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The 'Moderate Republican' Scam
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| Parent(s) |
Party
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Sep 27, 2006 01:15am |
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| Category | Opinion |
| Media | Newspaper - Washington Post |
| News Date | Wednesday, September 27, 2006 07:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Sen. Lincoln Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, is seeking reelection in his heavily Democratic state by insisting he's not really a Republican, or at least not part of the gang responsible for the decade's debacles. He didn't even vote for George W. Bush in 2004, he protests. He cast his vote for George H.W. Bush -- a kinder, gentler, more prudent, less strident Republican.
Big deal.
It matters not a damn whom Lincoln Chafee chose to support for president. His vote was one of roughly 435,000 cast in Rhode Island in the 2004 presidential election, and roughly 122 million cast nationwide. The election in which his vote did matter was that for majority leader of the Senate. There, he was one of just 100 electors, in a Senate nearly evenly divided. After this November's elections, control of the Senate may well hang by a single vote.
Chafee and Maine's Olympia Snowe and such deathbed converts to moderation as Ohio's Mike DeWine are seeking reelection to the Senate by claiming that they represent a Republicanism less rabid than the Bush-Rove strain. They point to individual votes in which they broke with the president and flouted the party line. But those votes have been negated a hundred times over by their votes to make Bill Frist the majority leader, just as they would be negated when the new Senate takes office in 2007 if the moderates backed any Republican unwilling to make a fundamental break with Bush and Bushism.
The issue isn't the individual voting records of Frist and McConnell, which are indistinguishable from each other and define the mainstream of today's gorge-the-rich, drown-the-poor, stay-the-course Republicanism. The issue is that under the control of the Republicans, both the Senate and the House have abandoned their constitutionally mandated obligation to oversee executive branch endeavors, most especially endeavors gone as awry as the war in Iraq. The issue is that under Republican control, both houses have abandoned any effort to address America's real problems. |
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