A True Conservative Speaks Up
In today’s Washington Post (page A19) Christine Todd Whitman, former Republican Governor of New Jersey and Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, reprises the central thesis of her book, “It’s My Party Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America“.
In her book, she warns the Republican party that their future lies in connecting with moderate, centrist Americans and not with the religious right and social conservative ‘base’ that helped elect and then re-elect President Bush. She accurate portrays that faction of the party as the ’squeaky wheel’ that it is. As the GOP moves farther to the right to collect voters holding more and more radically conservative views they alienate a larger number of the more moderate Americans who embraced the Republican party before Ronald Reagan came along to add religious conservatives to the GOP ranks.
Free the GOP
The Party Won’t Win Back the Middle as Long As It’s Hostage to Social Fundamentalists
By Christine Todd Whitman and Robert M. Bostock
Friday, November 14, 2008; A19
Four years ago, in the week after the 2004 presidential election, we were working furiously to put the finishing touches on the book we co-authored, “It’s My Party Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America.”
Our central thesis was simple: The Republican Party had been taken hostage by “social fundamentalists,” the people who base their votes on such social issues as abortion, gay rights and stem cell research. Unless the GOP freed itself from their grip, we argued, it would so alienate itself from the broad center of the American electorate that it would become increasingly marginalized and find itself out of power.
At the time, this idea was roundly attacked by many who were convinced that holding on to the “base” at all costs was the way to go. A former speechwriter for President Bush, Matthew Scully, who went on to work for the McCain campaign this year, called the book “airy blather” and said its argument fell somewhere between “insufferable snobbery” and “complete cluelessness.” Gary Bauer suggested that the book sounded as if it came from a “Michael Moore radical.” National Review said its warnings were, “at best, counterintuitive,” and Ann Coulter said the book was “based on conventional wisdom that is now known to be false.”
What a difference four years makes — and the data show it.
