Asking Ted Cruz to shut up until November is not exactly a grand gesture
Great news for moderates,
reports The Washington Post:
In a midterm election year in which the political climate and map of battleground states clearly favors Republicans, many GOP candidates are nevertheless embracing some Democratic priorities in an effort to win over skeptical voters.
The evidence?
- Sen. Rob Portman, the GOP's top fundraiser in the Senate, said his party's candidates need to run on "common sense" ideas
- Candidates—most notably Colorado's Republican nominee for Senate, Cory Gardner—have endorsed over-the-counter birth control
- Oregon Senate candidate Monica Wehby has endorsed marriage equality
- Florida Gov. Rick Scott endorsed medical marijuana
- Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell endorsed Kentucky's Medicaid expansion
We'll start with the last one first, because McConnell did not endorse Kentucky's Medicaid expansion. Instead, he said—implausibly—that Kynect, Kentucky's implementation of Obamacare had nothing to do with Obamacare and could remain in place even if Obamacare were repealed. Obviously, that was designed to sound as though McConnell had embraced a reasonable position, but given that McConnell remains committed to repealing Obamacare "root and branch" and given that Kynect is 100 percent dependent on Obamacare, the nicest thing you can say about it would be to call it doublespeak. Certainly, it was not a substantive shift on policy.
The other examples are a mix of stylistic shifts (Portman's "common sense" rhetoric), cherry picking issues to distract from otherwise conservative candidacies (Scott and Wehby), or—as is the case with the birth-control gambit—blatant attempts to embrace a position that sounds progressive on a superficial level but that will actually please conservatives who are all hot-and-bothered to make sure health insurance no longer covers contraception.
Clearly, Republicans want people to believe that they are embracing mainstream policies after getting lost in the wilderness with the tea party—and it's clearly working with some in the media—but it's equally clear that when it comes down to it, we're not seeing a GOP that's actually trying to reinvent itself in a meaningful way. Instead, we're seeing a GOP that thinks their best shot at winning control of the senate is by hitting the mute button on the Ted Cruz's of their party. It's hard to argue with the political wisdom of that, but it's equally hard to argue that it will continue once November rolls around. Don't take my word for it. Just ask Cruz.