In today's NYT, Lincoln Chafee
poses a question:
Despite my having voted against the Iraq war resolution, my reputation for independence, the editorial endorsement of virtually every newspaper in my state, and a job approval rating of 63 percent, I did not win. Why?
He then details a December 2000 meeting of GOP centrists with Dick Cheney, during which Cheney outlined a radical agenda that beared no resemblance to what Bush/Cheney proposed during the campaign. Chafee was so disturbed that he wrote Dick a letter in which he called for moderation and cooperation with the Dems. We all know how that played out.
It reminds me of the way Bush Cheney acted right after the 2004 election. They hadn't talked about Social Security at all during the campaign, but suddenly they had a "mandate" to privatize it. And we know how that played out, too.
While I realize that Social Security did not appear as a major issue in exit polls, I think that was the tipping point. Combine that with the Medicare fiasco, and a lot of independent and moderate Republican voters started waking up and rejecting a bait-and-switch GOP domestic agenda that they simply could not support.
It took Katrina, corruption and and continuing bad news in Iraq to really turn the American people against Bush, but we cannot let the MSM claim that Democrats must "move to the center" on domestic issues. We are the mainstream party, it is the GOP that has governed from the radical fringe. Their candidates in competitive districts can no longer run on their true agendas, because most of them are too extreme. With the loss of many moderates such as Chafee, I don't see how the Republicans in 2008 are going to be able to offer an agenda that a majority of voters can support or even believe.
Thank you, Senator Chafee, for sharing your letter with us, and further illustrating that the biggest problem in this administration has always been Big Dick.