Posted on 12/11/2006 11:06:46 PM PST by Luis Gonzalez
Our view: In Arizona and nationwide, voters rejected rigid ideologues in favor of those who promised moderation, dialogue.
The picture that emerged from last month's elections, at both the state and the federal level, showed a majority of voters weary of hard-line, intransigent ideologues on the far right.
We know that, because voters turned both houses of Congress over to the Democrats and for the first time in many years gave Democrats 27 of the 60 seats seats in the Arizona House of Representatives.
They also re-elected Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano, giving her a 27 percentage point victory over her ultra-conservative challenger, Republican Len Munsil.
And so there is some irony, to put it kindly, in the comments from some Republicans who believe the party suffered because its candidates were not conservative enough. That line of thinking suggests that what voters really wanted were tougher, more rigid conservatives. If that were true, then candidates like Republican Randy Graf, an aggressive conservative who was running for Congress in District 8, should have trounced his Democratic opponent, Gabrielle Giffords. But the opposite happened. Voters told Graf to take a hike and sent Giffords to Washington.
It is remarkable, then, to hear Republicans like Bill Montgomery, who did so poorly in his race against Attorney General Terry Goddard, declare: "The Republican Party took a hit because we strayed from the principles that make our party so strong and that serve to unify our membership, which consists predominantly of fiscal and social conservatives."
This is the same as saying Republican conservatives should stick to the principles that made them unpopular and that voters, for the most part, rejected.
Montgomery was quoted by reporter Daniel Scarpinato in a Star story last Wednesday. We are more inclined to agree with Steve Huffman, a Republican moderate who ran a primary against Graf and lost.
"I think the most important conversation we have to have right now is: 'Are we where the voters are?' " Huffman said.
It's an important, practical question that suggests that candidates should be responsive to voters' concerns. It makes perfect sense, and if other Republicans were to accept reality they would see that there was nothing mysterious about the election results. Voters rejected the fringes and moved toward the political center. The Republicans in District 8 who rejected Huffman didn't get it.
Many of them would undoubtedly agree with Montgomery, a political novice, who told Scarpinato, "I've always had a problem with the term 'moderate.' If you always take the middle ground, I don't see how that's a virtue. That's not leadership."
On the contrary, we would say that it is both a sign of leadership and a necessary asset to realize the wisdom in compromising on 10 or 20 percent of the issues in order to achieve success on 80 percent of the others.
Compromise is not a dirty word, nor is it fatal to try to understand another viewpoint in the hope of negotiating an issue that gives both sides some of what they're seeking. A case can be made that compromise is a sign of wisdom and maturity.
The point that hard-liners like Montgomery miss is that public service does not require rigid adherence to a personal ideological agenda. It requires an ability to remain flexible enough to respond to the people who elected you as their representative, not their emperor.
Failure to accept the fundamental message of the last election will eventually dilute Republican power at the state level as sure as it has at the national level. Voters want a change, not a restatement of the same old manifesto.
**PING**
You can try to figure out where the votes are, and position yourself there, or you can try to persuade the voters. To do neither is a losing strategy.
What we learned from this past election, is that the votes that win elections are in the center.
This is all silliness. The exit polls already answered this question. The voters were asked the most important issue that drove their vote that day.
It was not abortion. It was not guns. It was not immigration. It was not the economy and It Was Not IRAQ.
It was corruption scandals. Period. Full stop.
There is no ideological message whatsoever to be found in the election. None. It does not say you need to move to the right. It does not say you need to move to the left.
It says only that the GOP should not have had corruption scandals. Get rid of them, find some dirt on the Dems and get explicit indictments, and it all turns around without the party moving in either direction.
Oh please, spare me this deranged spew. If only the GOP were more "far right" and ideological. If they were, we wouldn't have had massive spending and unsecured borders. And somehow I doubt voters would send a message about being against "instransigent ideologues" by voting for the worst ideologues ever to populate Congress in the form of Pelosi and her far left extremist pathological, stand for nothing, agendless, visionless caucus.
