by Robyn Blumner

Will someone please wake me from the bad dream that is the coming election? No matter how kooky, mean or incoherent Republican candidates get, voters seem willing to support them. Maybe former witchcraft dabbler and perennial deadbeat Christine O'Donnell won't be taking a U.S. Senate seat in Delaware, but there are plenty of other congressional races from Florida to Colorado to Utah in which radical tea party-backed Republicans have a good (or certain) chance of victory. Extremism is the new Republican must-have accessory for fall, and it's working for them.

Tea party-Republican fulminating is primarily focused on a few initiatives that are well known by now: the $787 billion federal stimulus package, the health care reform bill to extend health insurance to all Americans and the TARP bailout program for troubled banks. The party line is that these actions expanded the size of government, squelched freedom, and increased the deficit, and anyone who voted for them is a big Karl Marx-loving ninny.

The huge upsides to these programs are irrelevant. The bailout saved the economy from collapse, health reform is already keeping health insurers from dumping people who get sick and the stimulus probably prevented another Great Depression, according to economists. But a crowd with pitchforks doesn't much care about facts as long as someone hangs. In this case, the people hanged would be Democrats and establishment Republicans.

I never thought I'd say this, but the election is making me nostalgic for Republicans -- at least, for those who used to populate the party.

Progressive Republicans did, in fact, exist, and you don't have to reach all the way back to Honest Abe Lincoln or Teddy "Trust Buster" Roosevelt to find them.

Growing up in New York, I was represented by Jacob Javits, a U.S. senator and a Republican who played a key role in passing civil rights legislation in the 1960s. He was a brilliant man with liberal instincts who authored the seminal legislation that protects pension funds for working people known as ERISA.

I remember Lowell Weicker fondly, too. This Republican senator from Connecticut rejected President Nixon's attempt to use executive privilege to shield his aides from testifying during the Watergate hearings. Weicker said the national interest was to get to the truth.

Full-blown liberals like Javits and Weicker, and even moderate "Rockefeller" Republicans who were fiscally conservative but socially and environmentally liberal, had their eulogy read a long time ago. The Christian Right ousted them from the Republican Party, except for a few stragglers like the ladies from Maine. But this election has taken the purge a step further. Party activists have now banished conservatives who had the audacity to go slightly off script.

Take Charlie Crist's hug heard 'round the world. When Florida's governor embraced President Obama and expressed support for the job-saving stimulus last year, Crist unknowingly severed his career-long relationship with the GOP. Marco Rubio, former state House speaker, and tea party darling, used the visual to unseat Crist as the frontrunner in the Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat, forcing Crist to run as an independent.

Tea party insurgencies used that same tactic in primaries across the country. They tarred establishment-backed Republicans who gave off even the slightest hint of cooperation with Democrats or the Obama administration.

American voters claim to be tired of the bitter partisanship in Washington, but this election is about to usher in a class of Republicans so committed to sabotaging Obama in particular, and government in general, that the last 10 years will look like a "Kumbaya" sing-along.

Rand Paul, a Republican running for the Senate in Kentucky, has said that he believes Democrats have a secret plan to wipe out the borders to turn North America into a "borderless, mass continent."

Sharron Angle, the Republican Senate candidate in Nevada, said that if she loses to Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader, conservatives might have to turn violent. "I look at this as almost an imperative," she said.

This year, the Republican Party slate resembles the country's crazy aunts and uncles, and yet voters are going along with it somehow. Where is the next Jack Kemp, a self-described "bleeding-heart conservative"? He's probably a Democrat. The Republicans no longer want him.(You can respond to Robyn's column at blumner@sptimes.com.)

 

Available at Amazon.com:

The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama

The Feminine Mystique

The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy

The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics

Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks

The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House

Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War

 

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A Nightmare of an Election | Politics

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