GOP more than the ascension of an African-American to chair the RNC. Steele vowed to reverse the party's descent into regionalism and electoral irrelevance. "We're going to bring this party to every corner, every boardroom, every neighborhood, every community," he pledged. The party, he insisted, needed to adopt a less hostile tone on immigration, leave gay marriage up to the states and reject Limbaugh's oft-quoted desire to see President Obama "fail."
"Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer," Steele said on CNN, attempting to put the radio host's comments into perspective. "Yes, it's incendiary. Yes, it's ugly." But worry not, he added: Michael Steele, not Limbaugh, is the "de facto leader of the Republican Party."
The retribution for Steele's heresy was swift. Taking to the air, Limbaugh eviscerated his own party's chairman, accusing the RNC leader of being "obsessed with seeing to it that President Obama succeeds." Facing the wrath of Rush's listeners, as well as a rebellion by party donors, Steele immediately caved in, apologizing for being "inarticulate" and professing his "enormous respect" for Limbaugh. "There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership," Steele groveled.
But the apology wasn't enough for the hard-liners. In an unprecedented move, the RNC's governing body gutted Steele's authority over the budget, and rumors have circulated that he could be subjected to a no-confidence vote. Says one Republican insider, "He'll be lucky to hold on to his job."
Steele is not the only Republican facing expulsion for the sin of moderation. In recent months, hard-liners have worked to cast out two of the party's most popular governors as heretics.
In the good old days — before Obama — many leading Republicans considered Arnold Schwarzenegger the future of the party. During the GOP primary debate at the Reagan Library, his mix of fiscal conservatism, social tolerance and climate-saving environmentalism sparked a lively discussion about whether the Constitution should be amended to allow the immigrant Schwarzenegger to run for president. But despite having loyally stumped for McCain, Schwarzenegger has now been written off by archconservatives. Says Norquist, "He's certainly not a model for Republican success. Or success of any kind."
Rumors recently circulated that Schwarzenegger has been contemplating a Specter-like switch of his own, debating the merits of abandoning the GOP with his advisers. "I think that the party needs to change," he tells Rolling Stone, commenting on the rumors for the first time. "But there's no discussion that I've ever had with anybody about leaving the party. So that doesn't exist, this conversation."
Nevertheless, since Obama took office, Schwarzenegger has worked closely with the White House on auto emissions, green energy and the stimulus package. He calls the president "a great visionary" and castigates fellow governors, like Mark Sanford of South Carolina, who tried to refuse stimulus funding for their states. "That's not really representing the people," Schwarzenegger says, calling on Republicans to stop hoping for Obama to fail and start working to make America succeed.
"This is not a political year," he says. "Next year is a political year where everybody looks for winning seats in the Senate and the House, all those kind of things. This year it's all about rebuilding America. If we're successful with that, that means that America's back! And we are booming. So, I mean, there is no downside."
The real risk, Schwarzenegger warns, is for Republicans who stake out a more extreme position. "They will be suffering the consequences," he says. "Because this is not going to be good for the country or good for the party. People shouldn't get stuck in ideological corners. We should all be able to meet in the middle — on health care, on high-speed rail, on greenhouse-gas reductions. That's where the action is."
Another GOP governor facing excommunication is Charlie Crist of Florida. By all reasonable standards, Crist is a right-of-center Republican who has established crossover appeal by taking a conservationist approach to global warming and the Everglades. But to GOP hard-liners, Crist is nothing but a warmed-over Democrat, a turncoat who appeared with Obama in support of the stimulus package. The governor was recently pilloried by GOP operatives — with obvious sexual innuendo — as "batting for the other team." Even Jeb Bush's son, George P., got into the act, giving Crist the hip-hop handle "D-Light."
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Many Republican strategists see such tactics as self-defeating. "You get guys like Crist who are tremendously popular, and they try to drum him out," says Davis, the former NRCC chair. For his part, Crist is weighing a run for the Senate — where, he tells Rolling Stone, he would have given the president a fourth Republican vote on the stimulus bill. The GOP, he adds, must come up with something to say other than No.
"Don't misunderstand me," he says. "Sometimes 'no' is the right answer. But you have to have a vision for the future. You have to talk about what it is you want to do rather than knocking the other guy all the time."
The one Republican governor who has been able to speak out against his party's reactionary impulses without facing the pitchforks has been Jon Huntsman Jr. "I'm a traditional Republican," says the popular two-term governor of Utah, who is said to be weighing a 2012 presidential run. "But our philosophy has got to be changed. We desperately need to expand our demographic appeal by offering hard-hitting, realistic, thoughtful proposals that address the issues that really matter to people, like health care, energy and the economy."
