File this in your Here We Go Again Department file:
A GOP group is putting Republican lawmakers “on notice,” threatening to campaign against anyone who breaks ranks to vote for the more than $800 billion economic recovery package.
The National Republican Trust PAC put out a statement Tuesday claiming it would provide financial support for primary challengers to any stimulus-supporting Republican in the next election.
“Republican Senators are on notice,” the group’s director Scott Wheeler said in a statement. “If they support the stimulus package we will make sure every voter in their state knows how they tried to further bankrupt voters in an already bad economy.”
The release did not name names, but was obviously directed at the three Republican senators who joined Democrats to advance the Senate version of the bill Monday.
Republicans Sens. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, and Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both from Maine, are expected to vote for the bill Tuesday. Specter is up for re-election next year and Snowe in 2012. Collins was re-elected in 2008 and won’t be up again until 2014.
This continues the trend that we’ve seen over the past decade in both parties: wings of each party going after moderates who don’t tow a pure right or left line. The irony — but really not so ironic in 21st century politics, where consistency of principle doesn’t mean much — some of these same GOPers are probably the ones who were ranting and raving about that mean, old Democratic party left that worked to defeat Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman in his primary battle due to his stance on the war issue.
But there is another issue:
GOP moderates (I was one once, before the party left me and am now an independent) are truly a vanishing species. In essence, the PAC is saying: “If you dare vote and behave like moderates, you’re not Republicans and we’ll run you out of the party.” It’s a message that won’t be lost on some voters — as seeming past messages have not been lost (look at the 2008 election results).
But the bigger issue is in this era of narrowcasting — cable channels catering to individual tastes, weblogs read by readers who in some cases will only visit blogs they totally agree with in advance, news magazines narrowing the focus of their readership, television networks losing audience share due to the success of “narrowcasting” in a host of other media — the GOP seems to be on that track. How often have we seen a party work to REDUCE the size of its tent?
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.