GOP Moderate Tries On Lieberman's Shoes

[Pangloss]

I thought this was kind of an ironic twist on the whole Lieberman deal from a couple of weeks ago. Those who thought that Lieberman's loss in the Democratic primary was signallying a national trend towards the left due to the unpopularity of the war may want to take a look at this one. Granted Rhode Island is a much smaller state, but Lincoln Chaffee is as moderate as Joe Lieberman, if not more so (Chaffee, unlike Lieberman, was a member of the famous "Gang of 14" moderates who ironed out a bipartisan deal on nominations). Chaffee is a Republican that the Michael Moore and MoveOn.org crowd should like, because he's one of the few who actually voted against the war in Iraq.

 

What's happening now is that Chaffee is under fire for not being conservative enough. A prominent local Republican is running against him, pushing a right-wing agenda, saying that Chaffee hasn't supported the president enough on major issues throughout his presidency, and has been "liberal" on major social issues.

 

In one of the more bizarre and interesting twists in this campaign, the Republican Party has been running negative attack adds against the Republican who's running against Chaffee, saying in party that the man is "too conservative!" No, really. Of course what they're concerned about is that Chaffee will lose in the primary and then lose to a Democrat in the main election, but I thought that was an amusing development.

 

Google News search results on the subject

[Sisyphus]

I don't think it's a secret that a major shift towards angry polarization has taken place under the Bush presidency, or that moderates in both parties have suffered.

 

What I do find interesting is the respective responses of the two parties in more or less the same situation. I guess there are a few different ways of portraying it. You could say the Republican party is more moderate for supporting their moderate candidate, but that hardly agrees with what we've seen practically everywhere else. Rather, I'd say their political strategists recognize that a conservative Republican can't win, and are taking the pragmatic approach. They probably feel more confident than their Democratic counterparts in doing this because they have less fear of losing voters to more extremist third parties. If Joe Lieberman had won his primary, I have to wonder if there wouldn't be a strong Green Party uprising in Connecticut...

[Pangloss]

I don't think it's a secret that a major shift towards angry polarization has taken place under the Bush presidency, or that moderates in both parties have suffered.

 

I think it's a very narrow view of American politics to say or even suggest that this problem is unique to and originating in the Bush administration. It's also a rather bald attempt at ABB spin.

 

The evidence is rather strong that this is a furthering of a very long-term problem. I have many conservative friends and I watched their reactions during the Clinton administration closely, with growing horror and incomprehension as incidents, reports and developments in the world were spun to mean that Clinton was everything from "a complete idiot" to "a genius in bed with certain corporations". Now they are the ones who look like idiots, every time the former president opens his mouth.

 

The birth and rise of the Web, the development of conservative talk radio and news sources, the backlash against those entites, the rebirth of liberal activism, the backlash against THOSE entities, all these things have lead to a growing level of active involvement in politics by the mainstream population. And as we all know from our own discourse in this and other forums, when people who have never been exposed to intelligent but differing opinions decide to "get involved", they have to fight certain tendencies of defensiveness and close-mindedness. People around the world are going through that personal growth and development in numbers perhaps greater than at any other time in human history.

 

In short, American political polarization isn't some sort of sensible, well-meaning backlash against a flawed and dangerous administration. It's a meandering, emotional exploration of serious topics by a group of wide-eyed children, fresh from the nursery. The sooner we take their pacifiers and formula away, the better.

[Sisyphus]

Whatever the cause, we agree that polarization has been getting worse. The fact that Bush seems to be so personally offensive to liberals (even more than Clinton was to conservatives) combined with the kind of perpetual pseudo-wartime we now live in makes me say that the current administration has overseen an even sharper polarization than the trends you mention were already guiding us towards.

[Pangloss]

You know "Wag the Dog" came out during the Clinton administration, right?

 

But seriously, you may be right, but if you are that says something bad about those partisans, not about the administration. This is what I told my conservative friends who were frothing at the mouth when Clinton was impeached over a dirty blouse. You cannot let nonsense like this come to dominate the political landscape and control the message and direction of the country, because if you do it WILL come back to bite you on the rear.

 

The great irony of this situation is that if you visit the far-left web sites these days, like MoveOn.org for example, they all talk about "winning back power". What exactly is it that they think is going to happen if they succeed, given the atmosphere that they've helped to create with their idiotic partisanship? They're going to run into exactly the same brick wall that the religious right has run into during the Bush administration (and believe me, the religious right is INCREDIBLY frustrated right now).

 

With these extremists, it's almost as if they expect a great veil to be magically lifted from everyone's eyes the minute (Select)<Michael Moore>|<James Dobson> steps into the Oval Office, and everyone will just begin agreeing with them on everything. It's really quite comical when you think about it.