Huntsman, an heir to a multibillion-dollar chemical fortune, is a handsome, late-end boomer with Gen-X sensibilities. He speaks fluent Mandarin, has guested on keyboards at an REO Speedwagon concert and has a young man's love of motocross. Although his record as a conservative is largely unimpeachable, he's an unabashed critic of the current state of the GOP. "Our party has fallen flat," he says. "If you're gonna dismiss something, put an alternative on the table. Give us another solution."
Huntsman believes that Republicans can only survive by broadening their appeal. "I still believe in traditional marriage," he says, "but civil unions are something, for Republicans, worth seriously considering." The party must also reject the "nativist" rhetoric that has driven so many Hispanics away from the party, and embrace a "pathway to citizenship" for illegal workers. On the environment, Huntsman says, Republicans can't afford to take the Gingrich path by obstructing proposals to curb global warming. "We have to be intellectually honest," he says. "We can't just dismiss climate change as bunk."
Instead of demonizing Obama as a socialist, Huntsman favors a more substantive critique. "There are a lot of pieces to the foreign-policy puzzle that have been left out so far," he says. "Our most important relationship in the world is China. There's nothing going on there right now. And what about trade? I haven't heard a thing about our trade agenda — it's been a complete blackout."
But such comments underscore a deeper reality: In the end, the Republican Party may be damned no matter what direction it chooses. If it follows Limbaugh and Gingrich and demonizes Obama, it could permanently alienate millions of voters. If it embraces large parts of the president's agenda, as Schwarzenegger suggests, it could wind up with no credit for Obama's success. And if it tries to develop the kind of alternative, solutions-oriented message favored by Huntsman, it could wind up stuck with wonky, eye-glazing electoral duds, like China and trade.
There is an alternate tack, embodied by the once and likely future presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. The former governor and Baptist preacher from Arkansas is seeking to hold together the old Reagan coalition by quietly deepening the party's commitment to Christian social values while attracting moderates with a more upbeat brand of economic populism. Like Gingrich, Huckabee is seeking to run against both the Bush and Obama administrations. But instead of going after the size of government, he is focusing more on whose interests it serves. Both parties, he argues, have been "captured by a Wall-Street-to-Washington axis of power," one that is "oblivious" to the problems of everyday Americans. As a result, Huckabee vehemently dismisses the GOP hard-liners who want government to sit by and do nothing during the financial crisis.
"My contention is that they are really libertarian," he says. "The Dick Armeys of the world preach that folks like me are the heretics. But conservatism isn't anti-government. You just want it to be limited and local. The problem is not that the Republican message is no longer valid. It's that you have to have someone who actually presents it."
History is on Huckabee's side. Politics, like business, goes in cycles: After one party enjoys an extended run in power, the other inevitably surges back. "There are inexorable tides of history that come in and out, and there's almost no way you can fight them," says Huntsman. "They bring some parties in, and eventually they will take them out again." The candidates who manage to win office when their party is on the way out are not ideologues who insist on hewing to the past but pragmatists willing to adapt to the prevailing currents. Richard Nixon interrupted a progressive era by expanding Social Security, just as Bill Clinton split the two Bush eras by implementing welfare reform and other objectives of the Reagan Revolution.
The best strategy for Republicans may be to agree with Obama about the need for action on issues like health care and energy — and then win over those pissed by the actions Obama takes. "As you clean this stuff up, you start polarizing and making enemies," says Davis, the former NRCC chairman. "That's the coalition. The Republicans, if they're poised, can pick part of that up and make some gains back."
Unfortunately for the GOP, Davis says, the only cure for the party's romance with ideological purity is the agony of defeat. "What traditionally happens in these cases is that the party gets tired of losing," he says. "And when you get tired of losing, you make adjustments. It's not an easy fix. There will be blood all over the floor in some of these primaries along the route."
If Republicans don't adjust quickly, the losing may go on for years. With the GOP having lost so many state legislative seats in the last two elections, the Democrats will have the upper hand in drawing up new voting districts next year. "As bad as it looks now," says Luntz, the GOP strategist, "it could get a lot worse after redistricting. Democrats will be in the driver's seat for the first time since 1970 — and that will make it impossible for the Republicans to recapture the House until at least 2022."
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Mark McKinnon, the strategist who spearheaded George W. Bush's ad campaigns in 2000 and 2004, puts it even more bluntly. "Darwin's thinking holds true for political parties," he says. "Adapt or die. Or at least be in the minority indefinitely."