But this writer knows damned good and well voters voted the way they did because the media portrayed for them one side of American's condition domestically and its position in the world and on Iraq, all of it negative, while reporting nothing about a record economy or the success we've had fighting terrorism and rebuilding Iraq. That is the long and the short if this election and this writer knows it because he/she/it helped to brainwash voters into voting against the president and party who helped give them the best conditions they've enjoyed in a long, long time. It's hardly as this delusional idiot claims that voters were voting against partisan extremes by voting for extreme partisans. Give me a break.
Hi ya Luis!
"On the contrary, we would say that it is both a sign of leadership and a necessary asset to realize the wisdom in compromising on 10 or 20 percent of the issues in order to achieve success on 80 percent of the others."
You know, moderate Republicans love to tell us conservatives to compromise on that 10 to 20% in order to get 80%, but they never deliver even 10 or 20% of the 80% they promise. I'm looking but I don't see no stinking 80% of fiscal restraint and small government ANYWHERE.
What I relearned and had reconfirmed from this past election is that Americans are generally politically ignorant and really do not have a great deal of decent choices.
It's all theatre.
You don't have to look very hard for that, unless you're relying on the MSM: Rep. William Mollahon, Rep. William Jefferson, Rep. John Conyers, Rep. Patrick Kennedy, Senator Harry Reid, etc. But the media all ignored these scandals to focus solely on the GOP's indiscretions, nearly all of whom resigned while the above named Demo Low Lives won re-election and are still in Congress. THAT is why the GOP paid the price for ethics in this election while the Dems. had theirs utterly ignored and were rewarded with Congressional control instead. We live in a country that's now a combination of Orwell and Alice in Wonderland.
Great post
Oh by all means let's do follow the mob. After all, there's no way all those people could be wrong is there.
And besides, it's not the job of elected leaders to, well, lead. They've got to follow the whims of the majority and make sure they get what they want.
Then they've got to see that they get it good and hard.
L
It never fails to irritate me to see the tendentious use of "moderate"--as, for instance, in "moderate Republican" or (as used here, the obverse) "Republican moderate."
In such expressions, the writer (or speaker) invariably considers the noun to be something of disrepute; the adjective "moderate" confers upon it an aura of semi-respectability.
It is, of course, enormously condescending. Better to be openly despised than to be treated as a credit to one's kind...such as it is.
People are not as stupid as you claim that they are.
People know that the economy is good, and they know that the war is not as good as they hoped it would be.
Kid yourself if you want, just be ready to watch years of DNC control of government if you do.
As has been illustrated ad nauseam for the past six years, nearly every attempt at bipartisanship by the Bush White House has been met with cries that it wasn't nearly enough (prescription drugs, No Child Left Behind, etc). Ironically, the one compromise that Bush did that was truly Solomonesque -- allowing Federal funding of embryonic stem cell research for the first time, but only on existing lines -- has become a rallying point for the Democrats because Bush refused to allow human beings at their earliest stage to be treated like rats bred for lab experiments.
If the question is "'Are we where the voters are?'" why don't YOU, Luis, tell us where YOU think they are -- and what the GOP has to do to meet them. And none of this bullschtuff about not being ideologues or being open to dialogue, because that's the kind of nonsense that led to that worthless Iraq Study Group report. Be specific, if you actually have issues that pique you. Let's see if you're up to the task.
LOL, I couldn't get past the first line, which was, of course, a baldfaced lie.
By their own yardstick, the Republicans did not achieve their objectives. The remedy available to voters was to put the other fellow in - many of them were lulled by the fact that "Blue Dog" Democrats claimed to share their values. It was a lie, of course.
Regards, Ivan
"The center" = the ignorant, mindless, soundbite-susceptible chattering class.
Yeah, let's go there.
Of course the DNC has scandals, but social conservatives reject even the mere mention of impropriety even as its leadership is mired in it.
On the other hand, the DNC says "so what, we're only human?", and the voters accept them.
The long and the short, if you're going to set yourself up as the party of family values and morals, you best hold up to scrutiny.
I admire Bill Bennett, but it's unfortunate that the man who wrote a book called "Virtues" turns out to have a problem with gambling.
Which ones?
"Moderate" needs to be removed from our society...... that and Matthew Lesko.
Yeah..they love you too, and will make damned sure that no one who even remotely thinks like you do gets in office for years to come.
