And now new, high-profile defections from the GOP ranks: according to Newsweek, the Republican Party under President George W. Bush is in danger of losing the children of Republican icons, who are on the verge of voting for Democrats:
Susan Eisenhower is an accomplished professional, the president of an international consulting firm. She also happens to be Ike’s granddaughter—and in that role, she’s the humble torchbearer for moderate “Eisenhower Republicans.” Increasingly, however, she says that the partisanship and free spending of the Bush presidency—and the takeover of the party by single-issue voters, especially pro-lifers—is driving these pragmatic, fiscally conservative voters out of the GOP. Eisenhower says she could vote Democratic in 2008, but she’s still intent on saving her party. “I made a pact with a number of people,” she tells NEWSWEEK. “I said, ‘Please don’t leave the party without calling me first.’ For a while, there weren’t too many calls. And then suddenly, there was a flurry of them. I found myself watching them slip away one by one.”
In essence, Eisenhower and other Republicans of that ilk over the years were called “country club Republicans” by conservatives. There aren’t too many of them left in positions of power in the party. And they could become a politically endangered species as the country becomes more polarized — particularly during primary season where conservatives in the primaries are dominant and help shape the party’s future.
But Newsweek has some other tidbits, too…including some surprises:
Eisenhower isn’t the only GOP scion debating if the party still feels like home. Theodore Roosevelt IV, an investment banker in New York and an environmental activist like his great-grandfather, Teddy, takes issue with what he says is George W. Bush’s inattention to global warming (and Republican presidential contender John McCain’s flirtations with the religious right). He’s unhappy with the cost of the global war on terror and the record deficits incurred to finance it. Ninety years ago, former president Teddy Roosevelt attacked Woodrow Wilson’s pro-democracy idealism, calling it “milk-and-water righteousness”; Roosevelt’s great-grandson doesn’t like how the current president is promoting values abroad, either. “I come from a tradition of pragmatic Republicanism,” he says. “This administration has taken the idea of aggressively exporting democracy à la Woodrow Wilson and gone in a direction even Wilson wouldn’t have considered.”
That a descendant of TR should be sour on GWB and his crew is not TOTALLY surprising given the fact that, since Bush came to power, political maven Karl Rove has said that TR’s political rival Mark Hanna had been his role model. Also: TR was a highly-praised pro-conservation activist American President, a category under which George Bush is unlikely to ever be placed. AND:
The party might even be alien to Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP nominee who jolted the party rightward when he said that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Goldwater’s youngest daughter, Peggy, who is active in GOP politics in Orange County, Calif., says she is a “moderate conservative,” just as her firebrand father became later in life, irked by Republicans in Washington who embrace big government. “The government is taking on more than I feel they can handle,” she says.
Traditional Goldwater Republicanism is far different from the Republicanism practiced by Bush and Rove (as those who’ve lived through Goldwater’s moments on the national stage and as younger readers who have discovered his writings know full well). It was no accident that, during the last Republican debate, GOP 2008 wannabes fell all over themselves praising Ronald Reagan (considered a political descendant of Goldwater) and kept a few continents between themselves and praise of George W. Bush.
BOTTOM LINE: The Newsweek piece again shows that there is a kind of shake up (or shake down) in today’s Republican Party with Bush loyalists representing a kind of new Republicanism where loyalty to the party’s leader (and adjusting and if necessary discarding previous beliefs as he adjusts them and a group of loyal talk show hosts help keep the troops intellectually in line) and to gaining and retaining power is the key goal. Winning elections has never been merely incidental to politicos.
But the old line about Goldwater: “He’d rather be right than be President” doesn’t apply to the current elite of the GOP which has a slogan more like: “We’d rather activate our base and win and worry about the details later.”
Another difference: previous Republican icons — even those who were blunt-spoken — seem to feel that coalition-building and consensus that aggregating interests was a virtue. The present party elite and White House seems to feel it’s symbolic of weakness (and, indeed, the approach has helped win some elections.)
In short: the seemingly impending defections suggest a reshaping of the GOP. Whether it ends in the party becoming stronger or being marginalized in coming election cycles remains to be seen.
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.