Hyping the divide in the GOP

“Split threatens to rupture Republican ranks: Conservative vs. moderate divide plays out across the airwaves on Sunday.”

Such was the oh-so-dramatic headline of an AP article at MSNBC yesterday. And, fine, Sunday was indeed a big day for the so-called moderates of the Republican Party, with both Colin Powell (on CBS) and Tom Ridge (on CNN) taking to the cable news circuit to criticize Dear Leader Rush and the extremist right-wing faction that currently dominates the party.

“I am still a Republican,” declared Powell — and I made this point in a recent post: Democrats may like Powell, but he’s not a Democrat — who, Obama endorsement aside, has voted “solidly” Republican for decades.

Meanwhile, noted Ridge, Limbaugh is “shrill” and, at times, offensive.

All this makes for good copy, I suppose, but here’s my question: What split?

If there is a divide in the Republican Party — which is to say, if there are two sides competing for control — it is a soundly lop-sided affair. There are a few notable moderates (or, more accurately, renegade conservatives) in the party, but, in the general, the Republican Party is overwhelmingly a conservative party. Powell may declare that he is still a Republican, but so what? Ridge may take a shot at Limbaugh, but so what? The Republican Party, as it now stands (or slumps), is not the party of Colin Powell, and those like him, and Limbaugh is far more popular than both Powell and Ridge. And while it’s not like I don’t prefer Powell to Cheney — and, as the NYT reported, Powell effectively offered “a public rebuttal” to Cheney (over national security) on Sunday — Cheney’s views are far more widely held among Republicans than Powell’s are.

The media love this sort of thing — personality is so much easier to cover than policy, and dramatizing conflict, or, rather, overdramatizing it, is what the media do so well. An intra-party split/divide — in other words, civil war — makes for a manufactured narrative the media can chatter to death.

But the truth is quite another thing altogether. Powell and Ridge, along with McCain and other such renegades, will continue to garner the headlines, but, again, the Republican Party is Limbaugh’s party, the party of the right-wing base and its leadership both in Congress and elsewhere. There are moderate Republicans, to be sure, but they are now a decided minority in a party that has been shifting ever further rightward in recent years, notably in defeat after the ‘06 and ‘08 elections.

Perhaps there is indeed a future in the Republican Party for the likes of Colin Powell, but the present is anything but theirs.

(Cross-posted from The Reaction.)