Our political Quote of the Day comes from “Morning Joe’s” Joe Scarborough who, in an opinion piece in Politico, writes about “The real Republican divide.” And he nails it:
Forget the GOP divide between tea party members and establishment Republicans. If you want to see where the fault line runs in the Party of Lincoln look at the difference between Washington Republicans and other GOP leaders across America.
A good place to start this review would be with the elected conservatives who met on Capitol Hill today. On one side of the table were Washington Republicans who ignorantly followed a self-serving freshman senator over the cliff straight into a government shutdown without an exit strategy. Despite warnings from the Wall Street Journal, Charles Krauthammer, Scott Walker and myself, they charged straight into enemy gunfire and woke up the morning after in a ditch with a 28 percent approval rating. For those trying to minimize the damage caused by the Ted Cruz strategy, Gallup pollsters report today that the GOP number is the lowest any party has received since they began asking voters a question about party approval 21 years ago
On the other side of the meeting table today on the Hill was the governor of a state that Barack Obama carried by 18 points just last year. Less than a year later, New Jersey’s Republican governor enjoys a gaudy approval rating and a 33-point lead over his Democratic challenger in a state that has gone Democratic in every presidential election following 1988. Chris Christie’s lead represents a 41 percent swing in the Republican Party’s fortunes since last year’s presidential election. Christie’s 68 percent approval rating in a dark blue state is also 40 points higher than the GOP’s approval rating nationwide.
He mentions several other successful GOP governors who are governing and garnering support beyond their existing partisan choir. He notes that these governors “succeeded because they have chosen to pass budgets, work with Democrats, and avoid credit defaults. Maybe, that’s why they are the future leaders of the Republican Party instead of those D.C. creatures who are leading Washington Republicans down a political rathole.”
His conclusion:
It’s time for the Party of Reagan to redefine the debate, stop engaging in stupid fights they cannot win, and focus on creating jobs and tackling the debt.
Go the link and read it all.
But the GOP’s problem with this divide will take some effort to overcome. Governors – — particularly ones like Christy who are dissed by the far right true believers — can’t do it alone. Republicans need to try to persuade, not constantly attack.
You can now get emails from internet political pundits and you know exactly what they will say before you even read it. You can look at comments on a political weblog and know precisely how someone will react, and almost exactly how they will comment, as soon as you see their name. A big problem for the GOP is a)a refusal to realize their party needs some work, b)an inability to discuss any criticism, issue or piece of negative information about a Republican without it turning into “but Obama…” or “but under Obama…” or the old trusty “but under Clinton.” (I wrote about that one years ago.)
The best defense to any question, any fact, or any writer is to go on the offense or turn it into another “but Obama…”
These governors may be hated by Democrats for some of their policies, or their political success, or their tough tactics. But because they GOVERN rather than deliver talk radio style polemics, they offer some kind of affirmative plan for governance. THIS is where the GOP is today and not addressing it with a positive, appealing, thoughtful, non-extortionary plan won’t help the Republican Party to attract a good part of the MANY Americans not enamored of the Democrats, or the MANY Republicans who have left the party because it no longer resembles the party of Teddy Roosevelt, Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan — or even of George W. Bush.
More governors have been nominated and done better in office than Senators and looking at the current crop of GOPers in Congress and comparing them to some of the GOP governors, it’s easy to see why.
(Oh, yes, and here comes the “But Obama…”)
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.