Mod Squad
The world
has been paying Republican moderates a lot of attention lately, and the
moderates are finding it all a bit disorienting. "We're just so popular now,"
said a bewildered Melissa Pezzetti, deputy executive director of the Ripon
Society, when I paid a visit earlier this week to the group's tiny office,
located in a brick low-rise behind the Fertilizer Institute on Capitol Hill.
"Us moderates don't make news very often."
The Ripon Society is
itself an emblem of how wispy is the movement to which Republican moderates
belong. Founded at Harvard in the 1960s by college Republicans put off by the
vulgarity of the Goldwater campaign, the society flirted with liberalism during
the '70s (it even sued the Republican National Committee over minority
representation at political conventions!) and has been drifting a little bit to
the right ever since. Today, according to Executive Director Mike Gill, a
former aide to Rep. Paul Gillmor, R.-Ohio, the classic Ripon Republican
venerates Ronald Reagan (whose scrapes with "gypsy moth" Eastern Republican
moderates during the 1980s are apparently forgotten) but tends to part company
with the party on social issues such as abortion. Membership, Gill says with a
rueful laugh, is between 15,000 and 20,000.
The heyday for moderate Republicans was probably the late
1950s, when Dwight Eisenhower was president and Modern (i.e., moderate)
Republicanism was the prevailing conservative orthodoxy. The WASP aristocracy
still controlled Wall Street, the Ivy League, and much of the press. The
Republican Party's liberal wing (as moderates were then called) was filled with
noble purpose about civil rights and women's rights, two issues on which
Democrats would not achieve dominance until the 1960s. The remarkable work on
civil rights done by Robert Kennedy's Justice Department bore a distinctly
Republican stamp: John Doar, a celebrated member of that team--who
single-handedly stopped an incipient riot at Medgar Evars' funeral by stepping
into an angry crowd and yelling, "Anybody around here knows that I stand for
what's right!"--was an Eisenhower appointee. (For a fictitious portrait of a
quintessential GOP moderate, click .)
Now that civil rights
issues have become mired in complexity and uncertainty about affirmative
action, the grand sense of purpose in being a moderate Republican doesn't seem
to exist anymore. Perhaps the emblematic moderate-Republican stance on civil
rights during this decade was Sen. John Danforth's championing of
affirmative-action foe Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court at the same
time Danforth was pushing the Bush White House to sign the
affirmative-action-friendly 1991 civil rights bill (which it eventually did).
Even regionally, moderate Republicans have lost their identity. For years they
were a bloc of Easterners perpetually at war for control of the party with
Midwestern conservatives. Now Eastern and Midwestern Republicans tend to blend
together in opposition to more conservative Southern Republicans (a subspecies
that didn't exist before) and conservative Westerners on Rust Belt issues such
as acid rain.
Since the districts of moderate Republicans, especially in
the East, tend to be heavily Democratic, and the ideological differences
between moderate Republicans and New Democrats are now microscopic (or perhaps
nonexistent), it's a bit baffling that moderate Republicans don't switch party
affiliation and become Democrats. There are a few Democrats around who began
life as moderate Republicans--Californian former Rep. and Clinton White House
Chief of Staff Leon Panetta is one--but for most (including Panetta), the
switch was made at least two decades ago. That's when former New York City
Mayor John Lindsay, former Sen. Don Riegle of Michigan, and former Westchester
County U.S. Rep. Ogden Reid all jumped ship. Practically the only nationally
known Republican politicians to defect to the Democrats in recent years are New
York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey Ross (who's a head case) and Rep. Carolyn
McCarthy of New York (who ran after her husband was killed and her son injured
by a gun-toting lunatic on the Long Island Railroad). By contrast, a steady
trickle of conservative Democrats, including Rep. Billy Tauzin of Louisiana and
Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, have switched to the Republican side
in recent years.
Why the persistence of
the Republican moderate as a subspecies? One explanation is simple mislabeling.
A conservative such as John McCain of Arizona can get called a moderate simply
because he bucks his party on a few issues (campaign finance, tobacco) and is
found to be personally likable by the press. Sometimes all it takes in terms of
apostasy is a pro-choice stance on abortion--as was the case with former Sen.
Alan Simpson of Wyoming. Black conservatives frequently get called "moderate"
simply because they maintain some vestigial sensitivity about race.
Conservative former Democrats like Tauzin get called "moderate" simply because
they used to be Democrats.
Another explanation is opportunism. The liberal views of
Kevin Phillips have greater market value because they can be presented to the
public as startling Republican apostasy. Ralph Neas, who for many years ran the
Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, always identified himself as a
Republican; he dropped the pretense only when he ran for the House last fall as
a Democrat in liberal Montgomery County, Md., losing to Connie Morella (the
most liberal Republican in Congress). In Vermont, liberal challengers to
independent Rep. Bernie Sanders have no choice but to run in the Republican
primary, since Sanders has co-opted the state's Democratic Party.
For most moderate
Republicans, though, the principal reasons not to switch party are nostalgia
and aristocratic indolence. The prevailing style of the GOP moderate is modest
and self-effacing. When I asked the Ripon Society's Pezzetti whether the group
had a Web site, she answered: "It's really pathetic. Don't bother." About the
only thing a Republican moderate is likely to get worked up about these days is
the Christian right, whose existence led to the 1992 creation of the Republican
Leadership Council, co-chaired by financier Henry Kravis. The group is housed
in a shabby building on Capitol Hill a few doors down from the palatial
headquarters of the Heritage Foundation. The elevator groans, and brown paint
peels from the window frames. The RLC's purpose seems to be precisely in tune
with that of the corporate titans who supposedly rule the party: Get government
out of the bedrooms and concentrate on lowering taxes. Yet the group's budget
is dwarfed by that of Heritage, which rakes in corporate contributions while
scattering its attention between economic and social issues.
Moderate Republicans are giving America what it wants.
Broadly speaking, they provided their party with its last two presidential
nominees (George Bush and Bob Dole) and, according to early betting, will serve
up the next one (George W. Bush). Yet even as their votes in Congress are
courted this week by Republican leaders and the White House, their ranks seem
in no danger of expanding. For all their good manners, common sense, and
solicitude toward voters, they just don't command much respect.
