Quote of the Day: Specter’s Defection Isn’t Really Catastrophic for the GOP

Our political Quote of the Day comes from the always thoughtful conservative writer, Josh Trevino. He looks at the defection of Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter to the Democratic party and suggests that it is not catastrophic for the GOP as the party’s critics and pundits’ pronouncements suggest:

…Specter’s party switch is the latest in a long trend of ideological party-sorting, in which the Republicans get the conservatives, and the Democrats get the leftists. It’s arguable which of the two actually offers more objective scope for dissent and range, and it’s arguable whether more scope is inherently good. The party coalitions are not mirror images of one another, and so the Republicans, with their modern roots in ideological struggle, are probably more cohesive than the Democrats, with their modern roots in plain power partnerships. This cohesion seems either a tremendous strength (there being power in unity) or a risible weakness (there being exclusion in strictures), depending on whether you’re a partisan, and on what year it is. A Republican party bound by common principles and shared goals seemed a crushing threat to its foes from late 2002 through early 2005; now, its detractors argue that its tent is too small, and its ideals too narrow.

So is that true or false? He makes his case:

Well. The proper response is that this is indeed true for some, but the long-term benefits of losing the likes of Specter (or Jim Jeffords, or perhaps, in the future, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins) outweigh the short-term costs — at least in political calculation. The truth is that the Republican party has been shedding “moderates” — a much-abused term, that — for the past generation. If we take the 1976-1980 era as the decisive span in which the Republican party became the party of conservatism, it seems clear that it has only become more conservative since — and that this process must entail the end of Republican careers like Arlen Specter’s.

The conservatization, so to speak, of the Republican party is not an unmixed blessing, not least because uniformity brings the danger of intellectual complacency. Yet to see in Specter’s defection the knell of a too-narrow, too-exclusive movement is to badly misread events. No party will ever be broad enough to accommodate an endangered office-seeker. More to the point, that process has yielded both the modern Republican identity, and several periods of Republican dominance — at least one stretch of several years in each of the last three decades. To abandon what the party is, and has been becoming over the past generation, just because a “moderate” defects, betrays an ignorance of recent history: and it makes as much sense as abandoning capitalism over the latest recession, centuries of prosperity notwithstanding.

Trevino is correct on one point. If you go back and read a lot of reportage, analysis and blog posts, the fact is that months or years later a lot of them won’t exactly win awards for prognostication. If you bet money on the accuracy of Dick Morris’ predictions in Vegas, you’ll leave town clad in a tiny figleaf. On the other hand, are a few analyists — Chris Matthews (when he was a print journalist), Larry Sabato (the most accurate mainstream academic pundit), Dick Polman (the Philadelphia Inquirer’s class-act columnist and blogger) — who’ve often hit the nail on the head, rather than stubbed their toes, with their predictions.

History indeed has shown instances where the Republicans seemed dead (1964) or the Democrats (so much so that at one point Karl Rove was dreaming aloud of a permanent Republican majority). Go back and read some of the stories written during those eras. The obituaries now appear simplistic and, to say the least, premature.

One (former) Republican who don’t get no respect for his analysis also seemed to sum up the GOP’s current problem. Note this CNN story about former GOPer and present Libertarian Bob Barr:

Former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr said Saturday it’s hard to “overestimate the damage” that’s been inflicted on the Republican Party — not only with this week’s defection of Sen. Arlen Specter, but also the “lack of any coherent philosophy, vision or leadership.”

“The Republican Party is in very deep trouble right now,” Barr said in an interview with CNN.

Here’s the “nut graph” from Barr:

Barr added that Specter’s decision is “just another sign that the Republican Party nationally lacks any semblance of leadership.” Democrats, he said, also don’t have a coherent agenda, but they have “something that Republicans absolutely lack.”

“They have a charismatic leader and they have party discipline. The Republican Party has none of that,” he said.

Asked if he ever considered returning to the GOP, Barr said, “That would make no sense as all, either from a philosophical standpoint or from the standpoint of wanting to join a party that knows what it’s all about.”

Some argue that the GOP is going through the five stages of death in the Kubler-Ross model while others call the obits now coming out in some circles premature. But one fact remains: the obits for both parties over the past 100 years didn’t stand the test of time.

The above cartoon by Mike Keefe, The Denver Post, is copyrighted and licensed to run on TMV. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.