Meanwhile, understand this...you can't win elections without them.
You missed his point.
"Let's?"
You're a Republican?
The center.
I doubt it.
Right on.
What you're proposing is that the Republican Party follow the dictates of a mob.
It's beyond pathetic. It's frightening.
L
Reagan had massive spending and signed am amnesty.
Not a conservative?
If you are not in the center, your choice is to move to a center you don't agree with, be displaced by the politicians who do agree with the center, or try and persuade people you are right. Centers can move, and do move over time, as people are persuaded, and as reality imposes its own corrective.
Elections are decided by the Oprah-watchers, the people in the middle. If you can reach them, persuade them, inspire them, you'll have a long career in public service. If you can't, if you lack the talent for shaping the public debate and find yourself forever chasing the debate rather than framing its terms, you'll soon be back home doing whatever it is that ex-politicians do.
Your challenge, in reaching out to the center, is that you are trying to persuade people who have only the dimmest idea what you are talking about, and you've got 5 seconds to explain it before they click you off. The day you find yourself on "The View" trying to explain your plans for post-war reconciliation in the middle east, or the day you find yourself on Oprah trying to explain how you intend to decrease government intrusion into private business, you either knock it out of the park, or you start shopping your resume around the lobby firms you know who might be hiring.
Any intelligent voter in this country shouldn't be at all effected by Bill Bennett and his gambling exploits.
That's Gorgonzola.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus
I don't.
The center will swing to a good leader. Reagan proved that.
ditto
This piece is a load of crap. Conservatism didn't lose, the Republican party lost. Want to see where Liberal Republicanism gets us ? Take a look at California, Illinois, New Jersey, New England. The party continues to slip away there because there is little to nothing to distinguish them from the 'Rats, either ideologically or ethically.
In order to keep Democrats out of power, you need to get Republicans elected, and the pure and simple truth is that neither Party's base is sufficient unto themselves to get their politicians elected, and until you show me a viable third party candidate, that's not an option either.
Twelve years ago, the center rolled right and threw the Democrats out of power this time they rolled left and threw the GOP out.
I can't advance any ideology with the opposition in power.
I wish I could disagree with you on this point. Sadly, I cannot.
Far too often I have heard person-on-the-street interviews conducted by Sean Hannity or Jay Leno. (Okay, so the two are hardly analogous, but they have both done such interviews.) Incredibly elementary questions (e.g. "Who is Condoleezza Rice?" or--I'm not making this up--"Who is the vice-president?" tend to provoke blank stares or wild guesses.
Bear in mind, the votes of such ill-informed souls--because there are apparently so many of them--more than negate the votes of those who take the trouble to at least master the basics.
The person/people that wrote this article don't have a damn clue as to what they're talking about. Instead, what they've written is merely what they wish to be true.
Right
We seated one of the most conservative presidents in recent history in 2000, and he could not hold Congress.
Conservatism lost.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus
Sometimes it takes someone outside the problem to really see what's wrong.
The only thing I'd take issue with is that 'twinge of conscience' thing. They expanded government shamelessly and at a pace that even LBJ would have envied.
Other than that minor quibble, very well said, sir.
L
You get it, how refreshing.
Great post.
Reagan did just that, but as much as I admire President Bush, he's not good at it and the GOP took a beating as a result of it.
Sure they did.
By all accounts, it was the "I" vote that swung...but go ahead and keep your head in the sand.
It's safer there.
Regards, Ivan
Bill Bennett was symptomatic of the whole party as a moral compass.
Thank God the President managed to stay fairly clear from scandal.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus
I've seen the Jaywalking (Leno) segments often. It freaks me out to see people that ignorant. Sean finds some beauties on the street too.
I'll be 60 next month. I've seen this conscious/purposeful dumbing down of the children for decades. It's not getting any better, because it serves the powerful to have this large ignorant class. Just as long as the trains run and the sewers work, all the rest of the people can be ignorant fools...... and they are.
And it's all one lovely plan to tear down America. Gotta give them credit......... they're good.
As Butch Cassidy used to ask Sundance when they were being followed by the posse, "Who are those guys? I couldn't do that, could you do that?"
;-)
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