Green Elephant Line Media Backgrounder

A Strategy of Exclusion Will Exclude Republicans from the Majority

May 13, 2009

Ideologues who hold to the strange belief that Republicans can expand their support by keeping people out of the party should ponder the so-called "RINOs" who are poised to expand the GOP's Senate numbers in the 2010 elections.

"RINO," which stands for "Republicans In Name Only," is the pejorative term used by the Club for Growth, talk radio entertainers, and the other self-appointed chiefs of the ideology thought police who believe that only Republicans who subscribe to their dogmas, in toto and without question, are qualified to call themselves Republicans.

As the old saying goes, however, impending execution concentrates the mind wonderfully. With their backs to a 60-vote, filibuster-proof wall, Republican pragmatists are rallying around practical, center-right candidates who represent the party's best chance to gain seats in the Senate.

Former Congressman Rob Simmons and Congressman Mark Kirk are well positioned to knock out flawed Senate Democrats in, respectively, Connecticut and Illinois, and Congressman Mike Castle would be the odds-on favorite to defeat Vice President Joseph Biden's son Beau in Delaware. Polls show Simmons and the yet-unannounced Castle with 20-point leads over their Democrat rivals.

Simmons, Kirk, and Castle are likely to fail the Club for Growth's remorseless litmus tests for ideological purity. For example, all three have outstanding records on environmental conservation. In Republicans for Environmental Protection's 2008 Congressional Scorecard, Kirk received high honors as the Greenest Republican in Congress.

With its reflexive hostility to any sensible environmental measure, the Club for Growth apparently disagrees with Ronald Reagan, who said that conservatives ought to conserve.

In addition, Florida's popular Governor Charlie Crist, a Republican with an admirable record of leadership on climate change, clean energy development, and Everglades restoration, is the candidate to beat for keeping in GOP hands the Senate seat held today by retiring incumbent Mel Martinez.

Look for the Club for Growth to oppose Simmons, Kirk, Castle, and Crist in favor of ideologues who can't win.

It wouldn't be the first time. Every Club for Growth campaign against a Republican who has been insufficiently obsequious to the club's narrow agenda has been a gift to the Democrats and their expanding congressional majority.

In a bizarre twist, some Republicans appear to welcome such an outcome. Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina said recently that he would rather serve with 30 ideologically pure Republicans in the Senate than suffer with 60 Republicans who occasionally think for themselves.

Such political narcissism may make the purists feel good about themselves, but it is not a sound basis for building an electoral coalition that can win again in what is still a center-right country.

A strategy of subtraction does not add up to a winning majority. It just subtracts.

What Republicans must do, instead, is offer a new set of ideas founded on old values, including conservation of America's natural heritage, one of the Republican Party's original causes and a tenet of the traditional conservatism of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk.

Today's exclusionary ideologues revere Ronald Reagan, but often forget that Reagan made room in the party for differing strains of Republican thinking. Reagan was wise enough to know that a political party is stronger if its adherents agree on principles but are willing to debate the particulars.

As conservative commentator Peggy Noonan wrote May 1 in the Wall Street Journal, "A great party is expansive."