This Is What a Maverick Looks Like
June 16th, 2009 at 10:40 am by CrankyThe GOP wants to seat a moderate in Florida’s Senate seat being vacated by Mel Martinez. To that end, they endorsed Charlie Crist at the expense of Marco Rubio. DeMint isn’t toeing the company line, to his great credit.
“He is exactly the kind of Senator Florida needs, and exactly the kind of leader our party is looking for: a conservative’s conservative with a record of success in a swing state, a self-made first generation American, a dynamic Republican spokesman in two languages, a young husband and father himself dealing with the same problems middle class families like his face every day,” DeMint writes in today’s FOX News Forum.
DeMint’s statement is here.
The RNC is expected to pull the same thing against Pat Toomey in the race for Specter’s Senate seat. Apparently, the RNC has no faith in conservatism whatsoever.
June 16th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
“Apparently, the RNC has no faith in conservatism whatsoever.”
Which is exactly why I have no use for the RNC.
June 16th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
2008 was the first year I pulled the lever for the Libertarians over the Republicans. Looks I’ll be doing it some more at the rate the RNC continues to implode into a smaller version of the DNC….
June 18th, 2009 at 10:34 am
The RNC started cratering once the Left helped ensure a Democratic win in ’08 by initiating a full force smear campaign against the Bush administration. Did Bush do everything right? No, name a president who can, but he didn’t commit the heinous atrocities and arrears of judgement that have been railed against him. In 2007 and 2008, the RNC took an offensive posture instead of a defensive one and even went so far as to distance itself from very things to which the GOP staunchly adheres. Call it a ploy; call it what you will, but whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t played well. And there has been a price to pay.
In recent years, I’ve often felt that the concept of true Conservatism (a hallmark of the party’s constructs) has been abandoned in order to “achieve”: poll position, elected office and in some cases, attempts to sway idealogy. The reality is that when it comes to politically speaking, timeless one upmanship doesn’t aLways work. Not like it does in a board room—-or in the hallowed halls of high school.
Like Duncan, I lean decidedly right, but I’ve never been a dyed-in-the wool Republican. Personally, I consider myself to be something more akin to a bleeding heart Conservative. That said, I also find myself leaning more and more towards Libertarianism and this past election is the main reason why. I disliked what the RNC didn’t do as much as I disliked what it did.
As I see it, the RNC needs to pick a team….then play.
LK
June 18th, 2009 at 11:03 am
Good insights Duncan and Laurie (you Pres, not so much
).
What would I have expected from a R controled Legislature and Excecutive branch as a Conservative?
Slightly privatized Social Security accounts, a sensible energy policy that included Drill Here, Drill Now and nuclear (nice to whine about it after they lose control), tort reform, any and I do mean ANY effort to reduce spending.
All that time and we got nothing excepting a strong foreign policy.
Now in my darker moments, I think that these things are only important to only a few misanthropic voters (like myself) and the RNC knows it. The American people as a whole just want something ‘free’ from the government (think Farm Bill, Bridges to Nowhere, etc.).
Democrats explicitly believe the government is a dispenser of largesse so that truly resonates with the “people”. Republicans know this but cannot be as candid.
If this is the case, and politics is truly a cycle of one party enjoying the spoils until voters get fed up and give the other party a chance to do the same, then the RNC is dead on.
June 18th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
In that regard, you are completely correct, Gordo. If that has been the RNC’s intention, then it has done an exempliary job of of maintaining epic fluctuations. But, the problem is, the Party’s core backers; those that have known what true Conservatism is (and feels like) decades before Reagan made it a more mainstream part of our lexicon, don’t like this incessant waffling. I know I don’t and I’m hardly a core Republican.
I know the old adage–water seeks it’s own level and can take the form of any container in which it is poured. That’s true and in many ways, an unavoidable fact of life. Flexibility and malleability are key. But, I think this has been a source of unravelling for the RNC. It needs to regroup and decide what it is and where it’s heading; make amendments where it sees fit, but it must do so with the best intentions for the party as a whole. I understand that to have a Rep. in the Oval Office or as the majority in the House and/or Senate is the goal. I’d rather live in a Rep. majority, mainly since true power is, was and always will be in the position, but I think RNC is going about it the wrong way. This bobbing for apples/crap shoot approach unsettles me.
Personally, I find it way too easy to leave an organization that’s fractured as opposed to being lured to the systemic values (or in the Dem’s case, the lack thereof) of it’s cheap rival.
LK
June 18th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Er…uh…in the last sentence in my comment, please make that “chief rival”, though the word cheap aptly applies to the subject of said sentence.
Mea culpa.
June 18th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Cheap/Chief – No worries, it makes sense either way.
“It needs to regroup and decide what it is and where it’s heading; make amendments where it sees fit, but it must do so with the best intentions for the party as a whole.”
That will be the thing to watch. What it wants to be.
June 23rd, 2009 at 1:02 am
The Republican Party is no longer conservative.
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, I didn’t leave the Republican Party, the Republican Party left me.