Diary Of A Mad Voter: Joan McCarter

Whither the Moderate Republican?

By Joan McCarter, 9-04-07

The LA Times ran an instructive story this long holiday weekend about Missouri state Sen. Chris Koster, a rising Republican star and chairman of the Senate’s GOP caucus. Well, he was a rising Republican star, until last week when he decided to become a Democrat.

But he didn’t just switch parties. He left his part with a “thundering speech that lambasted his former colleagues as ignoring the needs of their constituents and slavishly following the dictates of ‘religious extremists.’”

“The Republican desire is to criminalize early-stage stem-cell research in our state,” Koster said in a speech he repeated three times as he hopscotched across the state. “Go to Boston for your Nobel Prize; come to Missouri for your leg irons. And the Missouri Republican Party not only tolerates this lunacy, but embraces it,” Koster said....

The final straw, he said, came this spring when his colleagues overturned a state law requiring public schools to give students comprehensive, medically accurate information on sexually transmitted diseases and birth control. Districts may now focus exclusively on abstinence.

“I knew at that moment,” Koster said. “For me, leaving was the right, the moral thing to do.”

As the article points out, Koster’s switch in Missouri mirrors that of three prominent Kansas Republicans who joined the Democrats in the last year and a half, and for the same reason—the takeover of their party by social conservatives. “One of those defectors was elected attorney general. Another—who once chaired the Kansas Republican Party—now serves as lieutenant governor.” High profile defections have happened in the last year in Oklahoma and Nebraska, and last year, even in Idaho, a former Republican office holder ran for state office as a Democrat, albeit unsuccessfully.

Tony Edmondson has been a Republican for 40 years. But he says the Republican Party has left him behind. He says he’s a centrist and can no longer stay.

“Just for me personally, it’s where I am in my journey, and I feel our state legislature, the complexion of our legislature does not reflect the makeup of our state. . . .” That’s why this former Washington County Commissioner is running for State Senate as a Democrat....

I’m not the only Democrat and progressive in the country to watch a Republican party become more and more extreme, more and more dependent upon and entwined with the far-right religious conservatives, while simultaneously abandoning fiscal conservatism, small government, and a non-interventionist foreign policy and wondered what happened to the GOP, particularly the moderates in the party?

How does a Republican who holds those traditional conservative values of belief in small government, a government that keeps its nose out of our personal lives, and that lives within its means, square those beliefs with the Republican party of George Bush? And that’s not even factoring the Iraq debacle.

They do what Koster did, leave the party. That’s a trend that seems to be moving west, if Colorado can be seen as any example. The influence of Focus on the Family and a basic takeover of the Republican party by the extremist wing of the party, apparently concerned primarily with gaining and holding power at the expense of moderates has hurt the party, even with some evangelicals. Another LA Times story elaborates:

Phil and Sue Waters helped organize their suburban Denver megachurch to campaign for an anti-gay-marriage referendum on last year’s state ballot. But even these core GOP voters are feeling less excited about pitching in for the party’s candidates in 2008.

Their church, Faith Bible Chapel in Arvada, has long been a hub for Republican politics in closely fought Jefferson County. In a surprising change last year, a Democrat won the area’s congressional seat. Democrats plan to target the county next year for the open Senate seat as well as the presidential election....

“I’m still a Republican, but I’m very close to being an independent,” said Phil Waters. “I’m closer to the middle than I used to be because of the way the Republicans have screwed things up.”

Expect to see more Colorado Republicans waiver when their GOP congressmen do things like this:

A local couple is complaining that U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn left them two threatening voice mails after they wrote a letter criticizing his fundraising....

“We felt very threatened and intimidated, and quite frankly, scared,” Anna Bartha said. “It was just not anything we would ever anticipate an elected official would pursue or a way that an elected official would conduct himself.”

That’s what you get with take-no-prisoners, permanent majority mindset of Rove and James Dobson. The part that they forgot about is that taking over government actually means governing, and the people have something to say about that.

Editor’s note: Joan McCarter’s weekly blogs are part of a new feature on NewWest.Net/Politics called “Diary of a Mad Voter,” a group blog, published in partnership with the Denver Post’s Politics West intended give a glimpse into the hearts and minds of several independent-minded voters and thinkers in the Rocky Mountain West in the ‘08 election cycle. Check back this week at www.newwest.net/madvoter.

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