Former Marlyand Lt. Governor Michael Steele gives an idea of the kind of Republican Party he’d lead if he’s elected Chairman of the RNC:
Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele (R) said Monday that conservatives need to “wake up” and realize they need moderate Republicans to help rebuild the party.
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“Wake up people. I mean what are you going to do? Are you going to kick these folks out of the party? I have watched this party self-disintegrate for the last four or five years. I’ve watched this party isolate itself from itself.”
Steele, who is campaigning to be chairman of the Republican National Committee, insisted that Republicans have “a unique opportunity to build a relationship or a bridge between the conservatives and the moderates in our party.”
“We have to elect moderates in the party,” he added.
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“There are a lot of people who would join us and be a party of our efforts who are pro-choice but they love our message on money; they love our value system on family values, broadly speaking, so then how do we cross-appeal,” he said. “How do we make ourselves relevant to the 21st century electorate which is clearly of a different mindset on a host of issues?”
Steele is correct that the Republican Party cannot survive if it purges itself of what hard-core conservatives derisively call “moderates” or “Republicans In Name Only,” typically because they don’t sign on to the more conservative elements of the party platform on issues like abortion, school prayer, or gay rights. If the Republican Party is going to be a national party again, it has to appeal to voters in New England and California as much as it appeals to voters in Utah and Wyoming. One of the biggest reasons that it suffered losses in 2006 and 2008 is precisely because it had come to be identified with a narrow, social conservative agenda, that doesn’t have broad appeal outside the Bible Belt.
Justin Gardner thinks that Steele may have doomed his chances to be RNC Chairman by saying this, but who knows ? Maybe the party bigwigs have finally learned their lesson.
We’ll see.
December 9th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
For a lot of my Evangelicals and Catholic friends, abortion is the one reason they vote Republican. As far as they’re concerned, voting against the GOP is voting to kill babies.
They’ll put up with almost anything — even an adulterer and influence-peddler like McCain — as long as the candidate promises to end abortion. (He doesn’t even have to keep the promise to get re-elected — what a great scam!) Take away the anti-abortion and anti-gay-marriage planks, and all those Focus on the Family folks will be out of reasons to vote Republican.
I guess the question is, are there millions of undecided voters out there who’d join the GOP if it just quit being so conservative? Enough to offset the loss of the Religious Right?
I don’t have a dog in that race; I just think the GOP’s going to make itself even more irrelevant if it ditches the conservatives. And that might be a good thing. The demise of the GOP could be the birth of a genuine multi-party situation, and that would be a very good thing indeed.
December 9th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
I think that Steele is wrong. Its not the conservatives, ONLY, that want to purge the party. The “moderates” want to purge the conservatives. The moderates denigrate the conservative movement as uneducated religious bigots. Conservatives see moderates as sell outs to the liberal dogma which cost the GOP the last few elections. We need a big tent. Numbers count. But the message of the party has to be consistent. I think that there are enough conservatives, even in California, for a conservative message to be the one the GOP presents to the world. Otherwise, why would one vote for a republican when a democrat will do as well, if not better, at growing gov’t programs “for the children”…..