"Who will you support to serve as Speaker/Majority Leader/Majority Whip if elected?"
That's the only question we voters should be asking so-called "moderate" Republican candidates like Lincoln Chafee, Tom Kean, and death-bed convert Mike DeWine in this fall's elections.
Because if the answer is that "moderates" like Chafee, Kean and DeWine will support paleo-conservatives like Mitch McConnell to run Congress--and they will, then it doesn't matter how "moderate" Chaffee and his cohorts appear on certain issues.
A vote for moderates like Chafee, Kean and DeWine is not a vote for moderatation. It's a vote for more of the same.
(1) We can't take back all of Congress if we don't beat "moderate" Republicans Chafee, Kean and DeWine.
(2) And many voters are failing to ask the single most important question that could lead to these moderates' defeat -- the question above.
Harold Meyerson's says all this a lot more eloquently than I in today's Washington Post:
Meyerson's Piece in WaPo (sign-in may be required)
Here's Meyerson:
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.
Meyerson continues:
[I]f Chafee truly wished to alter the course of his party and his country in the spirit of his vote for Poppy Bush, he would, if reelected, cast his vote for majority leader when the new Senate convenes for Bob Dole or Howard Baker -- former Republican leaders who showed a decent respect for reality and an interest in doing the nation's business.
Rather than support an administration lapdog such as Kentucky's Mitch McConnell, the Republican whip, whom his party will probably put forth to run the Senate next January, Chafee would vote for some old-school GOP pol. Rather than just announce he's against the war and appalled by torture, he'd vote to put the Senate in the hands of someone with enough gumption and wisdom to stand up to a president who's hellbent on a war that's lost its purpose and who believes America should torture its prisoners either because it makes a nifty wedge issue to use against the Democrats or because he actually believes torture is an acceptable U.S. policy. (Or, to give the president the benefit of the doubt, both.)
He concludes:
The moderates will vote for the extremist. "Moderate," after all, is only an adjective; "Republican" is a noun. Chafee, Snowe, the whole lot of them, are moderate enablers of an extremist party. That leaves those voters in Rhode Island, Maine, Ohio and other states where these self-proclaimed Republican moderates are running only one choice if they seek a Congress to check and balance the president, if they want a more moderate nation: Vote for the Democrat.
I encourage everyone to read Meyerson's article.
And then get back out there and start hammering this issue.