"From now on, anyone who belongs to the Republican Party will automatically find himself in the same group as the opponents of abortion, and anyone who supports abortion will automatically be labeled a Democrat. The political center has disappeared, and the Republican Party has become the party of the Christian right more so than in any other period in modern history."
We're going to see more of these quotes in the coming weeks as the cannibals in the Republican Party grow increasingly restless and start eyeing each other like they're standing in the buffet line at cousin Lucy's wedding. What's interesting about the quote above, though, is that it isn't recent. No, those words were uttered two years ago by Arty Finkelstein, Gov. George Pataki's pal and an influential GOP political consultant.
Make the jump. There are some useful lessons for Dems who are hesitant about how hard to push in the current climate of political disarray across the aisle.
The simple truth is, the battle for possession of the soul of the party (if we can be so bold as to suggest that there is a "soul" in the Republican Party), which Pat Buchanan noted years before Finkelstein spoke up as the likely cause of an eventual Republican "bloodbath," has far deeper roots. As far back as 1994, when Newt Gingrich's arrogance and the inability of GOP moderates to control the insurgency that had just seized control of Congress, the Republicans were in a fight for their ideological identity.
Although it's easy to consider what we see unfolding before us today only in an immediate context and to view it as purely a fight between secular and religious Republicans, history shows us that recent electoral successes only papered over a deep and fractious ideological divide that reappears in times of crisis. The good news for progressives is that ... choose your metaphor ... the pothole never seems to be fully repaired, the bridge between warring factions never completely built, the festering wounds never salved.
It's those deep and ugly cracks in the Republican facade and the likelihood that they will only gape further and further that make it useful to look back and examine what may have been the seeds of today's season of GOPer discontent.
In the 1994 mid-terms, in a story that's well worn with repeated telling, the Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, took advantage of a Democratic Party that had, in the eyes of the electorate, become drunk with power and increasingly corrupt, much as the Republicans today have shown themselves to be.
Fueled by a brand of fiscal and social conservatism that found a willing public, Gingrich and his band of GOP insurgents swept into power on a platform of welfare reform, term limits, tougher crime laws and a balanced budget law. In a stunning defeat for the entrenched Democratic Party, they seized 54 seats and set about to fulfill their vaunted Contract with America in the first 100 days of the 1995 session.
The Gingrich Republicans were a mix of secular and religious conservatives, but the results of the election showed that growing participation by voters who self-identified as religiously motivated marked the difference in the election.
A national exit poll showed that 27 percent voters in the 1994 mid-terms identified themselves as "born-again" or "evangelical Christians," up from 18 percent in 1988 and 24 percent in 1992. Republican House candidates outpolled Democrats among white evangelicals by 52 points, 76 percent to 24 percent.
A survey conducted by the Christian Coalition showed that 33 percent of the 1994 voters were "religious conservatives."
Yet, by 1998, when the Democratic Party produced strong gains in that Congressional mid-term, Gingrich found himself under siege by Republican leaders who wanted him to step down. A fractious fight within the party had again re-appeared.
What happened in between the heady days of 1994 and 1998?
The most signal event was the budget crisis of 1995, when Gingrich overplayed his hand in trying to force draconian cuts in Medicare and other popular social programs and a president with the determination and the rhetorical appeal to call him on it, dented the insurgency and sent the GOP spiraling downward.
How did Pres. Clinton cast the debate over the budget that led to a six-day government shutdown and an embarrassment of biblical proportions for Gingrich? He reached out to the basic moral decency of Americans while sidestepping any distractions over specific religions or "evangelical" positions on important issues. And he laid the blame for it precisely in the lap of the Republicans.
I vetoed the spending bill sent to me by Congress last night because America can never accept under pressure what it would not accept in free and open debate. I strongly believe their budget plan is bad for America. I believe it will undermine opportunity, make it harder for families to do the work that they have to do, weaken our obligations to our parents and our children, and make our country more divided. So I will continue to fight for the right kind of balanced budget.