When I arrive at the governor's residence in Columbia, South Carolina — a lavishly appointed antebellum mansion spared by Sherman's army — Mark Sanford has just sat down with his family to a Sunday meatloaf supper. In recent weeks, the governor has emerged as his party's fastest-rising star, and he is widely touted as a conservative standard-bearer in 2012. A lanky man dressed in jeans and a blue gingham shirt, Sanford greets me with a grin and insists that I shake hands around the table with each of his four adolescent boys.
Sanford has elevated his national profile by threatening to reject $700 million in stimulus funds for schools and other essential services — even though his state suffers the nation's third-worst level of unemployment. Although he ended up accepting the money, Sanford is now threatening to veto the state budget unless South Carolina lawmakers offset the federal windfall this year by setting aside an equivalent amount in state funds to pay down debt. If he succeeds, as many as 4,700 state employees will lose their jobs.
The standoff has made Sanford a hero to the tea-party set, and earned him fulsome praise from Rush Limbaugh. He also receives high marks from the Contract With America vets, who recall the three terms he served in Congress as a member of the Gingrich revolution. "I didn't have to have very many conversations with Mark Sanford before I said, 'This guy really understands economics,'" Armey says. "He's devoted to individual liberty and small government. He's probably the brightest rising star among our governors."
The hard-line stance has also made Sanford a lightning rod for criticism. Even some in his own party accuse him of advancing his political career at the expense of his constituents. "I like Sanford, don't get me wrong," says Bartlett, the Reagan deputy. "But he's not standing up for any goddamn principle. He's thinking about running for president in 2012 and about what he can do to make himself attractive to the kind of people who make up the universe of Republican primary voters."
From his past rhetorical bombshells — Sanford has compared Obama's economic policies to those of Stalinist Russia — I expect the governor to be a firebrand. But as we sit under dark oil paintings in the mansion's library, where his butler serves chocolate cake, Sanford delivers his conservative, fiercely ideological critique with the mild manner of an economics geek. The stimulus standoff, he tells me, has given him unique leverage to force deep cuts to a state government that he views as bloated and inefficient. And he has no trouble with his rejectionist stance reinforcing the GOP's reputation as the Party of No. "The fact is that somebody has to start saying 'no,' because we're on an unsustainable course," he says. "'No' can be a badge of courage. As conservatives, it is frustrating to find yourselves constantly in the role of blocking, stopping, tackling, impeding, but that is a legitimate check on the natural progression of things — which is for government to grow and liberty to yield."
For Sanford, smaller government is everything. Although he's a conservative Christian fond of citing Scripture, even Sanford's opposition to gay marriage boils down to an argument against deficit spending. "I wouldn't approach gay marriage on a moral basis," he says. "I'd be driven to the issue based on its economic cost." In Sanford's novel, if bizarre, formulation, the government is already spending money it doesn't have to provide tax breaks to heterosexual couples. "If governments can't afford the current level of promises," he says, "tell me how we can substantially expand the pool of beneficiaries for a system that's already bankrupt?"
In the "tug of war" for the future of the party, Sanford insists the GOP must retreat to its small-government core — which means rejecting the past eight years of Republican rule. "We talked about being the party of less government and lower taxes," he says. "What got us in trouble was saying one thing and doing another." If that means driving moderates out of the party, so be it.
"I love heavy equipment," Sanford explains. "John Deere makes a great tractor. But when they get into trouble in the marketplace, they don't say, 'We've kind of lost our way. Let's take our engineering capacity and start to produce boats and airplanes, and by broadening our tent, we can make our way through the wilderness.' No, no. They go back to making a better tractor, and that's the way out of the wilderness. We have to go back to the basics. What will get us out of the wilderness will be acting on what we say we're about."
Sanford is, in the parlance of politics, a beautiful loser. Like Goldwater before him, he's a candidate of unwavering devotion to ultraconservative ideals, which makes him an electoral nonstarter. Even Sanford seems aware of the limited appeal of his "tough shit" message at a moment of grave economic distress. "There's not a particular appetite for austerity in austere times," he says. "But if that's what you believe, if that is where you're coming from, you need to let it out and you need to make the case for why, in fact, that approach is better than the next guy's."
I ask Sanford if the retreat to that core — at a time when Americans are looking for, if not a handout, at least a hand up — threatens to relegate the GOP to political irrelevance for the foreseeable future.
"I suppose it does," he says simply. "And I can live with that."
[From Issue 1079 — May 28, 2009]
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