Do GOP moderates have clout?
Political moderates predominate in the U.S. electorate, but the two parties are increasingly captives of their extremes. Will the moderates ever rise up and assert themselves?
In the Republican Party, they ought to do so by defending Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (Tenn.) against right-wing attacks for bucking President Bush over embryonic stem-cell research. Republican moderates also ought to start speaking up for “emergency contraception” before the right makes banning it a litmus test of party loyalty.
Someone in the GOP ought to tell Bush that “intelligent design” is not a true scientific theory on a par with evolution. And moderates need to fight at the state level to prevent “ID” from being required teaching in biology classes.
Does anyone in the GOP dare to come out for civil unions for homosexuals and to resist the party’s reliance on gay-bashing to win elections?
It’s almost impossible for a pro-choice candidate to get the GOP presidential nomination, but anti-abortion mania could be the undoing of the party in the long run if Bush installs a U.S. Supreme Court that actually overturns the Roe v. Wade decision, as the religious right expects him to do.
If current nominee John Roberts proves to be a vote against Roe, it will take only one more rightist appointee to ignite struggles in every state to ban abortion. Polls show that two-thirds of the electorate wants Roe to remain the law of the land.
There’s no question that the Democratic Party is just as much captive of the left as the GOP is of the right. Unions, pro-choice feminists, trial lawyers and civil rights liberals call the shots.
But the Democratic Party has an influential moderate wing, led by the Democratic Leadership Council, with which a number of 2008 presidential candidates are affiliated, including frontrunning Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.).
There is no real equivalent in the GOP that can serve as an organizational and intellectual base for moderate candidates like former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, New York Gov. George Pataki and Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).
Occasionally, a Republican moderate will speak out in a provocative op-ed, as when former Sen. John Danforth (Mo.) charged that “Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians.”
Moderates need to organize and fight — in both parties. When they don’t, they ill-serve a centrist public and miss a political opportunity.
A July NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed that a plurality of voters, 39 percent, regards itself as moderate, compared with 33 percent who say they’re conservative and 22 percent who say they’re liberal.
A new Pew poll shows that the public supports embryonic stem-cell research by 57 percent to 30 percent, and that 53 percent favors allowing gays to enter legal arrangements giving them the same rights as married couples.
Frist, who is pro-life on every other matter, nevertheless came out for federal funding of stem-cell research requiring the destruction of embryos “left over” and destined for destruction at fertility clinics. Despite all he’s done for the right — including making it virtually certain that Bush’s judicial nominees will get approved — Frist is now being attacked for his stem-cell view.
The religious right has every right to be politically assertive. So does the secular left. What’s needed is for moderates to get militant and contest these extremes.
Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.