Remember, the Republicans are following a very explicit strategy announced last April by Speaker Gingrich, to use the threat of a government shutdown to force America to accept their cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, to accept their cuts in education and technology and the environment.
As long as they insist on plunging ahead with a budget that violates our values (emphasis mine), in a process that is characterized more by pressure than constitutional practice, I will fight it. I am fighting it today, I will fight it tomorrow, I will fight it next week, and next month.
And Americans responded. Polls at the time showed that Republicans received more of the blame than did Clinton; 46 percent said the GOP was at fault, 27 percent blamed Clinton.
So, by the 1998 mid-terms, after relatively modest losses by electoral standards, but major ones when measured against the hubris of 1994, the Republicans were once again at each other's throats, split along lines of conservative and moderate with the evangelicals standing in between.
It took moral leadership by Clinton and a stubborn insistence that there are lines that should not be crossed to expose the fault lines in the opposition party. And it worked.
Fast forward to today.
In the spring issue of Dissent magazine in an article penned by Susan Jacoby titled Heaven Can Wait, she writes:
Call me crazy, but I have a feeling that a great many Americans, including religious Americans, are sick of hypocritical politicians who pretend that their policies deserve support because they are the work of a Higher Being. The question is whether there are any political leaders left with the courage to appeal to voters as reasoning adults, with arguments based not on the promise of heaven but on the moral obligation of human beings to treat one another decently here on earth.
We've also seen Dick Armey, Gingrich's former partner in their Congressional insurgency, come forward recently with doubts of his own about the religious influence on the GOP, specifically that wielded by James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and one of the evangelical right's messiahs.
In an interview published last month in Ryan Sager's book, The Elephant in the Room, which delves into the pending conservative crack-up, Armey refers to Dobson's crew of Congressional groupies as "a band of thugs" and "real nasty bullies."
Armey has said as recently as last week that fealty to Dobson and his supporters had pulled Republican attention away from stewardship of the federal budget and that the Republicans stood to lose political ground in the coming elections.
The Republicans are talking about things like gay marriage and so forth, and the Democrats are talking about the things people care about like how do I pay my bills?
Even conservative stalwart Richard Viguerie, who is launching a new Web site, www.conservativesbetrayed.com, has jumped into the fray.
Conservatives are like the biblical Jews who had to wander through the desert for 40 years until that generation of immoral, corrupt leaders had passed away," he said. "We are not going to get to the political promised land with this leadership. They don't have vision -- they don't have an idea of where they want to take the country.
They have become that which they beheld. In the early 1990s, they talked about a culture of corruption by the Democrats and how they were abusing their power. Lo and behold, that seems to be what the Republicans have engaged in. It's very, very hard to tell conservatives that there really is a significant difference on most issues between this crowd and the Democrats.
It's not necessary to debate whether Viguerie or Armey or Finkelstein or even Jacoby is correct. It is only necessary that we recognize that it was a singular moment, when a courageous president took a strong moral stand against the Republican tide and said, "this and no more" that things began to change. The result was GOP disarray, infighting and the first signs of a downward slide that was only halted when Karl Rove and his protégé found a way to re-energize their religious base and take back power while the Democrats fumbled around in the ideological wilderness looking for both a spine and a message.
The GOP confusion and discord that characterizes their condition as they enter the 2006 mid-terms is not an end, despite the optimism that infuses the Democrats as the election draws nearer; it is only an opportunity. Who among the politicians on our side of the aisle will seize the moment, as Clinton did, and, once and for all, lead us where we need to go?
There is a caution in relying solely on electoral wins as a measuring stick for progress and ironically, it comes from William Niskanen of the libertarian Cato Institute:
The Bush people have confused the politics of governing with the politics of campaigning. Bush never really understood what it takes to govern when you have to deal across party lines.
After the campaign, the governing. I hope they're paying attention.