[Mb-civic] The GOP's Shrinking Middle - E. J. Dionne - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

The GOP's Shrinking Middle

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
The Washington Post
Tuesday, March 21, 2006; A17

Members of Congress retire all the time, but some retirements are 
leading indicators of the direction of our politics. Rep. Sherwood 
Boehlert's announcement last week to call it quits matters, and in a 
depressing way.

The affable 69-year-old New York Republican is one of the last of a 
breed: a liberal Republican, though he calls himself a "moderate" and 
has the record to prove it. Boehlert's departure does not leave the 
House bereft of liberal Republicans -- Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa is more 
liberal than Boehlert. But Leach, alas, is an outlier. The spotted owl 
is in good shape compared with liberal Republicans.

Boehlert chose to retire in the year when National Journal, the 
political world's answer to Sports Illustrated, featured him as the 
ultimate "Down the Middle" guy. In its Feb. 25 issue, the magazine 
published its annual ratings, which showed that Boehlert's votes were 
more liberal than those of 52.2 percent of House members and more 
conservative than 47.8 percent. Boehlert's district includes the 
Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and it's hard to move the ball 
more to the middle of the plate than he does.

It's been downhill for his brand of Republicanism from the moment he set 
foot in Washington as a congressional staffer in 1964. That's the year 
Barry Goldwater won the Republican presidential nomination and the great 
flight of the Republican liberals began.

After Goldwater's landslide defeat, two Republican progressives who 
later became conservatives, George Gilder and Bruce Chapman, wrote a 
brilliant book called "The Party That Lost Its Head," detailing how and 
why the party's liberal wing responded so anemically to the conservative 
challenge. But it was too late. The party of Abraham Lincoln and 
Theodore Roosevelt was destined to become an annex of the conservative 
movement.

Boehlert has always been unabashed in embracing his liberal roots. Over 
breakfast on a sunny summer morning in Cooperstown five years ago, 
Boehlert embraced two of the most progressive politicians of his 
lifetime. "People say to me: 'Why are you the kind of Republican you 
are?' Because in my formative political years, when I was coming up in 
New York, my governor was Nelson A. Rockefeller and my senator was Jacob 
K. Javits."

Why does the decline and fall of liberal Republicanism matter? After 
all, rationalizing the political system into a more conservative GOP and 
a more-or-less liberal Democratic Party makes the alternatives clearer 
to voters, who are offered, in Goldwater's famous phrase, "a choice, not 
an echo."

But it turns out that a Republican Party dominated by conservatives is 
no more coherent than the party that left room for progressives. The 
huge budget deficit is conservatism's Waterloo, testimony to its 
political failure. The conservatives love to cut taxes but can't square 
their lust for tax reduction with plausible spending cuts. Oh, yes, a 
group of House conservatives has a paper plan involving deep program 
cuts, but other conservatives know that these cuts will not pass, and 
shouldn't.

Paradoxically, because the liberal Republicans didn't pretend to hate 
government, they were better at fiscal responsibility. They were willing 
to match their desired spending levels with the taxes to pay for them. 
It didn't make for exciting, to-the-barricades politics. It merely 
produced good government.

Boehlert, being an optimist by nature, was always ready to declare that 
the "moderates' moment" had finally arrived. Last November, after I had 
written a column taking some moderate Republicans to task for backing 
the outrageous budget bill that passed under the cover of darkness at 
1:30 a.m., there was Boehlert on the phone insisting that he and fellow 
moderate Mike Castle (R-Del.) had wrung some important concessions out 
of the House leadership. Maybe so, I replied, but I had a higher opinion 
of moderate Republicans and expected more of them than that lousy budget 
bill.

The problem may be that Boehlert and Castle did get as much as they 
could, given the numerical weakness of their variety of Republicanism, 
but that's not good enough. I suspect Boehlert knows this. Absent a 
robust progressive wing, congressional Republicans will continue to 
produce fiscally incoherent government. Democrats now have the task of 
representing their own brand of politics, and that of progressive 
Republicans, too.

I'll miss Boehlert and his optimistic moderation. Our politics worked 
better when a sufficiently large band of Republican moderates and 
liberals could take the edge off polarization and orient government 
toward problem-solving. But the liberal Republicans are gone. We have to 
deal with the GOP we have, not the GOP we wish still existed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/20/AR2006032001418.html?nav=hcmodule
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