Some very interesting thoughts from Dick Morris. As of late, the GOP has been feasting on their own.
The Republicans’ circular firing squad
Dick Morris
The Political Life
hillnews.com
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) once told me, “There is a small group of people who believe the same things. They are Republicans. Everybody else is a Democrat.”
Lately, the small group has gotten smaller, as the thought police are hunting down heretics belying President Bush’s oft-stated goal of a big-tent party.
The hunting season began when then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) was found dangling slowly from a tree in Washington, allegedly for endorsing a political party that had been dead for 40 years but really for failing to summon sufficient enthusiasm for the right-wing social and economic agenda.
It continued with negative ads running against Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) for daring to exercise independent judgment in whittling Bush’s tax cut to saner proportions. Then Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) took a bullet when Republicans threatened a primary over his apostasy in opposing huge tax reductions.
What sins are Snowe and McCain guilty of? They are on trial for embracing deficit reduction and worshiping at the altar of the balanced budget — core Republican principles the last time I looked.
Finally, Newt opened up on the State Department, in a thinly disguised assassination attempt against Secretary of State Colin Powell. Alarmed that the Cabinet member is 20 points more popular than his president is in the latest polls, Newt and the right-wingers decided to take him down a notch. While denying hotly that his aim was Powell, Gingrich blasted the State Department bureaucracy, a guise that fooled nobody.
Why did Gingrich go after Powell, albeit obliquely? To knock him down for 2008? To cut him off at the knees if Vice President Dick Cheney doesn’t run for reelection and a boomlet develops for Powell? Or to show that independent thinking is punishable by death in the party?
Hey, wake up guys! Does anyone out there realize that the Republican Party has a two-vote margin in the Senate? Do they remember what happened the last time they tried to enforce ideological discipline on a Vermont senator who took a walk rather than wilt?
The House Republican majority may be hard and sure, anchored by reapportionment deals that guarantee GOP control through the census of 2010. But because the best operatives couldn’t figure out a way to gerrymander state lines, the Senate is still tenuous. It does about as much good to savage the senator from Maine and stigmatize the senator from Arizona as it does to drink a cup of hemlock.
Where is Bush in all of that? Is the backbiting happening without his approval? Behind his back? No way. The president might be a bit skittish about attacks on his secretary of state, but there is no way a GOP front would be running negative ads against an incumbent Republican senator for failing to toe the line in backing the president’s budget without some wink and nod from the White House political director.
There is a side of Bush that is less than attractive. It is a take-no-prisoners, you’re-with-me-or-against-me attitude that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck.
Did he let Lott die to punish him for not backing his father for president? Does he want to conduct a purge of Republican moderates led by the woman from Maine and the man from Arizona? Is he mixing up his enemies and his friends?
One thing is clear: The Republican Party must not go down the road of demanding ideological purity and partisan discipline as a price of admission. Can conformity with the positions of the National Rifle Association and the Christian right be far behind? Can we imagine a purge of those who won’t go along with a ban on partial-birth abortion?
All that is so self-destructive. It’s a great way to stay a minority party. As Newt said, “Everybody else is a Democrat.”
Dick Morris is a former consultant to President Clinton, Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and other political figures. |
