A little news from my home city of San Diego (I’ve been largely away from it since Sept. 4 on a national car tour in my other incarnation). Nathan Fletcher, a moderate conservative who wants to run for Mayor of my home city, has now left the Republican Party. He joins a growing club of former moderate to moderate conservative Republicans (like yours truly who has been in both parties and for more than 10 years has been an independent) who feel the GOP doesn’t want them.
Here’s his announcement:
But to get the full background on his exit and what it means, if you’re a moderate or independent you need to read David Brooks New York Times column in FULL. Here’s the end part:
The next step was obvious: Run for mayor of San Diego. The city has a tradition of electing pragmatic center-right Republicans. Fletcher ran on some conservative ideas — pension reform and fiscal conservatism — and some less conventionally conservative ones — open space, bike paths and environmental policies. He’s also for comprehensive immigration reform.
He was endorsed by Paul Jacobs, the chairman and chief executive of Qualcomm. Both Mitt and Ann Romney, who have a place in San Diego, maxed out to his campaign, giving $500 each.
But as Scott Lewis of voiceofsandiego.org has detailed, the San Diego Republican Party has moved sharply right recently. A group of insurgents have toppled the old city establishment. As Lewis wrote, “The Republican Party has gone through a fantastically effective effort to enforce conformity around its principles.”
The G.O.P. central committee and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, an activist group, spurned Fletcher in the mayor’s race, endorsing the more orthodox conservative, Councilman Carl DeMaio. The councilman already had much higher name identification, and this endorsement gives him a huge structural advantage. Individual candidates can only raise money in $500 chunks, but a party can raise unlimited money and funnel it to the candidate of its choice.
On Wednesday, in a move reflecting long-term disillusionment and in an effort to shake up the campaign, Fletcher said he is leaving the Republican Party. He is becoming an independent. In his announcement video, he railed against the strategy he saw in both parties — the unwillingness to negotiate with the other side to keep it from being able to take credit for any accomplishment.
He declared, “I believe it’s more important to solve a problem than to preserve that problem to use on a campaign. I am willing to work or share or give all the credit to someone if the idea is good. I don’t believe we have to treat people we disagree with as an enemy. I’ve fought in a war. I have seen the enemy. We don’t have enemies in our political environment here.”
Fletcher is the decided underdog in the June 5 voting. But he represents a nationally important test case. Can the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, who were trained to be ruthlessly pragmatic, find a home in either political party? Can center-right moderates find a home in the G.O.P., even in coastal California? As the two parties become more insular, is it possible to mount an independent alternative?
Read in it full.
Mr. Fletcher: there’s a lot of what you’ve gone through going around. And I suspect more of it may go around the closer we get to election day and really accelerate if, as a Larry Sabato associate suggests, the Republicans hold on to the House, retake the Senate and even possibly get the White House in November. Today’s GOP is not the GOP of George HW Bush or even George W. Bush. RINOs are now extinct and the ranks of those somewhat to the right of moderate Republican RINOS are starting to thin out as well..
FOOTNOTE: And now both parties have responded harshly to Fletcher. Again, Mr. Fletcher, welcome to the club: independents and/or moderates are not the favorites of many partisan Democrats and Republicans. (I get lots of emails from them, mostly suggesting where I should stick my computer…)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.