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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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Analysis: An autopsy of liberal Republicans
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Party
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| Contributor | Brandonius Maximus |
| Last Edited | Brandonius Maximus May 06, 2009 06:45pm |
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| Category | General |
| Media | TV News - CNN |
| News Date | Thursday, May 7, 2009 12:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Question: How many years since the Civil War have both U.S. senators from Pennsylvania been Democrats?
Answer: two. The state sent Democrats Francis Myers and Joseph Guffey to the Senate between 1945 and 1947.
If you knew that, you understand just how far the Republican Party has fallen in its ancestral homeland of the Northeast, a decline that was underscored by Sen. Arlen Specter's recent decision to leave the party.
Specter's decision to join Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey on the Democratic side of the aisle raises a host of questions about a party that, after years in power, suddenly finds itself hemorrhaging voters and ceding vast swaths of electoral terrain.
First and foremost, who killed the Rockefeller Republicans? What happened to Specter's breed of fiscally conservative, socially progressive, temperamentally moderate Northeastern officeholders? And if they can be resurrected, should they?
Liberal to moderate Northeastern Republicans once were as much a part of the political landscape as today's liberals from Massachusetts. Now, they live mostly in the history books. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine may be the last ones standing in today's Senate.
The Northeast region sealed the deal for Abe Lincoln in 1860. It broke the back of William Jennings Bryan's populist Democrats in 1896. It kept the Republicans in power for all but 16 years between the Civil War and the New Deal. Specter's home state was the only large industrial state to back Herbert Hoover over Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.
Even after FDR started tilting the region to the Democrats, it produced a slew of moderate GOP officeholders, postwar leaders like New York's Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits, Pennsylvania's Richard Schweiker and John Heinz, Maine's Margaret Chase Smith and William Cohen, Massachusetts' Leverett Saltonstall and Ed Brooke, Connecticut's Prescott Bush and Lowell Weicker, Rhode Island's John Chafee, New Jersey's Clifford Case . . . |
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